Former and future governors, congressmen, and senators were there, including Tom Corwin from Ohio, Thurlow Weed and New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley from New York, and Schuyler Colfax of Indiana, who was chosen to serve as secretary of the convention. New York was also represented by Democrat David Dudley Field, designated to present Polk"s arguments against federal appropriations for internal improvements in the states. Also in attendance, Greeley wrote, was "Hon. Abraham Lincoln, a tall specimen of an Illinoian, just elected to Congress from the only Whig District in the State." It was Lincoln"s first mention in a paper of national repute.
"No one who saw [Lincoln] can forget his personal appearance at that time," one delegate recalled years later. "Tall, angular and awkward, he had on a short-waisted, thin swallow-tail coat, a short vest of same material, thin pantaloons, scarcely coming down to his ankles, a straw hat and a pair of brogans with woolen socks."
On the first day, Edward Bates was chosen president of the convention, much to his "deep astonishment," given the presence of so many eminent delegates. "If notice had been given me of any intention to nominate me for the presidency of the Convention, I should have shrunk from it with dread & repressed the attempt," Bates confided to his diary. He was apprehensive that party politics would render the convention unsuccessful and that he would then bear the brunt of responsibility for its failure. Yet so skillfully and impartially did he conduct the proceedings and so eloquently did he make the case for internal improvements and development of the inland waterways that he "leaped at one bound into national prominence." On a much smaller scale, Lincoln impressed the audience with his clever reb.u.t.tal of the arguments against public support for internal improvements advanced by Democrat Field.
At the close of the convention, Bates delivered the final speech. No complete record of this speech was made, for once Bates began speaking, the reporters, Weed confessed, were "too intent and absorbed as listeners, to think of Reporting." "No account that can now be given will do it justice," Horace Greeley wrote in the New York Tribune the following week. In clear, compelling language, Bates described the country poised at a dangerous crossroad "between sectional disruption and unbounded prosperity." He called on the various regions of the nation to speak in "voices of moderation and compromise, for only by statesmanlike concession could problems of slavery and territorial acquisition be solved so the nation could move on to material greatness." While he was speaking, Weed reported, "he was interrupted continually by cheer upon cheer; and at its close, the air rung with shout after shout, from the thousands in attendance." Overwhelmed by the reaction, Bates considered the speech "the crowning act" of his life, received as he "never knew a speech received before."
"The immense a.s.sembly," Bates noted in his diary, "seemed absolutely mesmerized-their bodies and hearts & minds subjected to my will, and answering to my every thought & sentiment with the speed and exactness of electricity. And when I ceased to speak there was one loud, long and spontaneous burst of sympathy & joyous gratification, the like of which I never expect to witness again."
Bates acknowledged when he returned home that his vanity had been "flattered," his "pride of character stimulated in a manner & a degree far beyond what I thought could ever reach me in this life-long retirement to which I have withdrawn." The experience was "more full of public honor & private gratification than any pa.s.sage of my life...those three days at Chicago have given me a fairer representation & a higher standing in the nation, than I could have hoped to attain by years of labor & anxiety in either house of Congress."
With that single speech, Bates had become a prominent national figure, his name heralded in papers across the country as a leading prospect for high public office once the Whigs were returned to power. "The nation cannot afford to be deprived of so much integrity, talent, and patriotism," Weed concluded at the end of a long, flattering piece calling on Bates to reenter political life.
While Bates initially basked in such acclaim, within weeks of the convention"s close, he convinced himself he no longer craved what he later called "the glittering bauble" of political success. Declining Weed"s appeal that he return to public life, he wrote the editor a pensive letter. Once, he revealed to Weed, he had entertained such "n.o.ble aspirations" to make his mind "the mind of other men." But these desires were now gone, his "habits formed and stiffened to the standard of professional and domestic life." Consequently, there was "no office in the gift of prince or people" that he would accept. His refusal, he explained, was "the natural result" of his social position, his domestic relations, and his responsibilities to his large family.
SEWARD WAS NEXT to enter public life, realizing after several uninspired years of practicing law that he "had no ambition for its honors." Though resigned to his profession "with so much cheerfulness that [his] disinclination was never suspected," he found himself perusing newspapers and magazines at every free moment, while scrutinizing his law books only when he needed them for a case. He was discovering, he said, that "politics was the important and engrossing business of the country."
