1858 (41 page)

Regardless of the region, party affiliation, or stand on the slavery issue—or any issue—just about every newspaper in the country commented on the speech. Most reprinted the “irrepressible conflict” paragraph and many reprinted the entire speech. Some large papers printed the speech on one day and comments on it the next. Letters about it were published long after the election, some in 1859. Wherever people gathered to talk politics, the speech and the concept were argued for hours. For many Northerners and just about all Republicans, the speech and the phrase came to symbolize the North/ South split. The national reaction to Seward’s speech far outdistanced the public reaction to a similar stand taken by Illinois’s Abraham Lincoln in his often-quoted “house divided” speech delivered earlier in the spring.
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Seward was shocked by the reaction to the speech, by both its admirers and detractors. It was the same speech he had given often—all of his adult life—and his description of the “irrepressible conflict,” although a new and catchy phrase, was not that different in meaning from dozens of other speeches. “[No one] dreamed more than I did that this was a new, or bolder, piece of composition,” he wrote abolitionist leader Theodore Parker of his surprise.
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Why was the electric speech so important then, if, except for a phrase or two, there was nothing radically different in it from the same speech he had delivered, in much the same form, for two decades?

First, by 1858 Seward had become the leading Republican in the country, just as he had been the leading Whig. The Republicans’ ascension to the second most powerful party in the country in just three short years had startled the political establishment. Whatever Senator Seward said as the nominal head of this new party was important to all, Republican and Democrat, Northerner and Southerner.

Second, participants and observers of that autumn’s political campaigns saw the elections of 1858 as critical to halt the Democratic Party, which many viewed as the slaveholders’ party, and the time to give the Republicans a majority in both houses of Congress, plus more governors. The New York gubernatorial election of Morgan was central to those goals.

Third, control of both houses of Congress might lead to victory in the race for the White House in 1860 and Seward was the indisputable favorite to be the Republican candidate for president in that race, surely running against Stephen Douglas. Most Americans discounted the constant bellowing of slaveholders and their friends in Congress that the election of Seward would bring about secession; the Southerners had been braying about secession for twenty years and were still there.

Fourth, the antislavery movement was catching fire across the nation, from the arrests of the Rescuers in Oberlin, Ohio, to other public rescues over the last few years. Hinton Helper’s controversial anti-South book,
The Impending Crisis
, was being read by thousands, the abolitionist newspapers were everywhere. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
continued to sell well throughout the country and in Europe.

The election of 1858, then, was the natural stage for some politician from a major party to deliver a scalding speech that would inflame the masses against slavery, convince hundreds of thousands to join the crusade, and then carry that speaker to the White House. All the elements of politics aligned themselves that rainy night in Rochester, and were symbolized in William Henry Seward and his “irrepressible conflict.”

Morgan was elected governor by 17,440 votes over Democrat Amasa Parker, a far cry from the 65,000 plurality of Republican John King in the previous election. The narrower-than-desired margin did not surprise New York Republicans or party members across the country. There were several reasons why Morgan fell far short of King’s plurality.

Most blamed the four-way race, claiming that without the American Party’s Burrows and abolitionist Smith in the contest the radical Republican ticket would have fared much better, and it surely would have. Burrows won 61,157 votes and Smith had 5,446. The overwhelming majority of the antislavery American Party and People’s Ticket votes would have gone to Morgan, giving him an impressive plurality of some 80,000 votes.
⁵⁴⁵
Some blamed a savage Democratic campaign designed to undermine Seward’s national popularity. Others said the Republicans were still a new party and not as organized as they might be, especially in New York. Some argued that while Morgan had been a successful organizer as national chairman for the Republican Party, he was not a particularly marketable candidate. Some said that the Democrats were far richer than the Republicans in New York, funded by fat cats such as August Belmont of New York City.

Some blamed Horace Greeley, the influential editor of the
Tribune
, for abandoning Seward four years earlier. Greeley scoffed at that and blamed the “irrepressible conflict” speech for the slight margin of victory, arguing that the excessively liberal Seward had gone too far in the Rochester oration. Greeley said the sword-rattling speech was too much too soon and scared the moderate center of the electorate. He wrote that the Republican victory “is one of which we cannot feel proud; we should have won by 50,000.”
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Weed did not see it that way. Victory was victory. Morgan had won, the Republicans wound up with twenty-eight of the state’s thirty-three congressional seats, an increase from twenty-one in the last election, and gained control of the state assembly. What more could anyone ask? “The revolution is perfect—the triumph is complete,” Weed declared in the
Evening Journal
. “It is, in all aspects, priceless and precious.”
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Seward did not see it that way either. In the desk drawers of his homes in Auburn and Washington, and in his desk drawers at the Senate, he had letters from people all over the country applauding the “irrepressible conflict” speech at Rochester. Newspaper reporters and editors throughout the Northern states wrote that it was not only his best speech, and one of the best of the 1858 campaign, but one of the most brilliant speeches in American history.

