William H. Seward

American politician and diplomat

• Born: May 16, 1801
• Birthplace: Florida, New York
• Died: October 10, 1872
• Place of death: Auburn, New York

After John Quincy Adams, Seward had the broadest vision of any secretary of state in U.S. history. As an antislavery leader who helped to found the Republican Party during the 1850’s, he unsuccessfully challenged Abraham Lincoln for the presidential nomination in 1860 but went on to achieve his greatest triumphs as secretary of state and is remembered principally for his role in the U.S. acquisition of Alaska.

Early Life

The ancestors of William Henry Seward came to America from England during the early eighteenth century. His parents, Samuel and Mary Seward, reared five children. Young Seward was influenced mainly by his father, who valued discipline and wealth. At the age of fifteen, Seward left home for Union College in Schenectady, New York. A financial dispute with his father led him to leave Union College for Georgia, where he taught school (and observed slavery at first hand) for a short time. Returning to New York State, he completed his studies at Union College. He then worked for two law firms before being admitted to the bar in 1822. The following year, Seward moved to Auburn, near Syracuse, where he joined the law firm of Judge Elijah Miller. Judge Miller provided him not only a job but also a bride, for Seward married the judge’s daughter, Frances, in 1824.

For men such as Seward, Auburn proved to be a great source of political opportunity. By the mid-1820’s, Seward had already become active in the National Republican Party, which supported John Quincy Adams, and he then became active in the Antimasonic Party, which not only challenged the “secret government” of the Masons but also advocated protective tariffs and government support for the construction of roads, canals, and railroads. It was as an Antimason that Seward launched his public career.

Seward won a seat in the state senate, and he increasingly became a favorite of the leading political organizer of his party, Thurlow Weed (also of Auburn). The two men became close friends and established a lifelong political relationship that soon brought Seward to national prominence. Weed first carried Seward into the new Whig Party as it emerged during the winter of 1833-1834, then engineered Seward’s nomination for governor. Although Seward lost when he first ran for the office in 1834, he triumphed four years later.

By the time he became governor, Seward had proven himself to be highly ambitious, often unprincipled, and tough. He stood for the Whig economic program of tariffs, internal improvements, and the national bank, and took a daring position in support of temperance, prison reform, and the abolition of jail sentences for debtors. On race issues, however, he was inconsistent. Although he detested slavery, he opposed, with equal vehemence, granting the right to vote to blacks. However, he recognized that the controversy over slavery might offer him political opportunities, and he grabbed them during the next twenty-five years.

Life’s Work

Portraits of Seward show a handsome man about five feet, six inches tall, with a graceful, thin face marked by an aquiline nose, a ruddy complexion, and wavy, red hair. Early photographs of Seward are not as flattering: The lines in his face are less graceful, his look less direct. This discrepancy can be observed also in his political career, for Seward often offered less than met the eye. As governor, he became well known for his opposition to slavery and his support for the education of Catholic immigrant children in the face of nativist Protestant objections, and he continued to advocate high tariffs and internal improvements. However, he took none of these positions without first having carefully assessed their potential impact on his career. When the Whigs in New York suffered reverses during the mid- and late-1840’s, they turned to Seward as their best chance to regain a seat in the U.S. Senate. Their plan succeeded. In 1849, the Auburn lawyer moved to Washington, D.C.

The next twenty years witnessed the zenith of Seward’s political career. Opposing the Compromise of 1850 because it did not end the expansion of slavery, Seward delivered his most famous speech. He argued before the Senate that there existed “a higher law than the Constitution” that prohibited the movement of slavery into free territory. This speech, which was reprinted thousands of times during the following decade, turned Seward into one of the leading symbols of the antislavery movement, a hero to northerners, a demagogue to southerners. Moreover, Seward’s “higher law” speech guaranteed that when the Whig Party disintegrated during the period between 1852 and 1854, Seward would be called upon to lead the Republican Party, which replaced it. Seward in New York, Abraham Lincoln in Illinois, and Salmon Chase in Ohio all came to lead the new party that was both sectional (not national) and fundamentally opposed to the expansion of slavery into the territory acquired by the United States following the Mexican War.