Fate provided an introduction to Thurlow Weed, the man who would secure his entry into the political world and facilitate his rise to prominence. Seward was on an excursion to Niagara Falls with Frances, her father, and his parents when the wheel of their stagecoach broke off, throwing the pa.s.sengers into a swampy ravine. A tall, powerfully built man with deep-set blue eyes appeared and helped everyone to safety. He introduced himself as Thurlow Weed, editor of a Rochester newspaper, which "he printed chiefly with his own hand." That encounter sparked a friendship that would shape the destinies of both men.
Four years Seward"s senior, Thurlow Weed could see at a glance that his new acquaintance was an educated young man belonging to the best society. Weed himself had grown up in poverty, his father frequently imprisoned for debt, his family forced to move from one upstate location to another. Apprenticed in a blacksmith"s shop at eight years old, with only a few years of formal schooling behind him, he had fought to educate himself. He had walked miles to borrow books, studying history and devouring newspapers by firelight. A cla.s.sic example of a self-made man, he no sooner identified an obstacle to his progress than he worked with discipline to counteract it. Concerned that he lacked a native facility for remembering names and appointments, and believing that "a politician who sees a man once should remember him forever," Weed consciously trained his memory. He spent fifteen minutes every night telling his wife, Catherine, everything that had happened to him that day, everyone he had met, the exact words spoken. The nightly mnemonics worked, for Weed soon became known as a man with a phenomenal recall. Gifted with abundant energy, shrewd intelligence, and a warm personality, he managed to carve out a brilliant career as printer, editor, writer, publisher, and, eventually, as powerful political boss, familiarly known as "the Dictator."
Weed undoubtedly sensed in the younger Seward an instinct for power and a fascination with politics that matched his own. In an era when political parties were in flux, Weed and Seward gravitated toward the proponents of a new infrastructure for the country, by deepening waterways and creating a new network of roads and rails. Such measures, Seward believed, along with a national banking system and protective tariffs, would enable the nation to "strengthen its foundations, increase its numbers, develop its resources, and extend its dominion." Eventually, those in favor of "the American system," as it came to be called, coalesced behind Henry Clay"s Whig Party.
Weed"s star rose rapidly in New York when, with Seward"s help, he launched the Albany Evening Journal, first published in March 1830. The influential Journal, which eventually became the party organ for the Whigs (and later, for the Republicans), gave Weed a powerful base from which he would brilliantly shape public opinion for nearly four decades. Through his newspapers, Weed engineered Seward"s first chance for political office. In September 1830, Seward secured the nomination for a seat in the state senate from the seventh district. That November, with Weed managing every step of the campaign, Seward won a historic victory as the youngest member to enter the New York Senate. He was twenty-nine.
Albany had nearly doubled in size since Seward had first seen it, but it was still a small town of 24,000 inhabitants. Originally settled by the Dutch, the state"s capital boasted a stately array of brick mansions that belonged to wealthy merchant princes. The year before Seward"s arrival, ground had been broken for the country"s "first steam-powered railroad." This sixteen-mile track connecting Albany with Schenectady was "the first link in an eventual nationwide web of tracks."
The legislature consisted of 32 senators and 128 representatives, most of whom boarded in either the Eagle Tavern on South Market Street or around the corner on State Street, at Bemont"s Hotel. Such close quarters, while congenial to politicians, were ill suited to families-especially those, like Seward"s, with small children. Consequently, Seward decided to attend the four-month winter session alone.
"Weed is very much with me, and I enjoy his warmth of feeling," Seward confided to Frances after he had settled into Bemont"s, describing his friend as "one of the greatest politicians of the age...the magician whose wand controls and directs" the party. Despite Weed"s eminence, Seward proudly noted, he "sits down, stretches one of his long legs out to rest on my coal-box, I cross my own, and, puffing the smoke of our cigars into each other"s faces, we talk of everything, and everybody, except politics." They enjoyed a mutual love of the theater and a pa.s.sion for the novels of Charles d.i.c.kens and Walter Scott. Their shared ambition, for each other and their country, became a common bond that would keep their friendship alive until the end of their days.
