William Henry Seward, senator and secretary of
state, was born in the town of Florida, New York, to Mary Jennings Seward and
Samuel Seward, a wealthy land speculator and gentleman farmer. Smart and
independent-minded, young William graduated from Union College with high honors
in 1820. He began practicing law in 1823 and built a reputation as a skilled
criminal lawyer. Seward began his political life backing John Quincy Adams’
National Republican party before switching to the Antimasonic party in 1829. At
that time he joined forces with the masterful political manager, Thurlow Weed,
forging a lifelong friendship in the process. With Weed behind him, Seward won a
seat in the state senate in 1830 and the Whig nomination for governor in 1834.
Losing the latter election to Democrat William Marcy, Seward bested the
incumbent in a rematch four years later.
As a Whig governor (1839-1843), Seward tried
(often unsuccessfully) to use the power of the state government to expand
internal improvements, such as railroads and canals, and public education. Many
legislators, however, thought that appropriations for additional
internal-improvement projects would bankrupt the state, while most Catholics
considered the public schools to be a government tool for imposing Protestant
values on their children. Governor Seward also advocated reform of prisons and
insane asylums, temperance, and became a political spokesman for New York’s
antislavery movement. He refused to cooperate in the fugitive slave act and
called for an end to racially discriminatory voting regulations.
In 1849 Seward was elected to the U.S. Senate. He
quickly gained notoriety with his first significant speech in which he declared
that the territorial expansion of slavery was contrary to the U.S. Constitution
and "higher law." As a result, he was perceived as an antislavery
radical, causing several Whigs, including President Zachary Taylor, to distance
themselves from the new senator. Northern and Southern Whigs agreed on most
issues, but their disagreement on slavery, compounded by controversy over
immigration policy, proved to be a catalyst for the party’s collapse in the
mid-1850s. Like many antislavery advocates, Seward was particularly agitated by
the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 which opened the territories north of the
Missouri Compromise line of 36° 40´ to slavery. With Weed’s critical
assistance, Seward secured reelection from a disparate coalition opposed to that
new federal law.
From the ashes of the Whig party, Seward, Weed,
and other established the Republican party, with opposition to the expansion of
slavery as its raison d’être. The senator was tempted to seek the new
party’s presidential nomination in 1856 but was persuaded by his political
mentor to wait four years. During that time, Seward remained in the public eye.
He used his Senate seat to advocate a program for national economic expansion
(which underlined the continuity between the Whig and Republican parties):
transatlantic railroad, transatlantic telegraph, Western homesteading,
protective tariffs, and trade in the Pacific.
Seward continued to attract attention on the
slavery issue, particularly with his contention that the Southern system of
slavery and the Northern system of free labor were in "irrepressible
conflict" with each other. He forecast that the free labor system would
eventually prevail if slavery was kept out of the Western territories and as
free labor penetrated the South. In 1859 negative publicity after the Harper’s
Ferry raid by radical abolitionist John Brown forced Seward to emphasize that
his vision of slavery’s end was peaceful, voluntary, and evolutionary. Yet he
was still often labeled as an antislavery radical, although some simply
considered him to be an unprincipled political opportunist.
Despite his controversial public persona, Seward
entered the 1860 race for the Republican presidential nomination as the
front-runner. He was an intelligent and talented politician, an influential
senator from the state with the most electoral votes, and the most prominent
Republican in the country. Because of Republicans’ firm opposition to the
expansion of slavery, they comprised a sectional party with strength only in the
North. In order to win the presidency, they needed a candidate who could
potentially carry states in the lower North which had gone Democratic in 1856—Illinois,
Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. At the Republican National Convention in
Chicago, the campaign managers of Abraham Lincoln packed the hall with raucous
supporters of the Illinois politician and promoted Lincoln as a moderate
alternative to Seward. On the third ballot, Lincoln overtook Seward to win the
nomination. The New York senator campaigned loyally for his party’s nominee.
After his election, Lincoln chose his former
rival to become secretary of state. The new president followed Seward’s advice
to be conciliatory in the inaugural address. Seward, like most of the president’s
cabinet, voted to abandon Fort Sumter off the coast of Charleston, South
Carolina, and he informed Virginia Unionists and Confederate representatives in
Washington, D.C., that such would be the administration’s position. Instead of
holding Fort Sumter, the secretary of state recommended that the U.S. Navy
reinforce Fort Pickens off the coast of Pensacola, Florida. Furthermore, he
urged the president to threaten war against France and Spain for violating the
Monroe Doctrine in Mexico and the Caribbean. This strategy was not intended to
precipitate war, but to rally Americans to a united cause; it was hoped to
foster cooperation in the national interest without giving in to all Confederate
demands or recognizing secession or independence.
Lincoln, instead, decided to reinforce Fort
Sumter with non-military supplies, a strategy which provoked South Carolina to
fire upon and capture the fort, four more slave states to leave the Union, and
the Civil War to begin. The secretary of state’s greatest challenge was to
prevent Great Britain and France from aiding the Confederacy or, worse, entering
the war as Confederate allies. In November 1861 a Union ship stopped a British
vessel, the Trent, and arrested two Confederate diplomats headed for
Britain. The so-called Trent Affair infuriated the British government,
but Seward managed to diffuse the situation adroitly. He was also able to
curtail British outfitting of Confederate warships, but he waited until after
the war to pressure Napoleon III into withdrawing support for France’s puppet
ruler in Mexico, Maximilian.
After an initially rough start, Seward gained the
trust of Lincoln and became a valued advisor to the president. The secretary of
state, however, angered more radical Republicans by his wariness of
government-mandated emancipation, as opposed to his favored voluntary approach.
He did, however, support the 13th Amendment and, in fact, lobbied
privately for its passage. He further earned the radicals’ ire by his support
of mild Reconstruction policies. He and his son were wounded by a would-be
assassin on the same night that Lincoln was murdered.
President Andrew Johnson retained him as
secretary of state, but the New Yorker had a more difficult working relationship
with the inflexible new president. In 1867 Seward negotiated the purchase of
Alaska from Russia and the annexation of the Midway Islands in the Pacific. He
was unable to accomplish further expansionist goals of acquiring Hawaii or
beginning construction of a canal across Central America. Upon his retirement he
traveled frequently, including a trip around the world, but he died in his New
York home. Seward is usually considered to be one of the best secretary of
states in American history.
Source consulted: American National Biography