The New Yorker knew, too, that the speech had won him the support of some of the most prominent Republican political leaders and operatives in the country, whose assistance would be invaluable at the 1860 presidential convention and subsequent national election.
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Governor Nathaniel Banks of Massachusetts called the New Yorker “a renowned statesman.” Michigan governor John W. Longyear, whose support in the Midwest would be critical to Easterner Seward in the 1860 race, told him, “[You have devoted] your life, fortunes, and your sacred honor to the support of the contest of freedom against slavery.” The governor of Wisconsin sang the New Yorker’s praises to all, rhapsodically telling them that Seward was the equal of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.

Politically connected judges who were also party leaders gushed in their enthusiasm for Seward after the speech. Judge John North of Wisconsin hailed Seward’s “political integrity and profound statesmanship.” Judge Aaron Goodrich of Minnesota applauded Seward for his “undying devotion to a righteous cause, transcendent genius…high moral daring.”
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Newspapers, too, jumped on the bandwagon of the ever-growing “Seward for president” boom. Dozens declared him the front-runner and the editor of the
New York Times
wrote just prior to the 1858 elections that it was time to prepare for 1860 and Seward’s nomination. The editor of the
Rochester Union and Advertiser
even wrote that Seward was
already
the Republican candidate for president.
⁵⁵⁰
The Democratic press coined a new term to meld radical Republicans and antislavery advocates together—“Sewardism.”
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There was one more factor that convinced Seward he had made the speech of his life at Rochester and that his oration would propel him into the White House in 1860—he was now convinced that the people of the United States had finally caught up with him. For two decades, he had felt very much alone in public life as the enemy of slavery, a radical perched on a lonely limb. He never had enough congressmen and senators on his side to make him look like anything more than a maverick. Those who did side with him often would not say so publicly for fear of defeat by moderately minded electorates in most Northern states.

The speech reinvigorated many who had tired of the losing fight against slavery. T. C. Leland was one. He wrote the New Yorker of the Rochester speech that he was “fired by it with renewed indignation against our democratic aristocracy, with renewed admiration of your faculty for historical portraiture and graphic words” and said, like so many others, that Seward ought to be president in 1860.
⁵⁵²

Old Whigs were behind him, too. One man scribbled “Whig Press Office” on his stationery and wrote Seward of the upcoming 1860 presidential election, “I hope the great party of freedom [Republicans] will then have a candidate whom they can work for, and that his name will be Seward.”
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William Seward was no longer a solitary figure standing against slavery. Winning candidates from many states had now joined him in the cause, publicly as well as privately. The New Yorker’s years as a maverick had ended; he had, in fact, become mainstream. He was not only his party’s best public speaker, shrewdest political operative, and best-known public figure, but now he had an enormous following in his crusade against slavery. He was confident that the antislavery following would grow over the next two years and make him the president of the United States.
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He was so certain he would win the presidential nomination, then easily defeat Douglas in the run for the White House, that he left the operations of the party to underlings and embarked on a triumphal eight-month tour of Europe.
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As his ship crossed the Atlantic and fellow travelers greeted the famous senator, William Seward was convinced that his historical “irrepressible conflict” speech that rainy night in Rochester, New York, would make him the next president of the United States.

He was wrong.

Chapter Thirteen

Election day 1858 was one of the darkest days in the history of the Democratic Party. The Democrats did retain their control of the Senate, by the narrowest of margins, but the Republicans swept the congressional elections, picking up a surprising twenty-one additional seats in the House, and reducing the Democrats’ House seats in the Northern states by a sizable 40 percent (in that era, only half of the House stood for election each year). The Republicans won control of numerous state legislatures for the first time, including New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana, and Minnesota. They retained their existing majorities in Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin.
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In Minnesota, the Republicans gained control of both houses in the state legislature for the first time.
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The Democrats won the majority of the state’s eleven congressional districts in Indiana in 1856, but in 1858 the Republicans captured eight of the eleven (one of the Republican victors had switched from the Democratic Party).