by Larry Tagg
After being passed over for the nomination, Seward had campaigned in the summer and fall as the Oracle of the party, but remained condescending toward Lincoln, hardly ever mentioning the candidate in his speeches. Many agreed with the New York Herald that Lincoln, in his unfitness, would require someone to run the government for him. Seward certainly thought so. He clung to a notion, as he confided to a German diplomat, “that there was no great difference between an elected president of the United States and an hereditary monarch”—that is, neither was really in charge. “The actual direction of public affairs belongs to the leader of the ruling party,” he insisted. Seward gave his support for the ticket, but only with a view to keeping a place open for himself as the “Premier,” the President in fact if not in name, the man who would hover behind Lincoln and dominate the inferior man’s mind.
By mid-December the waiting was over. Lincoln had promised him the State Department, and Seward, rejuvenated, threw off his malaise. The dignity and status of the new office revived him. That Lincoln was a man so unqualified for the coming task, his ability so doubtful, inspired Seward still more. Lincoln’s absence from Washington until just before his inaugural gave Seward the opportunity to take up the reins in the meantime, and he felt the intoxication of new power.
The stiffening influence of Lincoln’s “chain of steel” instructions to Republicans in December had doomed compromise over the extension of slavery, but with that, Lincoln’s influence ended until his inauguration. He had achieved the negative goal of defeating the Crittenden amendments in Congress, but he had shown no positive star to steer by. With the question of slavery extension answered with a firm “No,” the issue was secession, and on this question Lincoln remained mute. This was the moment Seward stepped forward and took up the Republican standard. Seward now saw himself as the indispensable man in the hour of crisis. He welcomed the role of savior of the democracy, even while he affected a duty-bound weariness under the yoke of responsibility. “I will try to save freedom and my country,” he wrote to his wife. “I have assumed a sort of dictatorship for the defense, and am laboring night and day with the cities and States.”
Seward’s firm belief that the country’s future depended on the maturing of his own plans was sure to force a collision with Lincoln after the inauguration. It is important, then, to trace the comet-streak of Seward’s career during January and February of 1861 in order to appreciate the titanic struggle that the little-regarded Lincoln faced in March and April for the soul of his own party and the control of his own administration. More, the dissonance between Lincoln’s program and Seward’s in those critical months would result in an explosion of hostility toward Lincoln by four previously loyal slave states— Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas—and convert their three million citizens into enemies at the start of the Civil War in April.
With Lincoln’s offer of State in his pocket, Seward felt at liberty to make his views known. On his return trip to Washington after his mid-month conference with Weed in Albany, he gave an off-the-cuff after-dinner talk to the New England Society at the Astor House in New York City on December 22. The wealthy diners were panicked by the news, received the day before, that South Carolina had gone out of the Union. He told them, “If you will only give it time, sixty days’ more suns will give you a much brighter and more cheerful atmosphere.” Give him time, he meant. All winter, those who talked to Seward heard him repeat the same cheery refrain: Sixty days, and everything will come right.
Schooled by a dozen years’ worth of jousts with Southern leaders on the floor of the Senate, Seward parted ways early on with Republicans who thought the Southern fire-eaters were bluffing; he took seriously the prospect of the secession of the Cotton States in the near future. In fact, he regarded the loss of those states as a fait accompli. They were in thrall to the fire-eaters, and would be impossible to conciliate no matter what was pledged or promised, he knew. Seward refused to be preoccupied with them. Instead he concentrated on the decision of the Border States whether to join their departing sisters. He would bend his efforts—by conciliation, forbearance, and patience—to win the trust of the still-loyal multitudes of these northernmost slave states still undecided.
For it was Seward’s view that any confederacy confined only to the seven Cotton States, though it stretched from the islands of South Carolina to the Rio Grande, would be a failure. It could never be more than an obscure republic, he reckoned, lacking factories and straining under twin burdens: keeping two and a half million slaves under guard by a roughly equal number of whites, and sealing its several thousand miles of border against the flight of slaves to territory from which they could never be reclaimed. The cherished Slave Power dream of a Caribbean empire—the “Golden Circle”—would, Seward thought, be crushed under the weight of the massive debt piled up trying to raise an army and build a navy strong enough to wrest the lands to the south from the mighty European powers. Confined within its narrow space, a pariah in the world community, the very slaves that made it rich would make it poor.
The impossibility of a Cotton State empire was the first principle of the strategy that would animate Seward’s efforts from the beginning of January until the fall of Sumter in mid-April. To cement the failure of secession, Seward was convinced, it was only necessary to prevent the remaining eight slave states from being drawn into the confederacy with them. The key was to keep the loyalty not only of the upper tier of Border States—Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware—but also the lower tier—Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, and, most important of all, Virginia. To keep these, Seward’s strategy would be to be the lamb and not the lion, to appease, to conciliate, to stall for time. When the Cotton States realized their sisters could not be tempted away from the Union, they would return.
