William H. Seward: Abraham Lincoln's Indispensable Man

this is a production of cornell university good evening and welcome to the third of the summer lecture series walter starr is truly bi-coastal born in massachusetts he grew up in california he counts as alma maters the east coast phillips exeter academy the west coast stanford university and the east coast harvard law school in harvard's john f kennedy school of government he graduated from each with honors at stanford and i'm telling you this because we don't think of historians as doing things like this necessarily he studied political science and history and his theme senior thesis involved a computer model of organizational decisions his masters in public policy thesis at the kennedy school was about agricultural marketing orders and while a student there he was a teaching assistant in a mathematical methods course after graduating from harvard walter joined the washington office of an international law firm that eventually posted him to hong kong where he worked for three years in 1990 he joined the united states securities and exchange commission working for several years in the chairman's office in 1995 fidelity investments hired him to be their first international lawyer based in hong kong and his work took him throughout asia walter returned to washington in 1999 joining emergency i'm sorry emerging markets partnership as an international lawyer focusing on asia eventually rising to be general counsel of emp global as the firm is known today he's now largely retired from legal work and concentrates on research and writing walter's first book john jay founding father was published in 2005. his second seward lincoln's indispensable man was published in 2012. it had the distinction of being the first new seward biography in more than 40 years he's presently working on a biography of secretary of war edwin mcmaster stanton that's scheduled to be published in 2016. his wife dr masami star is a mathematics teacher at phillips exeter he and his family divide their time between exeter and newport beach where they have a second home although he has no formal role at exeter he has an important informal one as adviser of the mock trial team in february 2012 the team won the new hampshire state championship a feat they repeated in february of this year he's extremely proud of them walter starr william h seward abraham lincoln's indispensable man [Applause] thank you bud for that very kind introduction can you all hear me okay um i propose to talk tonight about um about seward and his life and especially since i'm here in upstate new york his relations with his home state of new york seward is born in 1801 in what you all think of as down south orange county new york and grows up in the little town there of florida his father is kind of the principal man of the town he's a merchant he's a judge he's a politician he's the postmaster and seward grows up with politics around the dinner table he's a bright boy and he goes off to school first to a academy in the nearby town of goshen and then to union college in schenectady and years later writing his memoir he wrote about how he how impressed he was by the steamboat trip up the hudson river and his first site of albany he wrote that that no city that he had ever seen in his life not paris not constantinople not benares made the impression upon him that albany did when he first saw it as a young man from albany he takes the stage coach over to schenectady and as he wrote in his memoir he he mounted the the hill not anywhere near the size of hill that you all have here but but the hill that goes up to to union college was some trepidation because he wasn't sure he was going to pass the entrance exam but he did pass it with flying colors entering the sophomore class union college was then one of the leading schools of the nation it within a year or so of steward's arrival it acquires the fourth chapter of phi beta kappa in the country uh and seward uh upon learning that there would be such a distinction immediately sets to work to become a member of phi beta kappa which he does he almost doesn't graduate from college like many college students before and since he and his parents don't see quite eye to eye on the topic of money my son and i sometimes have some issues on this um and midway through what should have been his senior year of college seward without notice to his father or the college simply leaves gets on a boat heads down to the then remote parts of georgia his parents figure out where he is and they write him letters pleading with him to return he's he's set up as a school master there in fact the principal of a new school in putnam county georgia but eventually yields to his mother's pleas returns to new york state returns to school graduates upon graduation he sets out to become a lawyer and as one did in those days there were no law schools he read law he read law first in goshen and then for a while in new york city and he could upon completing his legal studies have settled in either of those places but he doesn't instead he settles in auburn what 35 40 miles up the road from you here why auburn it's a little bit of a mystery in his memoir he writes that he had received a sum of money that would enable him to explore the western part of the state but he only mentions one town that he explored auburn uh now he does mention elsewhere in the memoir that he knew someone in auburn he knew francis miller the daughter of chuckle chuckle he knew that the daughter of judge miller a prominent lawyer in town and so that may well explain why he at least stopped in auburn but but seward and francis were not romantically involved when he first arrived in auburn um in fact his letters from that period which i found in the historical society there indicate that he was much more interested um in a young woman in the next town over scannie atleast or skinny athletes um letters by the by not printed in seward's memoir so so why auburn well late in life a young man approached seward and said where should i settle and seward wrote him back a letter that said he believed that a young man should get his start not in the big cities but in a small town and preferably in the county seat in a new county well that almost exactly describes auburn when seward settled there himself in the 1820s it's the county seat of cayuga county which is at the time a fairly new county only 20 years old it's it's not a huge place but it has factories making furniture and rope and it has the prison which it still has um and so there's a lot for a young lawyer to do it's a great place for him to get his start in life he settles there joins judge miller's law firm as his junior partner and soon is arguing his cases not just in canada county but in all the surrounding counties i'm reasonably sure that he's down here in ithaca at some point within a few years of settling up there um from i had initially intended in writing this section of the book to sort of have one section that talked about his legal career and then a second section that talked about his political career but i realized the more i got into it that his political career started the day he got to town in fact it started when he was in