1858 (36 page)

It was yet another speech he hoped would convince everyone in the United States that he was a staunch leader of the antislavery movement with no qualms about his radical position. There had always been doubts. The friends of the antislavery movement and all the other liberal groups that Seward had championed over the years appreciated his support, but always wondered if he defended them out of pure belief in their cause or as yet another means to further his own gargantuan political ambitions.

Those ambitions had worried many in the antislavery movement and the new Republican Party. Some had accused him of being a puppet of New York’s conniving political boss, Thurlow Weed. Massachusetts’s Daniel Webster had called Seward “subtle and unscrupulous.” South Carolina author William Grayson called him “a sly schemer.” Mississippi senator Henry Foote thought him ruthless and labeled him “cold and unexcitable.” Many called the senator a cynic.
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Senators said that he was “bedeviled” about party loyalty and could never be trusted to vote with the organization. In the winter, when his friend Jefferson Davis had come so close to death, Seward acknowledged to him and his wife that he never really had convictions about what he said in public. Just four months earlier, in July, he wrote abolitionist Theodore Parker that the fierce commitment of the abolitionists to their cause always surprised him. “It is strangely true that they believe what they write themselves,” he wrote him, almost in amusement.
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Tonight was also another chance to sting his critics, and there were many. He wrote a friend about those who savaged him of “the malice of a thousand political assassins who undertake that job.”
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William Henry Seward had become, by the autumn of 1858, one of the country’s most spellbinding orators, a man who could hold the attention of any crowd for hours—uneducated country farmers or college graduates. In public appearances he carefully described the “slave power” domination of American politics, noting that from the White House on down to clerical jobs, politicians who sympathized with the slaveholding Southerners dominated the government, even though the number of states with slaves, and their populations, constituted a minority of the American nation and people. He loved to read off a lengthy statistical analysis that showed that one-half of the men appointed to federal jobs were from the South, even though that region made up only 33 percent of the population.

Seward’s speeches were not only well written but organized, permitting him to begin his remarks slowly and lead his audience to a crescendo at the conclusion. They were all laced with the history of his topic, whether loud indictments of slavery or pleas for a national railroad or better pay for the working man. He was a master of language, able to craft his phrases carefully, and used colorful words to drive home his point. Whether speaking to a group of legislators in the well of the U.S. Senate or in front of a crowd of twenty thousand farmers at an outdoor gathering, William Seward was the country’s most gifted speaker, so mesmerizing that people rode on trains and wagons for miles to hear him. Tonight in Rochester he would work his oratorical magic once again to get Edwin Morgan elected governor.

Ironically, when Seward was younger he dreaded speaking in front of people. He could not put words together and suffered from intense stage fright. He was a brilliant student at Union College in Schenectady, New York, but his one weakness, a professor there wrote of him, was “his inability to speak in public.”
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In the Senate, he was ineffective at first, his public responses spoken, one man wrote, “like clanging oracles into the night.” He was such a disappointing speaker that for several years he preferred to hand out copies of his speeches to reporters rather than deliver them. Years of speeches in the Senate and stumping for Whig—and later Republican—candidates on the campaign trail gradually turned him into a fine orator, even though at times his style was peculiar.

One observer wrote of his speaking ability, “His voice was harsh and unpleasant, and his manner extremely angular and awkward…[yet] I at once observed that he commanded the attention of the Senate.” Diplomat Charles Francis Adams wrote of Seward’s oratorical style that at first it did not seem impressive, yet “he had in a remarkable degree the faculty of fixing the hearer’s attention—the surest test of oratorical superiority.”
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Like all politicians, Seward developed standard speeches on certain topics and improved his arguments over the years. Tonight in Rochester he would deliver the same basic antislavery talk he had given many times before, as early as 1848 in Cleveland and later in the Senate in 1850, Buffalo in 1855, Auburn in 1856, and in the Lecompton debates just a few months earlier, in only slightly different language.
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In Buffalo, as an example, he framed the contest as the “tyranny of slaveholders over the non-slaveholders.”
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In Albany in 1855, he told a crowd that slavery “will be overthrown either peacefully and lawfully under the Constitution or it will work the subversion of the Constitution, together with its own overthrow.”
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Everyone expected oratorical melodrama from Seward as well. Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts wrote later, “There is scarcely a prominent orator or writer in the Republican ranks who does not go as far, or further, than Mr. Seward.”
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Tonight he would add a phrase and an argument, though, that would make the speech not only a national sensation, but one of the most important speeches in the history of the United States.