Seward watched with special interest the rise of a new Union Party in the Border States, made up of Unionists of all political stripes. “All old party platforms are now either breaking down or being swallowed up in the universal desire of the people to save the republic from dissolution,” one admirer wrote to Seward, “and a new one, constructed upon Union principles per se will inevitably spring up after the 4th of next March. It is for you take the lead or not in the movement.” Seward met secretly with Union Party leaders who seduced him with promises, such as James Barbour of Virginia, who said, “Come forward promptly with liberal concessions. … You may lose a portion of your own party North. But you place yourself and the new administration at the head of a national conservative party which will domineer over all other party organizations North and South for many years to come. You above all men have it in your power to bring the really conservative elements North and South into an organization the most useful and the most powerful yet seen in this country.” This emerging opportunity—to lead a new Union Party that would sweep everything before it—was heady wine to the man whose hopes of being the national standard bearer had so recently been laid to rest.
According to the young Henry Adams, Seward looked ahead to the Virginia Congressional elections in May as the decisive point where, if only a collision could be avoided until then, Union-loving Virginians would throw out the fire-eaters at the polls, elect Union Party leaders, and thus sound the death knell of the secession movement there, after which the Cotton States would come back like so many prodigal sons. But the fullness of Seward’s design was even more splendiferous than that—it included his ascension to power. According to his friend, the English diplomat Lord Lyons:
Mr. Seward’s real view of the state of the country appears to be that if bloodshed can be avoided until the new government is installed, the seceding States will in no long time return to the [Union]. He seems to think that in a few months the evils and hardships produced by secession will become intolerably grievous to the Southern States, that they will be completely reassured as the intentions of the Administration [which Seward would presumably direct], and that the Conservative element which is now kept under the surface by vi
olent pressure of the Secessionists will emerge with irresistible force. From all these causes he confidently expects that when elections are held in the Southern States in November next, the Union party will have a clear majority and will bring the seceding States back into the [Union]. He then hopes to place himself at the head of a strong Union party, having extensive ramifications both in the North and in the South, and to make “Union” or “Disunion” not “Freedom” or “Slavery” the watchword of political parties.
Seward was not alone in his expectations that the new Union Party— binding Northern Democrats and conservative Republicans with the Unionists of the Border States—would overwhelm and supersede the extreme Republicans. The New York Herald predicted that “the two or three hundred thousand voices in the North, in favor of coercion and involving the nation in the horrors of civil war”—that is, Lincoln’s constituency—“shall henceforth be disregarded,” and “over a million Union loving citizens in the States of Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware, will rally in their places, to the support of the government.” The statesman who would anchor this “great Union party,” according to the Herald, was none other than the incoming Secretary of State, William Henry Seward. Seward thus envisioned himself lifted up on the shoulders of a nascent Union movement, acclaimed as the architect of a powerful new Union Party, under whose banner patriotic multitudes North and South would rejoice— minus the discredited extremists, the enemies of compromise on both sides, including Lincoln. As the hero of a grateful republic, would not he, Seward, ascend, as the nation-saver, to a place alongside George Washington, the nation-builder?
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For Seward’s grand plan to bear fruit, he needed to ensure that the government was transmitted safely to Lincoln on March 4. And in early January, there was widespread alarm that the government would not survive until then. President Buchanan was heard to say in despair that he would be the last President of the United States. There was talk that treason was alive in the highest echelons of the Buchanan government, that the traitors would hand over Southern forts and arsenals—perhaps even Washington itself—to the secessionists before Lincoln arrived. There were rumors that armies of Southern riders would soon descend on Washington, seize it with the help of thousands of sympathetic Washingtonians, and make it the capital of the new slave nation. Seward had also to guard well against what Lincoln feared most: that secessionists would prevent his legal election to the presidency by obstructing the counting of the electoral vote in February.
Seward acted against these dangers with promptness and efficiency, by a thousand schemes, plied with unstinting energy. He took steps to keep informed of any sinister goings-on in the Buchanan government by cultivating a clandestine relationship with Buchanan’s new Attorney General, Edwin Stanton, maintained in theatrical style by secret messages. Rumors that Washington would be captured by an army of thousands of Southern horsemen evaporated by mid-January, but Seward helped form a House committee to seek out any future disloyal plots.
February 13, 1861, the day for the counting of the electoral vote in Congress, approached on the crest of a new swell of rumors of a powerful conspiracy to seize the government buildings to prevent Lincoln’s formal election. Seward responded by renewing a decades-old intimacy with Generalin- Chief Winfield Scott and enlisting him to insure against an obstruction of the vote. When crowds began moving toward the Capitol that morning they found armed guards at every entrance—no one could go in except senators, representatives, and people with written tickets of admission signed by the Speaker of the House or the Vice President. Sprinkled through the multitude were loyal colonels of militia in civilian clothes. They were joined by a hundred plainclothes policemen from Philadelphia and New York, ready with revolvers and clubs hidden beneath their coats. Horses attended nearby cannon loaded with canister—cans of musket balls that made a shotgun of each piece—enough to make a red mist of any mob foolish enough to attack. Scott had accumulated Regular soldiers from all over the East, and before the sun rose he had positioned them, with more cannon, in front of the White House, Treasury, General Post Office, Patent Office, and all the bridges on the Potomac. Even the Congressmen were overawed by all the military hardware. “The quietest joint Assembly of the two houses that I have ever known,” was how Senator Ben Wade described it. The electoral vote went ahead without incident.
