William H. Seward

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  William Henry Seward spent eight months traveling Europe and the Middle East in 1859, trying to project the calm of a statesman. Back home, his friends were predicting he would be the next president of the United States. His rivals were predicting something else entirely. Seward had spent decades making enemies: in the South by attacking slavery with words they called a declaration of war, in Northern cities by defending the rights of Catholic immigrants, and in party back rooms by his close association with the Albany political operator Thurlow Weed. By the time the 1860 Republican convention opened in Chicago, Seward led on the first ballot. He would not win. The man who beat him, Abraham Lincoln, then appointed Seward Secretary of State, and Seward became one of the most consequential diplomats in American history. He kept Britain and France out of the Civil War. He survived a knife attack that nearly killed him the night Lincoln was shot. And he bought Alaska. This is the story of a man who was almost always near the center of power, and whose influence on the country outlasted every political humiliation he endured.

• 2. Florida, New York to Auburn

  ›

  Seward was born on the 16th of May 1801 in a rural village called Florida, in Orange County, New York, roughly 60 miles north of New York City. His father Samuel Seward was a wealthy landowner who held slaves; New York State did not fully abolish slavery until 1827. The household was prosperous, and the boy who went by his middle name Henry was a driven student. One of the family's former slaves later recalled that young Henry would run away from home to get to school, rather than the other way around.

  At 15, Seward entered Union College in Schenectady, New York, admitted directly to the sophomore class. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and formed a lasting friendship with classmate Richard M. Blatchford. A money dispute with his father during Henry's final year sent him briefly to Georgia, where he took a teaching post in Putnam County at the age of 17. The trustees hired him on interview. Georgia received Seward warmly, but what he saw of the treatment of enslaved people marked him. He returned to New York in June 1819 and finished his degree with highest honors in June 1820.

  After passing the bar in late 1822, Seward chose to settle in Auburn, in Cayuga County, about 150 miles west of Albany. He joined the practice of a retired judge named Elijah Miller, married Miller's daughter Frances on the 20th of October 1824, and set roots in the town where he would live for the rest of his life.

• 3. The Weed Alliance

  ›

  In 1824, a broken carriage wheel outside Rochester introduced Seward to a local newspaper publisher named Thurlow Weed. The two men found immediate common ground: both believed government should actively fund roads, canals, and other infrastructure. It was an acquaintance that would shape the next four decades of American politics.

  Weed became something close to a one-man political machine for Seward. When Seward ran for state senator in 1830 as an Anti-Mason, Weed's Albany Evening Journal advocated for him and helped him win by roughly 2,000 votes. When Seward lost the 1834 gubernatorial race by around 11,000 votes, Weed blamed illegal ballots. When Seward ran for governor again in 1838, Weed maneuvered delegates to the Whig convention in Seward's favor, and Seward won by about 10,000 votes out of 400,000 cast. The victory was the most significant the Whig Party had achieved to that point.

  But the relationship carried costs. Weed was widely regarded as corrupt, and his fingerprints on Seward were visible to anyone who cared to look. At the 1860 Republican convention, publisher Horace Greeley, once a Seward ally, worked actively to undermine the New Yorker, citing doubts about his electability in critical states like Pennsylvania and Indiana. The convention would prove those doubts decisive.

• 4. Governor and Abolitionist

  ›

  Seward was sworn in as governor of New York on the 1st of January 1839, and his inaugural address, according to biographer Walter Stahr, brimmed with youth, energy, ambition, and optimism. From the start, his agenda put him in direct conflict with conservative and nativist opinion.

  New York City's public schools were run by Protestants and used Protestant texts, including the King James Bible. Seward believed this excluded the children of Catholic immigrants from literacy. He proposed changing the system, saying that education "banishes the distinctions, old as time, of rich and poor, master and slave. It banishes ignorance and lays axe to the root of crime." The proposal gained him Catholic support and earned him lasting nativist enemies.

  On slavery, Seward's record as governor was concrete. He signed laws guaranteeing jury trials for fugitive slaves in New York and pledging state aid to recover free Black people kidnapped into slavery in the South. In 1841, he signed legislation repealing a "nine-month law" that had allowed slaveholders to bring enslaved people into New York for up to nine months before they were considered free. After the repeal, any enslaved person brought to the state was immediately freed.

  In 1846, back in private law practice in Auburn, Seward defended two men accused of murder: Henry Wyatt, a white man who had stabbed a fellow prisoner, and William Freeman, a Black man accused of killing four people. Both defendants were likely mentally ill and had been severely abused while incarcerated. Seward argued insanity as a defense in both cases, and in the Freeman trial invoked both race and humanity, arguing: "he is still your brother, and mine, in form and color accepted and approved by his Father, and yours, and mine... Hold him then to be a Man." Freeman died in prison in late 1846. Wyatt was eventually convicted and executed despite Seward's efforts to secure clemency. The trials were locally contentious but raised Seward's profile across the North.

• 5. Higher Law, Irrepressible Conflict

  ›

  Seward entered the U.S. Senate in March 1849 after being elected by the New York state legislature on the first ballot, receiving five times the vote of his nearest rival. His relationship with President Zachary Taylor, a Louisianan, began with promise; Seward had taken advantage of an acquaintance with Taylor's brother to cultivate access before the inauguration.

  On the 11th of March 1850, in a Senate speech opposing Henry Clay's Compromise of 1850, Seward invoked "a higher law than the Constitution." The speech was widely reprinted and immediately made him the leading anti-slavery voice in the Senate. Southern senators never forgot or forgave it. The speech also cost him when Taylor died in July 1850 and the pro-Compromise Millard Fillmore took over; Fillmore replaced Seward's allies throughout the federal patronage structure in New York.