Seward"s gregarious nature was in perfect harmony with the clublike atmosphere of the boardinghouses, where colleagues took their daily meals together and spent evenings in one another"s quarters gathered by the fire. "My room is a thoroughfare," he told Frances. Early in the session, he befriended an older colleague, Albert Haller Tracy, a senator from Buffalo who had served three terms in the U.S. Congress and had once been touted as a candidate for vice president. In recent years, however, a series of debilitating illnesses had stalled Tracy"s political ambitions and "crushed all his aspirings." In Seward, perhaps, he found a young man who could fulfill the dreams he had once held dear. "I believe Henry tells him everything that pa.s.ses in his mind," Frances Seward wrote to her sister, Lazette. "He and Henry appear equally in love with each other."
"It shames my manhood that I am so attached to you," Tracy confessed to Seward after several days" absence from Albany. "It is a foolish fondness from which no good can come." His friendship with another colleague, Tracy explained, was "just right, it fills my heart exactly, but yours crowds it producing a kind of girlish impatience which one can neither dispose of nor comfortably endure...every day and almost every hour since [leaving] I have suffered a womanish longing to see you. But all this is too ridiculous for the subject matter of a letter between two grave Senators, and I"ll leave unsaid three fourths of what I have been dreaming on since I left Albany."
Seward at first reciprocated Tracy"s feelings, professing a "rapturous joy" in discovering that his friend shared the "feelings which I had become half ashamed for their effeminancy to confess I possessed." In time, however, Tracy"s intensity began to wear on the relationship. When Seward did not immediately respond to one of his letters, Tracy penned a petulant note. "My feelings confined in narrow channels have outstripped yours which naturally are more diffused-I was foolish enough to make an almost exclusive attachment the measure for one which is...divided with many."
Tracy"s ardor would fuel an intense rivalry with Thurlow Weed. "Weed has never been to see us since Tracy came," Frances told her sister during a visit to Albany. "I am sorry for this although I can hardly account for it." Confronted with the need to choose, Seward turned to Weed, not Tracy, for vital collaboration. Although Tracy continued a cordial a.s.sociation with Seward, he harbored a smoldering resentment over Seward"s increasing closeness to Weed. "Love-cruel tyrant as he is," Tracy reminded Seward, "has made reciprocity both the bond and aliment of our most hallowed affections." Absent that reciprocity, Tracy warned, it would be impossible to sustain the glorious friendship that they had once enjoyed.
A strange turn in Tracy"s affections likely resulted from his mounting sense of distance from Seward. He transferred his unrequited love from Henry to Frances, who also was feeling distant from her husband. Though still deeply in love after ten years of marriage, Frances worried that her husband"s pa.s.sion for politics and worldly achievement surpa.s.sed his love for his family. She mourned "losing my influence over a heart I once thought so entirely my own," increasingly apprehensive that she and her husband were "differently const.i.tuted."
In 1832, Seward convinced Frances to accompany him to Albany for the legislative session that ran from January to March. Their quarters on the first floor of Bemont"s Hotel were just below those taken by Tracy and his wife, Harriet. The two couples would often spend evenings or weekends together, and Tracy often tagged along with Henry and Frances when his wife was on one of her frequent trips to their home in Buffalo. He joined them on walks, shopping trips, and excursions with the children. "He is a singular being," Frances confided to Lazette. "He certainly knows more than any man I ever was acquainted with." His conversation, she marveled, "reminds me of a book of synonyms. He hardly ever makes use of the same words to express ideas that have a shade of difference."
Capitalizing on Frances"s hunger for companionship, Tracy insinuated himself into the private emotional world she once shared only with her husband. He spoke with her freely about his quarrels with his wife. He invited her into his sitting room to read poetry and study French. They talked about their battles with ill health. "I believe at present he could convince me that a chameleon was blue, green or black just as he should choose," Frances admitted to Lazette. Following one extended absence, Frances announced unabashedly that she was "very glad to see him as I love him very much." Though there is no indication that Frances and Tracy ever shared a physical relationship, they had entered into something that was considered, in the subtle realm of Victorian social mores, almost as shameful and inappropriate-a private emotional intimacy.