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Even harder than maintaining the national authority and insuring the orderly transfer of power to Lincoln, however, and a thousand times more baffling and labyrinthine in its execution, was the responsibility of steering the nation on the cautious course that would seduce the Border States away from the departing Cotton States, insure the election of Union Party men, and achieve the ruin of secession. Here again, while Lincoln paced and pondered in the solitude of his statehouse room in Springfield, Seward was the main actor on the national scene. He immediately mounted the rostrum to broadcast his vision.
William Seward understood the dramatic power of making only rare addresses in the Senate. He had held the nation spellbound in February 1860 after his return from Europe, when he addressed the Upper House as the presumptive Republican candidate. On January 12, 1861, he achieved a similar sensation with his first speech since the election. The situation was grave. Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama had all seceded from the Union in the previous week. Federal forts, arsenals, and navy yards were being seized all over the South. Speaking as the future Secretary of State, with Lincoln still mum, he was the man everyone expected to enunciate the Republican solution to the national crisis. Crowds gathered more than two hours before Seward took the floor, and when the Senate galleries filled, listeners overflowed into the halls, the cloakrooms, even into the galleries in the House.
Seward began on a statesmanlike note by declaring that cutting geographical and historical ties was a practical impossibility. He followed by recommending a list of concessions. By the time Seward ended his two-hour oration, with a pledge to “meet prejudice with conciliation, exaction with concession … and violence with the right hand of peace,” listeners were in tears. The tone had been heartfelt, patriotic, soothing. As policy, however, it was incomprehensible. The most common reaction to his address was bafflement—crusty old Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania muttered to a friend, “I listened to every word and by the living God I have heard nothing.” Seward, however, had reestablished his preeminence. By mid-January it was apparent to all that he was the Republican man of the hour. Henry Adams wrote to his brother on January 17 that Seward “is now … virtual ruler of this country.”
Seward certainly thought so. He was convinced that he was the Pole Star around which all revolved. “Mad men North and mad men South are working to produce a dissolution of the Union by civil war,” he wrote to his wife around this time. “The present administration [Buchanan’s] and the incoming [Lincoln’s] are united in devolving on me the responsibility of diverting these disasters.” He could not come home now, he told her. “It seems to me that if I am absent only three days, this Administration, the Congress and the District would fall into consternation and despair. I am the only hopeful, calm, conciliatory person here.”
The New Yorker drew into his orbit powerful allies. One was Charles Francis Adams with his presidential pedigree, a prominent Representative from Massachusetts. Adams had been a zealous anti-slavery man, but throughout the winter Seward made himself at home in the Adams household, and under Seward’s influence Adams bent publicly toward compromise.
Seward also drew close arch-Democrat Stephen Douglas. Douglas gave a ceremonial dinner on January 24, where Seward cast off his Republicanism like a dirty shirt when he rose to give the toast, “Away with all parties, all platforms of previous committals, and whatever else will stand in the way of the restoration of the American Union.” In the same compromising spirit, he told anyone who would listen what he told the Russian Minister to Washington: that Lincoln should cut loose from the Republican radicals and sa
ve the country by appealing to conservatives of all parties.
Seward also took pains to maintain his correspondence with Union Party leaders in the crucial state of Virginia, to whom he twice confided that he favored the substance of the Crittenden Compromise, recently defeated. When on January 19 the Virginia legislators called for a Peace Conference to meet in Washington in “an earnest effort to adjust the present unhappy controversies,” Seward was exultant. While the Peace Conference was in session, whatever fate befell conciliation in Congress, Seward could point to the Conference, insist that attempts at compromise were not exhausted, and thus continue to stall for time with the South.
By the time Lincoln left Springfield for his approach to Washington, Seward had pulled so hard on the Republican tiller to steer it by the star of conciliation that the party’s course had been skewed entirely from the basic antislavery principle it had fought for in the election. His new policy of appeasement received its culminating expression a few days before Lincoln’s inauguration when, in organizing the new territories of Colorado, Nevada, and Dakota, the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress declined to demand that slavery be excluded there. That at this critical hour they had renounced their bedrock principle—exclusion of slavery from the territories—was not lost on Douglas. He rose in the Senate to crow, “They have abandoned the doctrine of the President elect. … Not one of his followers this year voted [to exclude slavery in the territories] once. The Senator from New York, the embodiment of the party, … did not propose it. … Practically, … the whole doctrine for which the Republican party contended as to the territories is abandoned, surrendered, given up; non-interference is substituted in its place.” A disgusted Republican stalwart admitted: “Mr. Seward waived the anti-slavery guaranty on behalf of the Republicans.”
