SEWARD, William Henry (1801-1872), American statesman, was born May 16, 1801, in the town of Florida, Orange county, N.Y. He was graduated at Union College in 1820, and began the practice of law three years after in the town of Auburn, which became his home for the rest of his life. Several of his cases brought him reputation as a lawyer, but he soon drifted into the more congenial field of politics. After he had served for four years in the State senate, the Whig party of New York nominated him for governor of the State in 1834. Though then defeated, he was nominated again in 1838 and elected, serving until 1842. He then returned to his law practice, retaining, however, the recognized leadership of the Whig party in the most important State of the Union. During the next seven years slavery became the burning question of American politics. The purely ethical and the philanthropic sides of the anti-slavery struggle are represented by Garrison and Greeley (q.v.). Seward was the first to develop that purely political side, with an economic basis, which probably best met the desires and prejudices of the great mass of those who took part, willing or unwilling, in the struggle. The keynote of his theory was struck in 1848 in a speech at Cleveland :— “The party of slavery upholds an aristocracy, founded on the humiliation of labour, as necessary to the existence of a chivalrous republic.” The absurdity of the conception of a civilized nation which, in flat opposition to historical development, should tolerate for ever a systematic humiliation of labour was only his starting point. His theory culminated naturally in his famous Rochester speech of 1858, in which he enumerated the inevitable direct and indirect consequences of a free-labour and a slave-labour system ...respectively, showed the two to be absolutely irreconcilable and yet steadily increasing their interferences with one another, and drew this pregnant inference :—there is here “an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation or entirely a free-labour nation.” But the germ of the “irrepressible conflict” of 1858 lay clearly in the utterances of 1848, and Seward was even then most widely known as its exponent. When, therefore, the New York Whigs, who in 1849 controlled the State legislature, which elects United States senators, sent Seward to the senate with hardly a show of opposition, their defiance of the southern wing of their party was a premonition of the general break-up of parties three years afterwards. In the senate Seward had at first but two pronounced anti-slavery associates. As anti-slavery feeling increased, and the Republican party was organized in 1855-56, he went into it naturally, for it was to him only an anti-slavery Whig party, and his pre-eminent ability made him at once its recognized leader. In the Republican convention of 1860 he was the leading candidate for the nomination for president; and it was only by a sudden union of all the elements of opposition to him that the nomination was finally given to Abraham Lincoln, whose name was then hardly known outside of Illinois. It has been an almost invariable rule that American presidents have found their most irritating difficulties in dealing with the New York leaders of their respective parties; Lincoln when elected removed any such possibility by offering Seward the chief position in his cabinet, that of secretary of state. Here, for at least four years, Seward did the great work of his life. His errors, whether of constitutional law, international law, or policy, are more clearly seen now than they were then. In spite of them all the estimate of the value of his work must be very high, if we consider the chances in favour of foreign intervention at some time during a four years’ war, and his unbroken success in inculcating on other Governments the propriety and wisdom of neutrality. Much of this success was due to circumstances which he did not create, to his ability to rely solidly on the cordial friendship of the “plain people” (to use Lincoln’s common phrase) of Great Britain and France, and particularly to the change of policy induced by the emancipation proclamations of 1862-63; but much is still left to the credit of the secretary, whose zeal, acuteness, and efficiency brought the ship safely through the intricacies of international relations while the crew were putting out the fire in her hold. In the process of reconstruction which immediately followed the war Seward sided heartily with President Johnson and shared his defeat. The Whig element had been burned out of the Republican party by the war; a new party had grown up, not limited by ante bellum notions, and it rapidly came to look upon Seward, its once trusted leader, not only as a traitor but as the main intellectual force which supported Johnson’s clumsy attempts at treason. At the end of his second term as secretary of state in 1869 he retired to his home at Auburn, broken by loss of health, by loss of political standing, and by the death of his wife and daughter. He spent the next two years in foreign travel, and died at Auburn, October 10, 1872.
Of Seward’s Life ami Works, in 5 vols., edited by George E. Baker, the last volume deals with his career during his first term as secretary of state.
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