Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 / From Lincoln to Garfield, with a Review of the Events Which Led to the Political Revolution of 1860

by James Gillespie Blaine

During the period in which Mr. Johnson had been copiously illustrating the guilt of treason, and avowing his intention to punish traitors with the severest penalty known to the law, Mr. Seward lay wounded and helpless. His injuries, received at the hands of the assassin, Payne, at almost the same moment in which Booth fired his fatal shot at the President, were at first considered mortal. The murderous assault came only a short time after a severe injury Mr. Seward had received in consequence of being violently thrown from his carriage. The shock to his nervous system from the attack of the assassin was so great that his physicians did not for some days permit him to learn the fate of the President, or even to know that his own son, Mr. Frederick Seward, who had been his faithful and able assistant at the State Department, was also one of the victims of the plot of assassination, and was lying, as it was feared, and indeed generally believed, at the point of death.

To the joy no less than to the surprise of the entire country Mr. Seward rallied and regained his strength very rapidly. He was wounded on the night of the 14th of April. By the first of May he had so far recovered as to be informed somewhat minutely of the sorrowful situation. By the tenth of the month he received visits from the President and his fellow-members of the Cabinet, and conferred with them on the engrossing questions that pressed upon the Administration. On the 20th he repaired to the Department of State—which then occupied the present site of the north front of the Treasury building—and held conference with foreign ministers, especially with the minister of France, touching the complication in Mexico. From that time onward, though still weak, and bowed down with grief by the death of Mr. Lincoln and the possibly impeding death of one still nearer to him, Mr. Seward gave close attention to public affairs. The need of action and of energy so pressed upon him that he found no time to utter lamentation, none to indulge even in the most sacred personal grief. The heroic element of the man was displayed at its best. His moral strength, his mental fibre, his wiry constitution were all tested to their utmost, and no doubt to the serious shortening of his days.

Mr. Seward feared that the country was in danger of suffering very seriously from a possible, if not indeed probable, mistake of the Administration. In the creed of his own statesmanship, there was no article that comprehended revenge as a just motive for action. No man had suffered more of personal obloquy from the South than he, no one living had received deeper personal injury from the demoniac spirit, the wicked inspiration of the rebellion. But he did not for one moment permit those causes which would have powerfully influenced lower natures to control his action, or even to extort a single word of passionate resentment.

It had been Mr. Seward's fortune at different epochs in the country's history and in different phases of his own career to incur the harshest censure from political associates. He had been accused at one time of urging the anti-slavery cause so far as to endanger the Union; and, when the Union was endangered, he was accused of being willing to sacrifice the anti-slavery cause to save it. "The American people," said he in February, 1861, "have in our day two great interests,—one the ascendency of freedom, the other the integrity of the Union. The slavery interest has derived its whole political power from bringing the latter object into antagonism with the former. Twelve years ago Freedom was in danger, and the Union was not. . . . To-day practically Freedom is not in danger, and the Union is. With the loss of the Union, all would be lost." Mr. Seward, influenced by this belief, went farther in the direction of conciliation for the avoidance of war than his associates were willing to follow. His words gave offense to some who had long been his most earnest supporters,—a fact thus pointedly recognized by him: "I speak now singly for Union, striving if possible to save it peaceably; if not possible, then to cast the responsibility upon the party of slavery. For this singleness of speech, I am suspected of infidelity to freedom." But Mr. Seward held his course firmly, and waited for vindication as men of rectitude and true greatness can afford to wait. "I refer myself not to the men of my time, but to the judgment of history."

A similar dedication of himself to the judgment of history was in Mr. Seward's opinion again demanded of him. He was firmly persuaded that the wisest plan of reconstruction was the one which would be speediest; that for the sake of impressing the world with the strength and the marvelous power of self-government, with its Law, its Order, its Peace, we should at the earliest possible moment have every State restored to its normal relations with the Union. He did not believe that guarantee of any kind beyond an oath of renewed loyalty was needful. He was willing to place implicit faith in the coercive power of self-interest operating upon the men lately in rebellion. He agreed neither with the President's proclaimed policy of blood, nor with that held by the vast majority of his own political associates, which, avoiding the rigor of personal punishment, sought by exclusion from political honor and emolument to administer wholesome discipline to the men who had brought peril to the Government and suffering to the people.