A handsome man, Seward was a portrait of fashion as he sat on the stage of the hall waiting to be introduced. The New York senator was thin, slight, about five feet eight inches tall, with sloping shoulders, sandy hair that had been red when he was younger, large ears, a slightly recessed chin, bushy eyebrows over blue gray eyes, and a hawklike nose. His small frame enabled tailors to dress him well. He favored the most expensive suits from the best stores in New York, white shirts and large, dark cravat ties. The senator insisted on buying suits and appropriate clothes when he started college, beginning a feud with his father over clothing that lasted all of his college years.
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He never understood why his father, Sam, a successful merchant, landowner, and real estate speculator, preferred simple clothing. With Seward, as always, was his treasured silver snuff box that he used frequently, a yellow handkerchief, and his signature unlit cigar, that he held nimbly in his fingers as he spoke.
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Corinthian Hall was jammed for the speech. A correspondent for the
New York Times
wrote that the hall was “crowded to excess” and a reporter for Thurlow Weed’s
Albany Evening Journal
said it was “an immense meeting.”
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Seward had come a long way since the day he first met Thurlow Weed. Seward was elected to the New York state senate in 1830; at twenty-nine, he was one of the youngest members in its history, and there became an ally of Weed, already one of New York’s most powerful political bosses. Weed, a tall, brazen man with a natural inclination for writing and politics, had become the editor of the
Albany Evening Journal
, one of the state’s most influential newspapers. Weed used the pages of his newspaper, located in the state capital, to become a political powerbroker and, within a few years, the indisputable boss of the Whig Party.

Weed first met Seward in 1838. He liked Seward right away because he held the same political views as the party boss. He said of the young state senator that he was “strong and earnest in exposing and denouncing misrule… in sympathy with the masses.”
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Horace Greeley, editor of the
New York Tribune
, a friend and later foe of the party boss, saw Weed as a man who accomplished his goals but was certainly not a deep thinker. He said the boss was “coarser mold and fiber, tall, robust, dark featured, shrewd, resolute, and not overscrupulous. [He is] keen sighted, though not far-seeing.”
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A Weed-Seward-Greeley triumvirate began in 1838, when Weed and Seward convinced Greeley to spend the campaign publishing a propaganda Whig newspaper, the
Jeffersonian
, to get Seward elected governor. The three were kindred spirits, devoted to liberal causes, hard workers, and men determined to remake the United States and to eliminate slavery.

Weed always said that he and Seward were political twins. Weed wrote that Seward possessed “unmistakable evidences of stern integrity, earnest patriotism, and unswerving fidelity. I saw also in him a rare capacity for intellectual labor, with an industry which never tired and required no relaxation, to which was added a purity and delicacy of habit.”
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The two men seemed like brothers to those who knew them. Each savored a good joke, enjoyed life to the fullest, loved children, studied history, admired businessmen, appreciated literature, especially the works of Charles Dickens, and enjoyed talking politics endlessly. They relied on each other, as Seward acknowledged in a note to his mentor in 1850, “I need your advice every day and your help in many things.” They were so alike that someone who knew both men remarked, “Seward is Weed and Weed is Seward.”
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The Seward-Weed alliance to advance Seward’s career began badly when Seward lost the gubernatorial race in 1834 and considered not only quitting state politics, but moving to faraway Michigan for a new start in life.
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Weed talked him out of leaving. Four years later, in 1838, Seward became governor. By that time he had more experience, a track record in the state senate, and the backing of Weed’s ever-growing political machine. For Seward, it was the start of a long career of public service and national politics as a Whig and then a Republican. Right away, Weed saw the clever and intelligent Seward not only as the perfect political figure for his well-oiled political machine, but also as a man who might be elected president of the United States.
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The 1848 campaign was fruitful for Seward. He stumped for Whig candidates throughout the country, telling the boisterous crowds he addressed that slavery “can and must be abolished, and you and I can and must do it.”
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In March 1849 the U.S. Senate seat became available, and with the help of Weed, Seward scrambled to win it. Seward had enemies within the Whig Party and they tried to derail his crusade for the seat. Offering several other candidates, they charged that Seward was too radical on slavery and questioned his devotion to the national ticket. Weed, jockeying feverishly behind the scenes, made deals, twisted arms, and lined up votes for his friend and disparaged the skills and experience of Seward’s opponents. Seward wrote several letters reiterating his desire to maintain harmony between North and South. He wrote James Watson Webb, a friend of the president, that he was not a radical on slavery who would hurt the moderate position the party had taken on the issue.