1858 (37 page)

“I shall labor by free, and kind, and peaceful discussion to form public opinion and direct it to a constitutional, lawful, and peaceful removal of it,” he said of slavery, but added quickly that he viewed a Southern state’s decision to continue slavery, if it so desired, as “sacred.”
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On February 6, the New York state legislature put Seward in the Senate by a lopsided 121–32 vote.
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Right after he was elected, he received advice from one of his former professors at Union College, Elihu Nott, whom he relied upon all of his life. Nott reminded him that he had been elected as the champion of the “poor man’s rights” and should always hold that position. “The die is cast,” Nott said prophetically of his election and political views. “You have crossed the Rubicon and there is no re-crossing it.”

His college mentor warned him too, as did Weed throughout his life, that his stand on slavery and assistance for the downtrodden would always engender animosity from Southern slavers; they would not change their view of him no matter what he did or said. So, Nott and others told him, he had to simply ignore them.
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Few people arrived in the U.S. Senate so well known, or with as many supporters and detractors, as William Henry Seward in the winter of 1849. The former governor of New York was welcomed enthusiastically by the antislavery forces in Congress, who immediately saw the much-publicized politician as a leader for their cause. He was also embraced as the champion of the underdog, the immigrant, and the blue-collar worker. “Probably no man ever yet appeared for the first time in Congress so widely known and so widely appreciated as William H. Seward,” wrote Horace Greeley.
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His enemies could not stand the sight of him in the Senate chamber. The Democrats, Whig conservatives, and Southerners of both parties were alarmed by his radical views on the slavery issue and feared that his political skills might turn many others in Congress against the institution, too. They resented his constant remarks that the slaveholders permitted no one to disagree with them. “There is nowhere in any slaveholding state personal safety for a citizen, even of that state itself, who questions the rightful national domination for the slaveholding class,” Seward said. Even more, they resented what they saw as his insulting descriptions of their home states. He wrote of Virginia, as an example, “…an exhausted soil, old and decaying towns, wretchedly neglected roads, and in every respect an absence of enterprise and improvement…”
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The new senator not only had to balance his life between New York and Washington, but his personal life as well. His wife Frances had always complained that his busy law practice, political campaigns, and incessant scheming with Thurlow Weed had too often taken him away from her and their family. She complained again when he was elected to the Senate in 1849. Frances Seward, a decidedly non-political woman and mother of three, wanted to remain home in Auburn and was unhappy that she had to accompany her husband to Washington, a town where the political crowd would not only be larger and more contentious than in Albany, but right at her doorstep.

There were problems at home, too. Seward had three sons and a daughter, ranging in age from five to twenty-three. None of them were as intellectual or as emotionally focused as their father or maintained any interest in a life of public service. Augustus, the eldest at twenty-three, had begun an undistinguished career in the army. Recent college graduate Frederick seemed rudderless and had no interest in law. Willie, who was ten, had bad eyes, read little, and had no interest in school. Daughter Fanny’s health was always tentative. And then, just after his election, Seward’s cantankerous father died. Seward was named executor of Samuel Seward’s extremely complicated estate, so complex that it was not completely settled until 1871, twenty-two years after Sam’s death. His father had put all of the inheritance money for Seward’s brothers, nephews, and nieces in trust; they became his wards and their care took up much of his time.

When he started his career in Washington in 1849, Seward, who was forty-eight years old but looked much younger, plunged into two interests that would consume his life—establishing himself as a noble-minded and hard-working public servant and promoting himself shamelessly. Publicity was natural for Seward, who had courted attention all of his life and, through his friendships with Weed and Greeley, always had plenty of it. Now on a national stage, he expanded his self-promotion, always trying to keep his name in front of the public in a favorable light and continually meeting new people from around the country who would help him do it.

He proposed bills, making certain that stories were written about them, socialized with editors of Washington newspapers and began lengthy correspondence with newspaper editors from different states, such as Schuyler Colfax of Indiana. Seward asked a friend to publish the transcript of a well-publicized recent murder trial in which he won acquittal for his client. He clipped out any newspaper articles that suggested he run for president in 1852 and forwarded them to Weed for publication in his papers. He even authorized the use of his name for publicity purposes on other men’s business cards. All publicity was good publicity to Seward.
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The new senator realized quickly that he had stepped into a maelstrom of anger over slavery when he took his seat in the Senate in 1849. He wrote friend Hamilton Fish back in New York that the proslavery forces were bold and the moderation that their foes always exhibited was doomed to failure—aggressive opposition was needed.
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There was no doubt where the New Yorker stood on slavery in his first winter in the nation’s capital. He had argued against it all of his life and constantly urged people to do the same. Just a year before his election to the Senate, he told a Whig county conclave in New York, “Real friends of emancipation must not be content with protests. They must act—act wisely and efficiently.”
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He was tired of slaveholders and their supporters telling him that slavery would cease “in time.” In one stirring moment in the Senate, he stood to say, “Slavery has existed here under the sanction of Congress for fifty years, undisturbed…the right time, then, has not passed…it must therefore be a future time. Will gentlemen oblige me, and the country, by telling us how far down in the future the right time lies?”
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In one of the most dramatic moments in the history of the Senate, he rose and defiantly faced the Southerners in the chamber. At the end of a powerful speech, he said, “I simply ask whether the safety and interests of the twenty-five million free, non-slaveholding white men ought to be sacrificed or put in jeopardy for the convenience or safety of 350,000 slaveholders?”

