American Men of Action

by Burton Egbert Stevenson

Seward was already in the Senate, had spoken in reply to Webster, and assumed the leadership which Webster forfeited. In the House, too, was Stevens, who soon gained prominence by a certain vitriolic force which was in him, and these three men labored unceasingly for the defeat of the South—indeed, for more than its defeat—for payment, to the last drop, for the sins it had committed. They were bound together by party ties and in other ways, but most closely of all by a hatred of slavery, which, with Stevens and Sumner, mounted at times to fanaticism and led them into the errors always awaiting the fanatic.

Thaddeus Stevens, the oldest of the three, had been born in Vermont, but removed to Pennsylvania at the age of twenty-two, and began to practice law there. In 1831, he was one of the moving spirits in the formation of the anti-Masonic party, which fancied it saw, in the spread of Masonry, a grave danger to the republic. Two years later, Stevens was chosen a member of the Pennsylvania legislature, but his career did not really begin until, in 1848, at the age of fifty-seven, he was elected a member of the national House of Representatives, where he soon took his place as the leader of the anti-slavery faction. From that time forward, he was unceasing in his warfare against slavery, frequently going to lengths where few cared to follow, and which would seem to indicate that there was a trace of madness in the man. He developed an exaggerated and sentimental regard for the negro, and grew radical and relentless toward the South.

At the close of the war, he regarded the southern states as conquered territory, to be treated as such, and his ideas of treatment seem to have been founded upon those of the Middle Ages. He wished to confiscate the property of all Confederates; endeavored to impeach President Johnson, who was trying to enforce a system of reconstruction which was at least better than that which Stevens advocated. For a time he seemed to suffer from a very vertigo of hatred, which ate into his soul and destroyed him. The plan of reconstruction adopted by Congress was an embodiment of his ideas; but Johnson was acquitted of the charges Stevens brought against him, and Stevens's poison, as it were, turned in upon himself and killed him. His last request, that his body be buried in an obscure private cemetery, because public cemeteries excluded negroes, shows the man's unbalanced condition, the length to which his ideas had led him.

Charles Sumner, who was to the Senate much what Stevens was to the House, although a larger and better-balanced man, was a typical Bostonian and inheritor of the New England conscience, which, of course, meant that he was opposed through and through to slavery. He was a successful lawyer, and as his sentiments were well known, he was chosen to succeed Webster when the latter wavered on the anti-slavery question, and threw some pledges of assistance to the South. There was never any doubt about Sumner's position, no sign of wavering or coquetting with the enemy, and in 1856, he was assaulted by a southern senator and so severely injured that three years passed before he could resume his seat.

He did so in time to oppose any compromise with slavery or the slave power, which the threatening attitude of the South had almost scared the North into considering, and urged the immediate emancipation of the slaves. When this had been accomplished, his first thought was to make sure that the slaves would remain free, and he began the contest for negro suffrage, as the only guarantee of negro freedom, which he finally won. In the reconstruction period following the war, he was inevitably an ally of Thaddeus Stevens, though the latter far surpassed him in vindictiveness toward the South.

Let us not forget that the South had shown itself blind to its own interests when, as soon as reconstructed by Andrew Johnson, it had, state by state, adopted laws virtually enslaving the black man again. But for this fatuity, there would probably have been no such feeling of vindictiveness at the North as soon developed there; certainly there would have been no excuse for such severity as was afterwards exhibited. So it is true in a sense that the South has itself to blame for the horrors of the reconstruction period, and for the suspicion with which its good faith toward the negro was for many years regarded. Sumner was not a vindictive man, and in his last years, incurred a vote of censure from his own State for offering a bill to remove the names of battles of the Civil War from the Army Register and from the regimental colors of the United States. He practically died in harness in 1874. Looking back at him, one sees how much larger he looms than Stevens; one cannot but admire his courage and honesty of purpose; his public life was a continual struggle for the right, as he saw it, and, remembering that, his faults need not trouble us.

When Sumner arrived in the Senate, he found William H. Seward, of New York, already there. Seward, who had been admitted to the bar in 1822, at the age of twenty-one, was carried into the New York legislature by the anti-Masonic wave of 1830. Eight years later, he was the Whig governor of the state, and in 1849 was sent to the Senate. There he soon rivetted attention by his rebuke of Webster for condoning the Fugitive Slave Law, and caught the reins of party leadership as they fell from Webster's hands. It was then that he made his famous statement that the war against slavery was waged under a "higher law than the Constitution," and that the fall of slavery was inevitable.

In 1856, when the newly-formed anti-slavery party, known as the Republican, met to name a national ticket, Seward was the logical candidate, but refused to allow his name to be considered, and the choice fell upon that brilliant adventurer, John C. Frémont. Frémont was, of course, defeated, and Seward continued to be the leader of Republican thought, and the chief originator of Republican doctrine. Indeed, he was, in a sense, the Republican party, so that, four years later, he seemed not only the logical but the inevitable choice of the party for President. His most formidable opponent was Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, who had been carefully working for the nomination, and who was blessed with the shrewdest of campaign managers. Seward led on the first ballot, and would have won but for the expert trading already referred to in the story of Lincoln's nomination.

It was natural that Lincoln should offer him the state portfolio, and Seward accepted it. From first to last, he held true to the President, and the services he rendered the country were second only to those of Lincoln himself. When Lincoln was killed, an attempt was also made to murder Seward, and was very nearly successful—so nearly that for days Seward lingered between life and death. He recovered, however, to resume his place in Johnson's cabinet. Over the new President he had great influence; he had long been an advocate of mercy toward the South, and he did much to persuade the President to the course he followed in restoring the southern states to the Union, without reference to the wishes of Congress. Even John Sherman pronounced the plan "wise and judicious," but Stevens, Sumner, and their powerful coterie in Congress violently opposed it, and Seward came in for his share of the vituperation and bitter accusation which the plan called forth. Johnson's defeat closed his political career, and the last years of his life were spent in travel.

The very cause of his downfall marks him as the greatest of the three, for he placed justice above expediency, and not even the attempt upon his life changed his feeling toward the South. Perhaps the wisdom of his judgment was never better exemplified than in his purchase from Russia of the great territory known as Alaska, for the sum of $7,200,000. Alaska was regarded at the time as an icy desert of no economic value, but time has changed that estimate, and the discovery of gold there made it one of the richest of the country's possessions.