William Henry Seward

Background

He was born on May 16, 1801 in Florida, Orange County, New York, United States, the son of Dr. Samuel S. and Mary (Jennings) Seward.

Education

After preparatory studies in Florida and the neighboring village of Goshen, he was sent at the age of fifteen to Union College. Graduating in 1820, he began to read law.

Career

He was admitted to the bar in 1822, establishing himself the next year in Auburn, New York, which was to be his home for the rest of his life.

It was due to Weed's influence that Seward stood for and was elected in the fall of 1830 to the state Senate. In this body he served for the next four years. He played a prominent part in the debates on Andrew Jackson's bank policy; he sustained the President in his opposition to Nullification; he continued to advocate internal improvements; he supported abolition of imprisonment for debt. Defeated for reelection in 1833, he was unanimously nominated for governor in 1834.

By this time the Whig party had supplanted the Anti-Masons, and it was under the Whig banner that Seward was to fight for the next twenty years. In this first Whig candidacy, however, he was defeated, by William L. Marcy.

The next few years Seward devoted to the practice of law, and he acquired a modest competence through his success as agent for the Holland Company, in settling disputes with settlers in Chautauqua County.

The Whigs carried the New York legislature in the election of 1837 and Seward's political ambitions, which he professed were dead in 1834, rapidly came to life again, with the governorship as their objective. The contest for the nomination lay between him and the dignified Francis Granger, nearly nine years his senior. The election of 1838 resulted in a victory for Seward, as did that of 1840, though by a reduced plurality. In the midst of the depression, he refused to acquiesce in the suspension of activities already undertaken, and from first to last boldly defended large expenditures. In this particular case the policy cannot be said to have succeeded. The state's credit was adversely affected, its bonds selling at a discount of twenty percent. in 1841. When the Democrats regained control of both houses of the legislature in the fall elections, they proceeded to suspend virtually all but the most necessary expenditures, and to levy additional taxes. Seward, however, stoutly insisted that his policy had been wise, and that the obstacles to its accomplishment were merely a blind distrust of the future, on the part of foreign investors and of the American people.

His natural impulsiveness, as well as his generosity of feeling, was illustrated also by his attitude on the question of public education in New York City. The schools there, conducted by a private corporation, the Public School Society, had been unacceptable to the rapidly growing Catholic population, and, furthermore, did not attract the children of the immigrant classes.

He declined to be a candidate for reelection in 1842, and his letters show that he felt himself at this time to be too far in advance of public opinion to prosper politically. The years in the governorship depleted Seward's financial resources. During the next seven years he worked assiduously to restore them, at first in his old field, the court of chancery, but, after a little, more and more in patent cases. From time to time he took criminal cases, involving trial before a jury. In the years of private practice Seward was very far from abandoning his interest in politics. He took part in almost every campaign, often outside the borders of the state.

By 1848 antislavery sentiment had become so strong that it was possible for him to be elected to the United States Senate, many Democrats, as well as all the Whig members of the legislature, voting for him. When Seward entered the Senate the slavery question had become acute, and the question of its relation to the disposition of the territories just acquired from Mexico was assuming portentous proportions. In the celebrated debate growing out of Henry Clay's famous resolutions of 1850, Seward took his stand firmly against all compromise, and in favor of the unconditional admission of California as a free state.

He was still an intense Whig partisan, and he had, in common with Weed, a great interest in party manipulation and party victory. He had favored the candidacy of Zachary Taylor in 1848, precisely because it served to raise so few perplexing questions of principle; and now he worked zealously to secure the nomination of General Winfield Scott in 1852, on much the same grounds. Though he disliked the compromise measures and was by no means convinced of their finality, he nevertheless made no serious effort to prevent the Whigs from indorsing them in the national nominating convention of 1852, and he avoided a vote on the question of repeal of the fugitive-slave law when Sumner brought the matter before the Senate in the session of 1852.

The elections of 1852 left the Whig party completely routed. The future appeared hardly bright to a rising antislavery leader; but soon came the Kansas-Nebraska bill, reopening the whole controversy with regard to slave and free territory. In the debates on this measure, Seward showed greater caution and less forthright courage than in the discussions of 1850. The year 1854 saw not only the rise of the Republican party in the West, but of the Know-Nothing party, principally in the East and South. For Weed and Seward these new organizations created natural embarrassment. Reluctant to abandon the old partisan vessel, they propitiated the anti-Nebraska men by committing the Whigs to a strong antislavery platform; by shrewd subterranean work they managed to inter-penetrate the Know-Nothing party and secure Seward's reelection to the Senate.