Seward paused, looked left, then right, up at the crowd in the gallery, and then, a smug smile on his face, said, “I have no answer,” and sat down.
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At the same time that he was becoming the leader of the antislavery cause in Washington, he had introduced and lobbied into law substantial antislavery legislation back in New York. He personally shepherded so many strong slavery bills through the New York legislature—via colleagues—that his own Whig friends there said he was turning it into an “abolition party.” He was one of the financial contributors to Frederick Douglas’s abolitionist newspaper, the
North Star
. Seward signed the bail bonds to free the rescuers in the well-publicized case of the runaway slave “Jerry” in Syracuse. He permitted the Underground Railroad in New York to use his Auburn home as a safe house and personally hid and fed dozens of runaway slaves there. Later, he would give famed slave rescuer Harriet Tubman a home on his property where she would live out the rest of her life.

What most Americans did not understand about Seward was that he not only saw slavery as morally wrong, but as a weakness of character that intellectually and emotionally crippled the entire nation. How could any country claim to be a great republic if it permitted slavery or kept out immigrants? This view had been argued by a few men since the 1760s, but never truly understood. Seward did not merely want to end slavery, but to elevate the American people in doing so.
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Seward was always able to separate his political and personal life. His most dogged enemies on the floor of the Senate, such as Henry Foote and Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, became close friends from it, as did Democratic vice president John Breckinridge.
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The New Yorker and his wife hosted numerous dinner parties to which they invited not only Northern congressional allies, but Southern firebrands whose view of the world was the direct opposite of Seward’s. No expense was spared at these dinners; they were talked about for weeks afterward. Seward was a treasured guest at receptions and dinner parties hosted by the Southerners and never failed to win their personal friendship while at the same time being the target of their political animosity.

He managed to befriend those he opposed by dividing his life into personal and professional relationships and convincing others in the federal government to do the same. A toast he offered at one party was typical. Seward raised his glass to all and said, “May many such pleasant banquets as this hereafter occur among us, and may none of them be interrupted or rendered less agreeable by the introduction of sectional talk.” When he finished, others at the party, Southerners as well as Northerners, applauded him. The Southerners easily separated their friendship with the affable Seward and their politics; in contrast, Seward always had difficulty doing that, certain that if a man liked him he would put up with his politics.
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All of Seward’s feelings about slavery and fears that the antislavery forces were not strong enough tumbled forth in the debates over the Compromise of 1850, introduced by Henry Clay to restore harmony to the country. Under its terms, the slave trade was abolished in the District of Columbia, California came into the Union as a free state, new boundaries were set between Texas and New Mexico, and New Mexico and Utah were admitted to the Union as territories, with slavery unresolved. It also included a new fugitive slave law to permit owners to retrieve runaways. It was an opening salvo in a war that he would continue this night in Rochester in 1858.
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The Compromise produced soaring oratory. Everybody seemed to think that the Compromise called for their best verbal work. One of the finest speeches was delivered by Massachusetts’s Daniel Webster, who uttered one of the most memorable lines in U.S. history when he rose and said, “I wish to speak today not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American…I speak today for the preservation of the Union. Hear me for my cause!”
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Seward wanted to defeat the Compromise, telling other senators, “I think all legislative compromises [are] radically wrong and essentially vicious.” But he wanted to bring California in as a free state too, which the Compromise would sanction. He wrote, “The storm is blowing, but when it has spent, we shall admit California just as if it had not rained at all.”
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On March 11, Seward, his eyeglasses in one hand, began what would become a legendary address on slavery by ripping into the venerable seventy-year-old Henry Clay, whose desk was right next to his. “Now if Henry Clay has lived to be seventy years old and still thinks slavery is opposed only from such motives [sectionalism], I can only say he knows much less of human nature than I supposed,” he said. The New Yorker then began a lengthy speech admiring parts of the Compromise, such as the end of the slave trade in the capital and the admission of California as a free state, but denouncing it as a whole because it continued to advocate slavery and included the fugitive slave law. He said of the fugitive law that it was “unjust, unconstitutional, and immoral.”
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Seward began in a dry monotone that morning, as he always did, hoping for some self-inspiration. He still did not consider himself a very good public speaker in 1850 and neither did anyone else. The years in the Senate, and the political climate in the country, would change that perception.
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Moving forward slowly, Senator Seward said that the extension of slavery into new territories was abominable because it would subvert democracy. Turning up the rhetoric, his voice rising, he told his audience that they could not just listen to the voices of the people living in the territories now, but had to listen for the voices of those who would live there hundreds of years in the future. He said they were crying out, “The soil you hold in trust for us, give it to us free—free from the calamities and sorrows of human bondage.”