The following summer, Seward left his wife and family in Auburn to accompany his father on a three-month voyage to Europe. While his aging father"s need for companionship provided a rationale for the sojourn, Seward relished the opportunity to see foreign lands and observe new cultures. Father and son traveled extensively through England, Ireland, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and France. "What a romance was this journey that I was making!" Seward recalled years later. Everywhere he went, however, his thoughts returned to America and his faith in his country"s unique future.
"It is not until one visits old, oppressed, suffering Europe, that he can appreciate his own government," he observed, "that he realizes the fearful responsibility of the American people to the nations of the whole earth, to carry successfully through the experiment...that men are capable of self-government." He hungrily sought out American newspapers in library reading rooms, noting with regret ubiquitous reports of "malicious political warfare."
While Lincoln, Chase, and Bates would never visit the Old World, Seward, at the age of thirty-two, mingled comfortably with members of Parliament and received invitations to elegant receptions and dinner parties throughout Europe. In France, Seward spent a long weekend visiting with the Revolutionary War hero General Lafayette at his home, La Grange.
In Seward"s absence, Frances corresponded frequently with Tracy. When Judge Miller noticed a letter in an unknown hand awaiting Frances on the mantelpiece, he demanded to see it. Frances did not know what to do, she explained to her sister. "I handed it to him and he very deliberately commenced breaking the seal for the purpose of reading it. My first impulse was to jump up and s.n.a.t.c.h the letter from his hand, which I did and then apologized by saying I would prefer reading it myself first. He appeared very much astonished that I should be so unreasonable."
As Tracy"s letters multiplied, the deeply religious Frances began to contemplate the perilous shift in their friendship. Mortified in front of Henry, now returned from Europe, she proffered the letters, asking him to determine if Tracy was endeavoring to break their marital peace. At first Seward refused to read them, unwilling to impute such dishonorable intentions to Tracy. When a further letter arrived that caused Frances to collapse in tears, believing herself dishonored in both Tracy"s and her husband"s eyes, Seward resolved to confront him.
The next time the two men met in Albany, however, Seward made no mention of the delicate situation. Nor did he bring it up in the following months, for his attention was increasingly consumed by politics. Four years in the state senate had proved Seward an eloquent voice for reform. He had denounced imprisonment for debt, urged separate prisons for men and women, and pushed for internal improvements, all the while maintaining friendly relations on both sides of the aisle. It was time, Weed believed, to push his protege toward higher office.
At the September 1834 convention in Utica, New York, Weed convinced members of the newly organized Whig Party that the young, energetic Seward would wage the best campaign for governor against the heavily favored Democrats. Seward was thrilled. Needing all the support he could gather, he did not want to risk alienating the influential Albert Tracy. Promises he had made to his wife could wait.
Br.i.m.m.i.n.g with high expectations in his upstart race, Seward eagerly embraced the Whig platform that promised to deliver for the nation something of the progress he had achieved for himself. Despite Weed"s caution that he faced an uphill battle, his native optimism would not be dampened. The campaign, complete with slogans and songs, was a lively affair. To counter charges that the boyish, red-haired Seward was too young for high office, the Whigs offered a gallery of historical figures who had achieved greatness in their youth, including Charlemagne, Napoleon, Lafayette, Mozart, Newton, and, of course, Whig leader Henry Clay himself. Seward antic.i.p.ated victory until the final votes were tallied over a three-day period in November 1834.
Defeat shook the usually buoyant Seward to the core. He began to reevaluate his present life, his marriage, and his future. Obliged to return to Albany that December for the final session of the state senate, where he was a lame duck, he fell into an uncharacteristic state of melancholy. Unable to sleep, Seward feared that his consuming ambition, which had kept him away from his wife and children for months, had jeopardized his marriage.
