In the weeks that followed, his days were increasingly taken up with politics. Though he did not enjoy formal dinner parties, preferring intimate suppers with his family and a few close friends, Bates now spent more time than ever before entertaining political friends, educators, and newspaper editors. Although still tending to his garden, he immersed himself in periodicals on politics, economics, and public affairs. He felt he should prepare himself intellectually for the task of presidential leadership by reading historical accounts of Europe’s most powerful monarchs, as well as theoretical works on government. He sought guidance for his role as chief executive in Carlyle’s Frederick the Great and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Evenings once devoted to family were now committed to public speeches and correspondence with supporters. Politics had fastened a powerful hold upon him, disrupting his previous existence.
The chance for his nomination depended, as was true for Chase and Lincoln as well, on Seward’s failure to achieve a first ballot victory at the convention. “I have many strong assurances that I stand second,” Bates confided in his diary, “first in the Northwest and in some states in New England, second in New York, Pa.” To be sure, there were pockets of opposition, particularly among the more passionate Republicans, who argued that the party must nominate one of its own, and among the German-Americans, who recalled that Bates had endorsed Millard Fillmore when he ran for president on the anti-immigrant American Party four years earlier. As the convention approached, however, his supporters were increasingly optimistic.
“There is no question,” the New York Tribune predicted, “as there has been none for these three months past, that [Bates] will have more votes in the Convention than any other candidate presented by those who think it wiser to nominate a man of moderate and conservative antecedents.” As the delegates gathered in Chicago, Francis Blair, Sr., prophesied that Bates would triumph in Chicago.
Though Bates acknowledged he had never officially joined the Republican Party, he understood that many Republicans, including “some of the most moderate and patriotic” men, believed that his nomination “would tend to soften the tone of the Republican party, without any abandonment of its principles,” thus winning “the friendship and support of many, especially in the border States.” His chances of success looked good. How strangely it had all turned out, for surely he understood that he had followed an unusual public path, a path that had curved swiftly upward when he was young, then leveled off, even sloped downward for many years. But now, as he positioned himself to reenter politics, he sighted what appeared to be a relatively clear trail all the way to the very top.
ON THAT MORNING OF MAY 18, 1860, Bates’s chief objective was simply to stop Seward on the first ballot. Chase, too, had his eye on the front-runner, while Seward worried about Chase. Bates had become convinced that the convention would turn to him as the only real moderate. Neither Seward nor Chase nor Bates seriously considered Lincoln an obstacle to their great ambition.
Lincoln was not a complete unknown to his rivals. By 1860, his path had crossed with each of them in different ways. Seward had met Lincoln twelve years before at a political meeting. The two shared lodging that night, and Seward encouraged Lincoln to clarify and intensify his moderate position on slavery. Lincoln had met Bates briefly, and had sat in the audience in 1847 when Bates delivered his mesmerizing speech at the River and Harbor Convention. Chase had campaigned for Lincoln and the Republicans in Illinois in 1858, though the two men had never met.
There was little to lead one to suppose that Abraham Lincoln, nervously rambling the streets of Springfield that May morning, who scarcely had a national reputation, certainly nothing to equal any of the other three, who had served but a single term in Congress, twice lost bids for the Senate, and had no administrative experience whatsoever, would become the greatest historical figure of the nineteenth century.
CHAPTER 2
THE “LONGING TO RISE”
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, William Henry Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates were members of a restless generation of Americans, destined to leave behind the eighteenth-century world of their fathers. Bates, the oldest, was born when George Washington was still president; Seward and Chase during Jefferson’s administration; Lincoln shortly before James Madison took over. Thousands of miles separate their birthplaces in Virginia, New York, New Hampshire, and Kentucky. Nonetheless, social and economic forces shaped their paths with marked similarities. Despite striking differences in station, talent, and temperament, all four aspirants for the Republican nomination left home, journeyed west, studied law, dedicated themselves to public service, joined the Whig Party, developed a reputation for oratorical eloquence, and became staunch opponents of the spread of slavery.
It was a country for young men. “We find ourselves,” the twenty-eight-year-old Lincoln told the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, “in the peaceful possession, of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate.” The founding fathers had crafted a government more favorable to liberty “than any of which the history of former times tells us.” Now it was up to their children to preserve and expand the great experiment.
The years following the Revolution fostered the belief that the only barriers to success were discipline and the extent of one’s talents. “When both the privileges and the disqualifications of class have been abolished and men have shattered the bonds which once held them immobile,” marveled the French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville, “the idea of progress comes naturally into each man’s mind; the desire to rise swells in every heart at once, and all men want to quit their former social position. Ambition becomes a universal feeling.”
The same observation that horrified Mrs. Frances Trollope on a visit to America, that “any man’s son may become the equal of any other man’s son,” propelled thousands of young men to break away from the small towns and limited opportunities their fathers had known. These ambitious youngsters ventured forth to test their luck in new careers as merchants, manufacturers, teachers, and lawyers. In the process, hundreds of new towns and cities were born, and with the rapid expansion of roads, bridges, and canals, a modern market economy emerged. Vast new lands and possibilities were opened when the Louisiana Purchase doubled the extent of America’s territorial holdings overnight.