Both Seward’s friends and his foes exaggerated his opposition to slavery, for he was first and foremost a nationalist—and, as such, hardly a radical within the abolitionist cause. Slavery, he believed, would impede national development, but he was against so rapid and wrenching a transition away from slavery as might lead to war and destroy the Union. Seward favored gradual, not immediate, abolition. He advocated compensation for slaveholders who freed their slaves. A conservative and traditionalist, unlike many abolitionists, he continued to praise the Constitution.

The fact that Seward was a nationalist also explains his support of federal funding of internal improvements, tariffs, and development of the West. He remained suspicious of executive power, although not when it was used to assert the national interest against foreign competitors. Seward believed that, eventually, the United States would extend its boundaries from coast to coast and would encompass Canada and Mexico and Alaska (which he helped to purchase from Russia in 1867). As a nationalist, he believed, as did his hero John Quincy Adams, that Providence intended for the United States to dominate the Western Hemisphere. He believed that the political and moral contradictions of slavery would discredit this mission.

Seward viewed the systems of the nation’s free and slave states and territories as incompatible. This incompatibility would, he claimed in an 1858 speech, lead to “an irrepressible conflict,” meaning that the United States would eventually have to extend either the free or the slave system to all of its borders. Lincoln shared this conviction, and the likelihood that either Lincoln or Seward would become the Republican Party nominee for president in 1860 led many influential southerners to advocate secession.

Seward desperately wanted to become president, but, for a number of reasons, he failed to receive his party’s nomination. The “irrepressible conflict” speech had become so notorious that many Republicans feared that its author could not win the election. Furthermore, Seward’s long-standing support for Catholic education, stemming back to the New York education quarrels of the 1840’s, left nativists in his party dissatisfied. (As for Thurlow Weed, another likely candidate that year of 1860, he was simply outmaneuvered by the opposition—a rare but important occurrence in his political career.) Thus, the Republican Party named Abraham Lincoln its candidate for the presidency. Seward’s defeat was a bitter blow, yet—although he genuinely believed Lincoln to be less qualified than himself—Seward loyally supported Lincoln in the general election. Lincoln rewarded this loyalty, offering Seward the post of secretary of state following his electoral victory.

During the next eight years, Seward proved himself to be among the nation’s most outstanding State Department chiefs, though it was not immediately apparent. He began his work in a provocative manner. He proposed that Lincoln, in effect, serve as a figurehead president while Seward assume the real powers of the presidency. He threatened war against England and France in order to motivate the South to return to the Union in a burst of nationalistic fervor. He insulted the British at a moment when the Union needed foreign support against the challenge of the Confederacy.

If Seward’s early diplomacy appeared belligerent, however, he quickly mended his ways. From the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, Seward’s major task was to minimize foreign support for the Confederacy. The South not only sought diplomatic recognition from the Europeans; it also sought military aid in the form of loans and equipment, especially naval craft that could challenge the Union blockade of Southern ports.

Preoccupied with military and political matters, Lincoln gave Seward a free hand in the diplomatic arena. Seward played it well. When a Union naval captain plucked two Confederate officials off the Trent, a British frigate, officials in London threatened war. Seward avoided conflict in an adroit maneuver in which the British, for the first time since the American Revolution, accepted the American view of neutral rights on the high seas. In like manner, Seward, through a combination of bluff, public appeal, and skillful negotiation, discouraged both the British and the French from aiding the Confederacy either diplomatically or materially.