On grounds of political expediency he had been passed over in 1856 in the Republican National Convention for Fremont; and some of his shifts of attitude may be attributed to the fact that he had his eye on the presidential nomination of 1860. In 1859 Seward went abroad, meeting many celebrities in England and France, and returning to a great reception in New York.

In February 1860, he again advocated the admission of Kansas as a free state, and made a speech which may be regarded as an expression of the platform on which he would stand for the Republican nomination.

When the Republican National Convention met in Chicago in June 1860, he was undoubtedly the leading candidate, but the hostility of Horace Greeley, the opposition of the Know-Nothings, and Seward's own too widely known radical utterances, conspired to deprive him of the nomination.

He was also one of the Senate committee of thirteen constituted to consider means of composing the situation; as the spokesman of the section, and at the suggestion of Weed, he proposed on December 24 that Congress guarantee slavery in the slave states, and request the repeal of the personal liberty laws in exchange for the grant of jury trial to fugitive slaves.

As early as December 8, Seward had been offered the office of secretary of state by Lincoln. He accepted on December 28; and although he was deeply displeased at the selection of Chase and Blair as cabinet colleagues, and even sought to reverse his decision as late as March 2, he yielded to the entreaties of the President. He took office on March 4 and deserved to be, the dominant figure in the administration, and the man who could best avert the perils of civil war.

More than any preceding secretary he conducted his diplomatic correspondence with an eye to public opinion at home. It is no chance that the publication of diplomatic dispatches in one or more annual volumes put out by the State Department begins with him. He no doubt wrote almost too much for the American public, as compared with those to whom his dispatches were actually directed. His early dispatches were too blustering in tone, and might have gotten him into serious trouble sometimes had it not been for the wisdom of Lincoln.

Seward made skillful use abroad of the question of slavery to check the anti-Northern agitation in France and England. On the Emancipation Proclamation he was at first conservative, because of his fear of its domestic consequences. When it was first discussed in July 1862, he urged Lincoln to postpone action, at least until a Federal victory. But when the preliminary proclamation was issued after Antietam, he used it with great effect in his dispatches to Adams and W. L. Dayton. The danger of intervention seemed greatest in the fall of 1862 and the winter of 1863. At the end of October, the French government sought to secure joint action with Great Britain and Russia looking to an armistice. The proposal was rejected, and Seward wisely made no protest. But when the French directly proffered mediation early in 1863, Seward responded in one of his most effective dispatches. His steady pressure, combined with the skill of Adams, finally led the British government to take due precautions, in the case of the Laird rams, while his protests in the case of the Alabama laid the basis for solid pecuniary claims later.

In 1867 he negotiated the cession of Alaska, and with the aid of Sumner secured the prompt ratification of the treaty by the Senate. He sought to acquire the two most important islands of the Danish West Indies; but this agreement was never ratified. He encouraged overtures from the Dominican Republic looking to incorporation in the United States, again unsuccessfully. In his instructions to the American minister at Honolulu he advocated the annexation of Hawaii.

In domestic affairs Seward exercised a constant influence both on the Lincoln and the Johnson administrations. In the Johnson administration he was a central figure. He advocated a conciliatory policy towards the South, wrote some of Johnson's most important veto messages, and supported the President in many speeches, making "the swing around the circle" with him in 1866. By doing so he lost both popularity and influence, and he valued both dearly; but whatever the reaction of the moment, the judgment of time has been that he was wiser than his opponents.

He had suffered serious injury in a carriage accident in the spring of 1865, and this had been followed by the brutal attack upon him in his house which was contemporaneous with the assassination of Lincoln; yet he was soon transacting the public business with as much skill and coolness as ever.

He died on October 10, 1872.

Achievements

• As a lawyer William Henry Seward was well-known for his work with the death sentence on a poor imbecile Negro, Freeman, in whose defense Seward made in 1846 one of the most eloquent of his speeches. A case which won him still more fame was that in which in a suit for damages he unsuccessfully defended in 1846-47 Van Zandt, an Ohio farmer, who had assisted in the flight of fugitive slaves.
  
  As a politician he was a determined opponent of the spread of slavery and partially provoked the American Civil War. His firm stance against foreign intervention in the Civil War helped deter the United Kingdom and France from entering the conflict and possibly gaining the independence of the Confederate States. Seward remained loyally at his post through the presidency of Andrew Johnson, during which he negotiated the Alaska purchase in 1867 and supported Johnson during his impeachment.

Works

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  • Speech of Hon. William H. Seward, for the immediate admission of Kansas into the Union; delivered in the Senate of the United States, April 9, 1856

    (This reproduction was printed from a digital file created...)