The newly liberated Americans crossed the Appalachian Mountains, which had separated the original colonies from the unsettled West. “Americans are always moving on,” wrote Stephen Vincent Benét. “The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried/The metal sleeping in the mountainside.” In the South, pioneers moved through the Gulf States toward the Mississippi River, extending cotton cultivation and slavery as they went. In the North, the movement west from New England and the mid-Atlantic brought settlers who created a patchwork of family farms and planted the seeds of thriving cities.
Bates traveled farthest, eight hundred miles from his home state of Virginia across Kentucky, Illinois, and Indiana to the young city of St. Louis in the newly established territory of Missouri. Chase made the arduous journey from New Hampshire to Cincinnati, Ohio, a burgeoning city recently carved from a forest rich with wild game. Seward left his family in eastern New York for the growing city of Auburn in the western part of the state. Lincoln traveled from Kentucky to Indiana, and then on to Illinois, where he would become a flatboatman, merchant, surveyor, and postmaster before studying law.
“Every American is eaten up with longing to rise,” Tocqueville wrote. These four men, and thousands more, were not searching for a mythical pot of gold at the edge of the western rainbow, but for a place where their dreams and efforts would carve them a place in a fast-changing society.
OF THE CONTENDERS, William Henry Seward enjoyed the most privileged childhood. Blessed with a sanguine temperament that seemingly left him free from inner turmoil, he launched himself into every endeavor with unbounded vitality—whether competing for honors in school, playing cards with his classmates, i
mbibing good food and wine, or absorbing the pleasures of travel.
Henry Seward, as he would be called, was born on May 16, 1801. The fourth of six children, he grew up in the hill country of Orange County, New York, in the village of Florida, about twenty-five miles from West Point. His father, Samuel Seward, had accumulated “a considerable fortune” through his various employments as physician, magistrate, judge, merchant, land speculator, and member of the New York state legislature. His mother, Mary Jennings Seward, was renowned in the community for her warmth, good sense, and kindly manner.
Affectionate and outgoing, with red hair and intelligent blue eyes, Henry was singled out among his brothers for a college education, “then regarded, by every family,” he later wrote, “as a privilege so high and so costly that not more than one son could expect it.” His “destined preferment,” as he called it, led him at the age of nine to a preparatory academy in the village of Goshen, and then back to his own town when a new academy opened its doors. His day of study began, he recalled, “at five in the morning, and closed at nine at night.” The regime imposed by the schoolmaster was rigorous. When young Henry faltered in his translations of Caesar or failed to decipher lines of Virgil’s poetry, he was relegated to a seat on the floor “with the classic in one hand and the dictionary in the other.” Although sometimes the pressure was “more than [he] could bear,” he persisted, knowing that his father would never accept failure.
After the isolated hours consumed by books, Henry delighted in the sociability of winter evenings, when, he recalled, “the visit of a neighbor brought out the apples, nuts, and cider, and I was indulged with a respite from study, and listened to conversation, which generally turned upon politics or religion!” His pleasure in these social gatherings left Seward with a lifelong memory and appetite. Years later, when he established his own home, he filled evenings with a continuous flow of guests, always providing abundant food, drink, and conversation.
The Sewards, like other well-to-do families in the area, owned slaves. As a small child, Henry spent much of his time in the slave quarters, comprised of the kitchen and the garret above it. Basking in the warmth of the fireplace and the aroma of the turkeys and chickens roasting on the spit, he savored the “loquacious” and “affectionate” company of the garret’s residents. They provided a welcome respite from the “severe decorum” of his parents’ parlor on the other side of the house. As he grew older, however, he found it difficult to accept the diminished status of these slave friends, whose lives were so different from his own.
Although his father, an exception in the village, permitted his slaves to join his own children in the local schoolhouse, Henry puzzled over why “no other black children went there.” More disturbing still, he discovered that one of his companions, a slave child his own age who belonged to a neighboring family, was regularly whipped. After one severe beating, the boy ran away. “He was pursued and brought back,” Seward recalled, and was forced to wear “an iron yoke around his neck, which exposed him to contempt and ridicule,” until he finally “found means to break the collar, and fled forever.” Seward later would credit this early unease and personal awareness of the slaves’ plight for his resolve to fight against slavery.
The youthful Seward was not alone in his budding dislike for slavery. In the years after the Revolutionary War, the state legislatures in eleven Northern states passed abolition laws. Some states banned slavery outright within their boundaries; others provided for a system of gradual emancipation, decreeing that all slaves born after a certain date would be granted freedom when they attained adulthood. The slaves Seward knew as a child belonged to this transitional generation. By 1827, slavery would be fully eradicated in New York. While Northern legislatures were eliminating the institution, however, slavery had become increasingly important to the economic life of the cotton-growing South.