Seward’s skill was evident in more than simply wartime diplomacy. He shrewdly unveiled the Monroe Doctrine when the French installed a puppet regime in Mexico, and he effectively laid the foundation for American financial claims against London stemming from damage inflicted on Union shipping by a Confederate cruiser, the Alabama, constructed in Great Britain. More important, his vision of an American continental empire culminated in his imaginative purchase of Alaska in 1867. “Seward’s Folly,” his critics called the acquisition, but even an unfriendly Congress recognized its potential value.

The plot to kill Lincoln also targeted Seward, who was severely wounded. He recovered to serve President Andrew Johnson as secretary of state, generally endorsing Johnson’s Reconstruction policy. The fact is that Seward remained willing to subordinate black rights to what he believed to be the main task, that of the reconciliation of the North and the South. Nevertheless, it was foreign policy, not Reconstruction politics, for which he would be remembered. Retiring from public life in 1869 and returning to Auburn, he died three years later, October 10, 1872.

Significance

William Seward’s career touched upon virtually all the major issues of the pre-Civil War era. He became one of the country’s leading Whig (and later Republican) leaders in part because he thoroughly supported the main Whig principles: nationalism, a limit on executive power, strict support for the Constitution, a high tariff to fund internal improvements, and low land prices in order to stimulate westward expansion. However, it was antislavery that, above all, shaped his career. Seward became a leading opponent of the expansion of slavery, and he nearly rode this issue into the presidency.

What Seward lacked, however, was conviction. Seward never conveyed Lincoln’s sense that slavery was a genuine American tragedy. To an extent, Seward was victimized by his evident ambition. He was not fully trusted, in large measure because he was not fully trustworthy. Too often he subordinated political principle to personal interest, a weakness that limited his effectiveness with allies and foes alike. Nevertheless, Seward’s skepticism about principle allowed him to compromise where compromise was necessary and made him a particularly effective diplomat. Next to John Quincy Adams, he had the broadest vision of any secretary of state in American history. He was a practical man, a man of action rather than an intellectual. Whatever the flaws in his character, his record speaks for itself.

Bibliography

Adams, Ephraim D. Great Britain and the American Civil War. 2 vols. New York: Longmans, Green, 1925. Adams, while sympathetic toward the British, nevertheless provides a fair and detailed account of Seward’s first four years as secretary of state.

Case, Lynn M., and Warren F. Spencer. The United States and France: Civil War Diplomacy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970. An excellent survey of Seward’s foreign policy from a Continental perspective. Seward is viewed with grudging respect.

Ferriss, Norman B. Desperate Diplomacy: William H. Seward’s Foreign Policy, 1861. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976. A sympathetic account of Seward’s diplomacy, with a focus on the Trent affair.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Trent Affair: A Diplomatic Crisis. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977. A thorough but dull account of the crisis that nearly brought Great Britain and the United States to war in 1861.

Paolino, Ernest N. The Foundations of American Empire: William Henry Seward and U.S. Foreign Policy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973. The author views Seward as defining a commercial imperial mission for the United States. Curiously, the book ignores the Civil War.

Seward, William H. William H. Seward: An Autobiography from 1801-1834, With a Memoir of His Life, and Selections from His Letters. 3 vols. Edited by Frederick Seward. New York: Derby and Miller, 1877. The editor was Seward’s son. This volume provides a look at Seward’s entire life from his own perspective.

Taylor, John M. William Henry Seward: Lincoln’s Right Hand. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Balanced, straightforward biography, focusing on Seward’s relationship with Lincoln. Describes Seward’s handling of the Trent affair and John Wilkes Booth’s assault on Seward the night Booth assassinated Lincoln.

Van Deusen, Glyndon G. William Henry Seward. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. The best one-volume biography. Van Deusen is sympathetic to but rarely uncritical of Seward, whom he views as a man both unprincipled and practical.

Warren, Gordon H. Foundation of Discontent: The Trent Affair and Freedom of the Seas. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981. This work is less kind to Seward than the work of Ferriss. It is very helpful in clarifying the complex legal issues of the affair.