"What a demon is this ambition," he lamented from Albany, baring his soul in a long, emotional letter to his wife. Ambition had led him to stray, he now realized, "in thought, purpose, communion and sympathy from the only being who purely loves me." He confessed that he had thought her love only "an incident" among his many pa.s.sions, when, in truth, it was "the chief good" of his life. This realization, he feared, had come too late "to win back" her love: "I banished you from my heart. I made it so desolate, so dest.i.tute of sympathy for you, of everything which you ought to have found there, that you could no longer dwell in it, and when the wretched T. [Tracy] took advantage of my madness and offered sympathies, and feelings and love such as I [never did], and your expelled heart was half won by his falsehoods.... G.o.d be praised for the escape of both of us from that fearful peril.... Loved, injured and angel spirit, receive this homage of my first return to reason and truth-say to me that understanding my own feelings, yours are not crushed."
Failing to receive an immediate reply from Frances, Seward tossed in his bed. He felt cold, clammy, and feverish. For the first time, the possibility occurred to him that his wife might have fallen out of love, and he was horrified. "I am growing womanish in fears," he admitted in a second heartfelt letter. "Tell me in your own dear way that I am loved and cherished in your heart as I used to be when I better deserved so happy a lot."
Finally, Seward received the answer he longed to hear. "You reproach yourself dear Henry with too much severity," Frances wrote. "Never in those times when I have wept the most bitterly over the decay of my young dreams...have I thought you otherwise than good and kind.... When I realized most forcibly that "love is the whole history of woman and but an episode in the life of man"...even then I imputed it not to you as a fault but reproached myself for wishing to exact a return for affections which I felt were too intense." She a.s.sured him that "the love of another" could never bring her "consolation"-G.o.d had kept her "in the right path."
By return mail Seward pledged that he desired nothing but to return home, to share the family duties and read by the fireside on the long winter nights, "to live for you and for our dear boys," to be "a partner in your thoughts and cares and feelings." With Frances to support him, Seward promised to renew his Episcopal faith and attempt to find his way to G.o.d. He was "count[ing] with eagerness," he concluded, "the hours which intervene between this period and the time when that life will commence."
As Seward took leave of the many friends he had made in his four years in Albany, he decided against confronting Tracy. The day before his scheduled departure, however, a curious letter from his old friend provoked an immediate response. The letter opened with halcyon recollections of the early days of their acquaintance, when Tracy still possessed "golden dreams, of a devoted, peculiar friendship. How much I suffered," he wrote, "when I was first awakened to the perception that these were only dreams.... For this you are no way responsible. You loved me as much as you could...but it was less far less than I hoped." He explained that "this pain, this disappointment is my excuse for the capriciousness, and too frequent unkindness which I have displayed towards you."
In an emotional reply, Seward explained that Tracy misunderstood completely the nature of the "alienation" that had befallen them. "Availing yourself of the relation existing between us," Seward charged, "you did with or without premeditated purpose what as a man of honor you ought not to have done-pursued a course of conduct which but for the virtue and firmness of the being dearest to me" would have destroyed his entire family. Seward related his initial reluctance to read the letters Frances had surrendered to him; and his conclusion, after reading them, that Tracy "had failed to do me the injury you recklessly contemplated.
"Thenceforth Tracy," he wrote, "you lost that magic influence you once possessed over me.... You still have my respect as a man of eminent talents and of much virtue but you can never again be the friend of my secret thoughts. I part without anger, but without affection." Even at this heavy moment, Seward remained the consummate politician, unwilling to burn his bridges completely.
If Seward believed the crisis with Frances had forever muted the voice of his public ambitions with a contented domesticity, he was mistaken. No sooner had he returned to Auburn than he admitted to a friend: "It is seldom that persons who enjoy intervals of public life are happy in their periods of seclusion." Within days, he was writing to Weed, pleading with his old friend and mentor to "keep me informed upon political matters, and take care that I do not so far get absorbed in professional occupation, that you will cease to care for me as a politician."
In the summer of 1835, seeking distraction from the tedium of his legal practice, the thirty-four-year-old Seward organized a family expedition to the South. He and Frances occupied the backseat of a horse-drawn carriage, while their five-year-old son, Fred, sat up front with the coachman, former slave William Johnson. Their elder son, Gus, remained at home with his grandfather. Seward, as always, was thrilled by the journey. "When I travel," he explained, "I banish care and thought and reflection." Over a three-month period, the little party traveled through Pennsylvania and Virginia, stopping at the nation"s capital on their way back. While their letters home extolled the warmth and generous hospitality extended to them by Southerners all along their route, their firsthand encounter with the consequences of slavery profoundly affected their att.i.tudes toward the South.