At fifteen, Seward enrolled in upstate New York’s prestigious Union College. His first sight of the steamboat that carried him up the Hudson was one he would never forget. Invented only a decade earlier, the steamboat seemed to him “a magnificent palace…a prodigy of power.” His first glimpse of Albany, then a rural village with a population of twelve thousand, thrilled him—“so vast, so splendid, so imposing.” Throughout his life, Seward retained an awe of the new technologies and inventions that fostered the industrial development of his rapidly expanding country.
At Union, Seward’s open, affable nature made him dozens of friends. Upon his arrival, he later confessed, “I cherished in my secret thoughts aspirations to become…the valedictorian of my class.” When he realized that his competitors for the honor seemed isolated from the social life of the school, he wondered if the prize was worth the cost. His ambitions were revitalized, however, when the president of Union announced that the Phi Beta Kappa Society “had determined to establish a fourth branch at Union College,” with membership conferred on the top scholars at the end of junior year. There were then only three active branches of Phi Beta Kappa—at Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth. To gain admission, Seward realized, would place him in the company of “all the eminent philosophers, scholars, and statesmen of the country.”
He made a pact with his roommate whereby the two “rose at three o’clock in the morning, cooked and spread our own meals, washed our own dishes, and spent the whole time which we could save from prayers and recitations, and the table, in severe study, in which we unreservedly and constantly aided each other.” Years later, his jovial self-confidence intact, Seward wrote: “Need I say that we entered the great society without encountering the deadly blackball?”
Seward began his senior year in good spirits. Without sacrificing his popularity with classmates, he was poised to graduate as valedictorian. But his prideful character temporarily derailed him. Strapped by the stingy allowance his father provided, he had fallen into debt with various creditors in Schenectady. The bills, mostly to tailors, were not large, but his father’s refusal to pay spurred a rash decision to leave college for good, so that he might work to support himself. “I could not submit to the shame of credit impaired,” he later wrote. Without notifying his parents, he accompanied a classmate to Georgia, where he found a good job teaching school. When his father discovered Henry’s whereabouts, he “implored [him] to return,” mingling promises of additional funds with threats that he would pursue the trustees of the school “with the utmost rigor of the law…if they should continue to harbor the delinquent.”
If his father’s threats increased his determination to stay, a letter from his mother, revealing “a broken heart,” prompted Seward’s return to New York. The following fall, after working off his debt that summer, he resumed his studies at Union. “Matters prosper in my favor,” he wrote to a friend in January 1820, “and I have so far been inferior to none in my own opinion.” He was back on track to become valedictorian, and his election as graduation speaker seemed likely. If denied the honor, he told his friend, “his soul would disdain to sit in the hearing of some, and listen to some whom he considers beneath even his notice.” His goals were realized. He graduated first in his class and was unanimously elected by classmates and faculty to be Union College’s commencement orator in June 1820.
From his honored place at Union College, Seward glided smoothly into the profession of law. In an era when “reading the law” under the guidance of an established attorney was the principal means of becoming a lawyer, he walked directly from his graduation ceremony to the law office of a distinguished Goshen lawyer, and then “was received as a student” in the New York City office of John Anthon, author of a widely known book on the legal practice. Not only did Seward have two eminent mentors, he also gained access to the “New York Forum,” a society of ambitious law students who held mock trials and prosecutions to hone their professional skills before public audiences.
Accustomed to winning the highest honors, Seward was initially chagrined to discover that his legal arguments failed to bring the loudest applause. His co
nfidence as a writer faltered until a fellow law student, whose orations “always carried away the audience,” insisted that the problem was not Henry’s compositions, which were, in fact, far superior to his own, but his husky voice, which a congenital inflammation in the throat rendered “incapable of free intonation.” To prove this point, Seward’s friend offered to exchange compositions, letting Seward read one of his while he read one of Seward’s. Seward recalled that he read his friend’s address “as well as I could, but it did not take at all. He followed me with my speech, and I think Broadway overheard the clamorous applause which arose on that occasion in Washington Hall.”
During his stay in New York, Seward formed an intimate friendship with a bookish young man, David Berdan, who had graduated from Union the year after him. Seward believed that Berdan possessed “a genius of the highest order.” He had read more extensively than anyone Seward knew and excelled as a scholar in the classics. “The domains of History, Eloquence, Poetry, Fiction & Song,” Seward marveled, “were all subservient to his command.” Berdan had entered into the study of law at the same office as Seward, but soon discovered that his vocation lay in writing, not law.
Together, the two young men attended the theater, read poetry, discussed books, and chased after women. Convinced that Berdan would become a celebrated writer, Seward stood in awe of his friend’s talent and dedication. All such grand expectations and prospects were crushed when Berdan, still in his twenties, was “seized with a bleeding at the lungs” while sojourning in Europe. He continued traveling, but when his tuberculosis worsened, he booked his passage home, in “the hope that he might die in his native land.” The illness took his life before the ship reached New York. His body was buried at sea. Seward was devastated, later telling his wife that he had loved Berdan as “never again” could he “love in this world.”