  In January 1854, Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which would repeal the Missouri Compromise and allow new territories to decide for themselves on slavery. Seward called it "this infamous Nebraska Bill" and worked in the Senate to ensure the final version would be unpalatable to enough members to fail. The bill passed anyway, but Northern opposition crystallized around opposing it.

  In a speech at Rochester in 1858, stumping for Republican candidates in the midterm elections, Seward described slavery and free labor as "antagonistic systems" locked in an "irrepressible conflict" that would force the United States to become entirely one or the other. White Southerners read this as a declaration of war. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney later told a friend that if Seward had been elected in 1860, he would have refused to administer the oath of office.

• 6. The Convention Loss

  ›

  Going into the 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago, Seward was the acknowledged frontrunner. He held 173 and a half votes on the first ballot, compared to Abraham Lincoln's 102, with 233 needed to nominate. On the second ballot, Pennsylvania shifted to Lincoln, cutting Seward's lead to 184 and a half against 181. On the third ballot, Ohio moved four votes from Salmon Chase to Lincoln, giving him 231 and a half votes to Seward's 180 after the roll call. A small stampede followed, and Lincoln was nominated unanimously.

  When the news reached Seward in Auburn by telegraph, witnesses described him as calmly remarking that Lincoln had some of the attributes needed for the presidency and would certainly be elected. In private, Seward was devastated. His political manager Weed had been lavishly funded at the convention and had worked hard to hold Seward's support; Lincoln's manager David Davis, treating the New Yorker as the man to beat, had maneuvered the critical delegations from battleground states into Lincoln's column.

  Seward had not been a passive observer of his own defeat. In 1859, on his advisers' counsel to avoid more inflammatory statements, he had spent eight months in Europe and the Middle East, meeting Prime Minister Palmerston and being presented to Queen Victoria. The effort to appear statesmanlike came too late. His "irrepressible conflict" speech, his association with Weed, his support for Catholic immigrants, and his opposition by Know Nothing nativists had made him unelectable in states Lincoln needed to win. Lincoln, who had been out of office since 1849, had simply accumulated fewer enemies.

  Seward campaigned for Lincoln for five weeks in September and October, traveling by rail and boat as far north as Saint Paul, Minnesota, into Missouri, and even into Kansas Territory, which had no electoral votes. On the 3rd of November, three days before the election, he gave a patriotic speech before a large crowd in New York City at Weed's urging. Lincoln won.

• 7. Wartime Diplomat

  ›

  Seward was confirmed as Secretary of State on the 5th of March 1861, with minimal Senate debate. His primary mission for the next four years was to keep Britain and France out of the war. An Anglo-American conflict, as he understood clearly, would almost certainly secure Confederate independence.

  In May 1861, both Britain and France declared the Confederacy a belligerent power under international law, entitling Confederate ships to the same port rights as U.S. vessels. Seward managed the response carefully, writing that as long as Britain avoided direct interference, he would not be overly sensitive about how they described their policies. When a Union warship intercepted the British mail vessel RMS Trent in November 1861 and removed Confederate diplomats James Mason and John Slidell, holding them in Boston, Britain drew up war plans and sent reinforcements to Canada. Seward persuaded the British minister Lord Lyons to postpone delivering an ultimatum, told Lincoln the prisoners would have to be released, and Lincoln let them go on technical grounds.

  In November 1862, after the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation improved America's standing in British public opinion, the British cabinet voted against recognizing the Confederacy as a nation. The following year, when Confederate agents had arranged for two warships to be built in Britain supposedly for French interests, Seward pressed Palmerston to prevent their departure. British officials seized the vessels in October 1863, nearly complete.

  From the start of the war until early 1862, when responsibility passed to the War Department, Seward also oversaw wartime detentions of suspected Southern sympathizers, approximately 800 men and a small number of women. He reportedly boasted to Lord Lyons, "I can touch a bell on my right hand, and order the arrest of a citizen... and no power on earth, except that of the President, can release them."

  At the Hampton Roads Conference in February 1865, Seward joined Lincoln in meeting Confederate commissioners, including Vice President Alexander Stephens. Lincoln would accept nothing short of an end to armed resistance and the end of slavery; the Confederates would not concede the two sides were even one nation. After the talks ended without agreement, Seward sent a bucket of champagne to the Confederate delegation, conveyed by a Black oarsman, and called across to them: "keep the champagne, but return the Negro."

• 8. The Night of April 14

  ›

  On the evening of the 14th of April 1865, John Wilkes Booth assigned his conspirator Lewis Powell to kill Seward. Booth would kill Lincoln. George Atzerodt was meant to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson. The plan was to destroy the three senior members of the executive branch in a single night.

  Seward had been injured in a carriage accident days before and was at home recovering. Powell gained entry by claiming to be delivering medicine for the injured man. Seward's son Frederick stopped him at the top of the stairs; when his pistol misfired, Powell beat Frederick over the head with the barrel. He forced his way into the bedroom, pushed Seward's daughter Fanny aside, jumped onto the bed, and stabbed William Seward in the face and neck five times. A soldier assigned to guard and nurse the secretary, Private George F. Robinson, pulled Powell off the bed. Two of Seward's other children, including his son Augustus, were also injured in the struggle before Powell fled.

  Seward survived. He would carry the scars of the attack for the rest of his life, and the metal brace he had been wearing for his jaw injury may have prevented the knife from severing his jugular vein.

  Seward remained Secretary of State through Andrew Johnson's presidency, supporting Johnson through his impeachment battle. In 1867, he negotiated the purchase of the Alaska Territory from Russia. His contemporary Carl Schurz had described him as "one of those spirits who sometimes will go ahead of public opinion instead of tamely following its footprints." Seward died on the 10th of October 1872, three years after leaving office, in the Auburn house where he had practiced law and raised his family for more than four decades.