Mr. Seward was undoubtedly influenced in no small degree in these conclusions by the habit of mind he had acquired in conducting the foreign affairs of the Government during the period of the war. He had keenly felt the reproach, the taunt, and the open or ill-disguised satisfaction reflected by a large number of the public men of Europe that we were no longer and could never again be "the United States of America." He felt that the experiment of Imperial Government in Mexico, then in progress under Maximilian, was a disturbing element, and tended by possible conflicts on this continent to embroil us with at least two great European powers. The defense against that unwelcome alternative, and the defense against its evil result, if it should come, would in his judgment be found in a completely restored Union—with the National Government supreme, and all its parts working in harmony and in strength. He believed moreover that the legislation which should affect the South, now that peace had returned, should be shared by representatives of that section, and that as such participation must at last come if we were to have a restored Republic, the wisest policy was to concede it at once, and not nurture by delay a new form of discontent, and induce by withholding confidence a new phase of distrust and disobedience among the Southern people.

Entertaining these views, and deeply impressed with the importance of incorporating them in the plan of reconstruction, Mr. Seward rose from his sick-bed, pale, emaciated, and sorrowful, to persuade his associates in the Government, of the wisdom and necessity of adopting them. He had undoubtedly a hard task with the President. The two men were naturally antagonistic on so many points that agreement and cordiality seemed impossible upon a question in regard to which they held views diametrically opposite. Mr. Johnson inherited all his political principles from the Democratic party. He had been filled with an intense hatred of the Whigs and with an almost superstitious dread of the Federalists. Mr. Seward and he were therefore political antipodes. The one was the eulogist and follower of John Quincy Adams, the other was a sincere believer in the creed and the measures of Andrew Jackson. As Adams and Jackson had agreed only in devotion to the Union, so now Seward and Johnson seemed to have no other principle of Government in common, and that principle was equally strong in each.

Not only was this obstacle of inherent difference of political view in Mr. Seward's way, but he also encountered an intense personal prejudice which even while he was disabled by wounds had been insinuated into the President's mind. Nor had Mr. Seward any force of popularity at the time with the Republican party of the country. It had fallen to his lot during the four eventful years of the war to assume unpleasant responsibilities and to perform ungracious acts. He was not at the head of a department where popular applause awaited his ablest work, or where popular attention was attracted by the most brilliant triumphs of his diplomatic correspondence.

The successful placing of a vast loan among the people redounded everywhere to the praise of Mr. Chase. The gaining of a victory in the field reflected credit upon Mr. Stanton. But a series of diplomatic papers far outreaching in scope and grasp those of any statesman or publicist with whom he was in correspondence, recalling in skill the best efforts of Talleyrand, and in spirit the loftiest ideals of Jefferson, did not advance the popularity of Mr. Seward because the field of his achievements and triumphs was not one in which the masses of the people took an active interest. The most difficult and in many cases the most successful of diplomatic work is necessarily confidential for long periods. In legislative halls, discussion on questions of interest enlists public attention and holds the popular mind in suspense before the fate of the measure is decided. But the dispatches and arguments of a minister of Foreign Affairs, which may lead to results of great consequence to his country, are not gazetted till long after they have borne their fruit; and the public rejoicing in the conclusion, seldom turns to examine the toilsome process by which it was attained. It was from the comparative isolation of the Department of State, four years removed from active contact with the people, that Mr. Seward now assumed the task of controlling the new President and directing his policy on the weightiest question of his Administration.

Those who thoroughly knew Mr. Seward through all the stages of his political career were aware that, great as he was in public speech, in the Senate, at the Bar, before popular assemblies, cogent and powerful as he had so often proved with his pen, his one peculiar gift, greater perhaps than any other with which he was endowed, was his faculty, in personal intercourse with one man or with a small number of men, of enforcing his own views and taking captive his hearers. With the President alone, or with a body no larger than a Cabinet, where the conferences and discussion are informal and conversational, Mr. Seward shone with remarkable brilliancy and with power unsurpassed. He possessed a characteristic rare among men who have been long accustomed to lead,—he was a good listener. He gave deferential attention to remarks addressed to him, paid the graceful and insinuating compliment of seeming much impressed, and offered the delicate flattery, when he came to reply, of repeating the argument of his opponent in phrase far more affluent and eloquent than that in which it was originally stated.