At the time of their journey, three decades of immigration, commercial enterprise, and industrial production had invigorated Northern society, creating thriving cities and towns. The historian Kenneth Stampp well describes how the North of this period "teemed with bustling, restless men and women who believed pa.s.sionately in "progress" and equated it with growth and change; the air was filled with the excitement of intellectual ferment and with the schemes of entrepreneurs; and the land was honeycombed with societies aiming at nothing less than the total reform of mankind."
Yet, crossing into Virginia, the Sewards entered a world virtually unchanged since 1800. "We no longer pa.s.sed frequent farm-houses, taverns, and shops," Henry wrote as the family carriage wound its way through Virginia"s Allegheny Mountains, "but our rough road conducted us...[past] low log-huts, the habitations of slaves." They rarely encountered other travelers, finding instead "a waste, broken tract of land, with here and there an old, decaying habitation." Seward lamented: "How deeply the curse of slavery is set upon this venerated and storied region of the old dominion. Of all the countries I have seen France only whose energies have for forty years been expended in war and whose population has been more decimated by the sword is as much decayed as Virginia."
The poverty, neglect, and stagnation Seward surveyed seemed to pervade both the landscape and its inhabitants. Slavery trapped a large portion of the Southern population, preventing upward mobility. Illiteracy rates were high, access to education difficult. While a small planter aristocracy grew rich from holdings in land and slaves, the static Southern economy did not support the creation of a sizable middle cla.s.s.
While Seward focused on the economic and political depredations of slavery, Frances responded to the human plight of the enslaved men, women, and children she encountered along the journey. "We are told that we see slavery here in its mildest form," she wrote her sister. But "disguise thyself as thou wilt, still, slavery, thou art a bitter draught." She could not stop thinking of the "wrongs of this injured race."
One day Frances stopped the carriage to converse with an old blind slave woman, who was at work "turning the ponderous wheel of a machine" in a yard. The work was hard, but she had to do something, she explained, "and this is all I can do now, I am so old." When Frances asked about her family, she revealed that her husband and all her children had been sold long ago to different owners and she had never heard from any of them again. This sad encounter left a lasting impression on Frances. She recorded the interview in detail, and later read it out loud to family and friends in Auburn.
A few days afterward, the Sewards came across a group of slave children chained together on the road outside of Richmond. Henry described the sorrowful scene: "Ten naked little boys, between six and twelve years old, tied together, two and two, by their wrists, were all fastened to a long rope, and followed by a tall, gaunt white man, who, with his long lash, whipped up the sad and weary little procession, drove it to the horse-trough to drink, and thence to a shed, where they lay down on the ground and sobbed and moaned themselves to sleep." The children had been purchased from different plantations that day and were on their way to be auctioned off at Richmond.
Frances could not endure to continue the journey. "Sick of slavery and the South," she wrote in her diary; "the evil effects constantly coming before me and marring everything." She begged her husband to cancel the rest of their tour, and he complied. Instead of continuing south to Richmond, they "turned their horses" heads northward and homeward." For decades afterward, indelible images of Southern poverty and the misery of enslaved blacks would strengthen Seward"s hostility to slavery and mold Frances"s powerful social conscience.
WHEN SEWARD RETURNED to Auburn, a lucrative opportunity beckoned. The Holland Land Company, which held more than three hundred thousand acres of undeveloped land in western New York, was searching for a manager to parcel the land and negotiate contracts and deeds with prospective settlers. The company offered Seward a multiyear contract with an annual salary of $5,000 plus a share in the profits. Though accepting the position meant he would reside for months at a time in Chautauqua County, more than a hundred miles from his family and home in Auburn, Seward did not hesitate.
He took a leave from his law firm and rented a five-bedroom house in Westfield, "more beautiful than you can have an idea," hopeful that his wife and family would join him during the summer months. In the meantime, he invited Weed"s seventeen-year-old daughter, Harriet, to keep Frances company in Auburn, and to help with the two boys and their new baby girl, Cornelia, born in August 1836.