  • The Works of William H. Seward; Volume 05

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • The Works of William H. Seward; Volume 03

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • William H. Seward: An Autobiography From 1801 to 1834. With a Memoir of His Life, and Selections From His Letters. V. 3 1861-1872

Politics

Seward's convivial temperament as well as his profession fitted him for politics; the question was with what political group he would affiliate himself. His family had been Democratic-Republicans of the strictest persuasion, but with praiseworthy independence the rising young lawyer chose to ally himself with the opposing elements.

At any rate, Seward voted for DeWitt Clinton for governor, and John Quincy Adams for president in 1824, and wrote a good "Address" in support of the former. The enthusiasm which he then felt for Adams was never dimmed, and undoubtedly had its part in forming his own political ideals as time went on.

The closing years of the 1820's saw the rise of the Anti-Masonic movement in western New York. To this Seward found himself drawn, both by expediency and by conviction. In the deliberations of the new organization, as indeed in previous political discussions, the rising young politician was drawn close to Thurlow Weed, whose casual acquaintance he had first made in 1824 and with whom he was to maintain one of the most intimate and long-standing friendships in American political annals.

Later he moved to Whig party and in the late yeatrs was a Republican.

No one would maintain, however, that Seward was an uncompromising idealist in the governorship. He dispensed offices on the strict spoils basis, as was the custom of the time; he signed a law requiring registration of voters in New York City under party pressure and very much against his personal convictions; and it may be that other motives than humanitarian interest were operating in the evolution of the policies above described.

He also ardently championed the cause of Irish freedom, gaining the support of the Irish-American voters as a result.

He wished to abolish, not only the slave trade, but also slavery in the District of Columbia; he was opposed to leaving the territories to organize themselves with or without slavery.

He played a leading role in the welcome to Kossuth, introducing a resolution of protest against the Russian intervention in Hungary.

In the struggle over Kansas in 1856 he took the extreme view, advocating its admission as a free state under the Topeka Constitution; in common with other Republicans he denounced the Dred Scott decision as the product of a conspiracy.

Views

Quotations: In his message of 1840, Seward recommended "the establishment of schools in which they (the children of New York) may be instructed by teachers speaking the same language with themselves and professing the same faith".

He declared that "the slave system would either be removed by gradual voluntary effort, and with compensation, within the framework of the Union, or the Union would be dissolved, and civil wars ensue, bringing on violent but complete and immediate emancipation. "

Personality

His four years in the governorship reveal the natural ardor and optimism of his temperament, his strong humanitarian sympathies, and also his impulsiveness and tendency to challenge majority opinion.

It may be fairly argued that Seward combined devotion to principle, and flexibility as to means, in such proportions as to make him most effective. As a human being, few could have been more lovable. Cheerful, generous, loathing personal controversy, he had a wide range of interests and of sympathies. He read much and widely; he traveled extensively, going to Europe several times, and seeing a great deal of his own country. He was a little vain, and he had his political enemies; he is dwarfed by the master-spirit of his great chief; but, compared with the irascible Stanton, the pompous Sumner, the intriguing Chase, and many others, he looms up as one of the most attractive, as well as most important, figures in a critical period of American history.

Quotes from others about the person

• According to his biographer Van Deusen, "his foreign policy built for the future. He wished to prepare America for the great era which lay ahead. So he sought bases, naval stations and, peacefully, additional territory. "
  
  In 1973, Ernest N. Paolino deemed him, "the one outstanding Secretary of State after John Quincy Adams".
  
  His contemporary Carl Schurz described Seward as "one of those spirits who sometimes will go ahead of public opinion instead of tamely following its footprints".

Connections

On October 20, 1824, he had married Frances Miller, the daughter of his law partner. A woman of liberal sympathies and humanitarian views, she undoubtedly influenced his later career, and especially his attitude toward slavery. They had three sons and two daughters, one of whom died in infancy. Frederick William Seward was closely associated with his father. A nephew, Clarence Armstrong Seward (October 27, 1828 - July 24, 1897), who became an orphan in childhood and was brought up in his uncle's family, served for a brief time in 1865 as assistant secretary of state and attained prominence as a corporation lawyer. His cousin, George Frederick Seward, another nephew of William H. Seward, was launched upon his diplomatic career under the latter's influence.

Father:

Dr. Samuel S. Seward

Mother:

Mary (Jennings) Seward

Spouse:

Frances Miller

nephew:

Clarence Armstrong Seward

Cousin:

George Frederick Seward

Son:

William H. Seward Jr.

Son:

Frederick William Seward

political opponent:

William L. Marcy

Friend:

Dr. Eliphalet Nott

Friend:

Thurlow Weed

References

• William Seward: The Mastermind of the Alaska Purchase (Historical American Biographies)
• William Henry Seward: Senator and Statesman (Famous Figures of the Civil War Era)
• William Henry Seward: Lincoln's Right Hand