college while he was in college i should mention this being here in tompkins county daniel tompkins at the time the vice president of the united states comes to visit union college and seward is selected to give the address of welcome in part because he's a good speaker but in part because he's already known as a political kid the leader of the tompkins for governor group on campus i surmise so from the day he gets to auburn he's involved in the local militia and he's a member of the vestry of the local church and he's writing newspaper articles for candidates and he writes one newspaper article anonymously to oppose the presbyterian effort to impose blue laws so his political career starts long before he holds office he's active in 1824 in the campaign of uh the local bit of the campaign of john quincy adams he's active in 1828 again in the campaign and in 1830 he's nominated to serve as the anti-masonic senator for a senate district that includes six counties cayuga and basically most of the rest of the finger lakes not not down here to tompkins county that's a different district but sort of you can think of most of what's just north of you here uh and he's a well-suited candidate because he's not just an anti-mason a group of people opposing the political power of the masonic party but he's known as an adams man a man in favor of internal improvements he carries the district and in 1830 goes off to albany as state senator uh his wife stays home um indeed talking at dinner i realized that that's sort of a consistent theme throughout his political life that his wife stays home she stays home she has reasons to stay home and they have two small children at the time that he's elected to the state senate um her father is still alive they live in the same house uh with her father and uh her maiden aunt sister but she has reasons not just of attraction to albany but sorry attraction to auburn but also repulsion to albany and then later repulsion from washington she just does not like politics and politicians and especially perhaps politicians wives skipping forward to the civil war area when seward finally gets her down to washington she feels that she has to pay a call upon mary lincoln and so seward lets lincoln know that he and his wife and the family will be coming to the white house to pay a call upon mary lincoln and they arrive amass because it's not just seward and wife but it's seward's two sons and daughter-in-law and daughter and a big group of stewards arrive sit down hand in their visiting cards as one did in those days and the usher tells them wait just a minute and they wait and they wait and then as fannie describes it fanny bean seward's young daughter describes it in her diary the usher comes back and says so sorry mrs lincoln is not receiving to which fanny says in her diary baloney if she if she really wasn't receiving they would have turned us away at the door she didn't want to see us and francis the wife just hated that kind of you know visiting and calling and so she by and large stays at home during seward's four years as state senator his four years as governor of new york his 12 years as federal senator and then eight years as secretary of state a long period away from upstate new york away from home briefly what is he a state senator i can't say that he accomplishes much he goes back home to auburn for a while practices law in 1838 he's elected governor of new york what does he do as governor what are his claims to fame as as your governor um i should mention that it's not well known that he was governor when i was over in albany doing research at the library one of the research people asked me what i was doing i said oh i'm researching governor seward and she said oh well he was never governor i guess i guess the point is you really need to leave a large building or something you know a bridge or something here in new york to so people know that you're a governor uh seward as governor set out a very ambitious agenda he wanted to build not merely one but three railroads kind of east west across the state he wanted to widen the erie canal he wanted to improve education he wanted to reform the civil service system and he accomplished some of that he the erie canal widening starts during his tenure the work on the railroads starts during his tenure i think the thing he would be proudest of though was the education reforms at the time there were large numbers of children who weren't going to school at all particularly urban children and particularly the children of immigrants there was a flood of immigrants coming from primarily ireland and the quote public schools of new york city were not educating these people because those schools were using the king james bible and other protestant texts so they were not acceptable to catholic parents and the the handful of catholic schools were simply overwhelmed and unable to deal with the flood of students seward saw this as a huge problem not just because he was sympathetic to the plight of these children but because he saw these children he saw immigrants in general as a resource for the state for the nation and he felt that their education was important not just for their own lives but to make the state and the nation a greater place and so he from his very first inaugural address right through of the four years of his governorship worked on this cause he was a whig this was not a whig cause by and large the whigs perhaps a little like republicans today were not a party of immigrants or for immigrants they were the party of those who had been around for a while and so seward had to kind of what we engage in what we would call bipartisanship reach across the aisle to democrats work with his good friend archbishop john hughes to find the votes to pass the legislation the mcclay bill which finally passes in the last year of his governorship he doesn't run for a third term he could under the laws of the time have done so but he's run up a lot of debt entertaining and he's tired of quarreling with the whigs on this and that issue so he again goes back to auburn he never leaves politics for a single day i mean he's home in auburn with within a few days he's writing to his friend thurlow weed the newspaper editor in albany both asking for the news and telling him about the the political situation in auburn um so he's out on the campaign trail in 1844 and again in 1848 and it's in 1848 at a campaign event in boston massachusetts that he first meets a man that for whom he will become the indispensable man abraham lincoln seward is the the lead speaker speaks for a considerable length of time that evening and lincoln is sort of the cleanup hitter at the end speaking as one newspaper put it in a a humorous western strain to them in favor of zachary taylor for president now those of you who know everything there is to know about abraham lincoln and i'm sure that there are one or two of you out here know that on the next night that the two of them shared a hotel room and stayed up late talking about slavery um and i was very keen to nail down the details of this of course the first meeting and so i researched this well unfortunately the the the story is that they shared a hotel room in worcester massachusetts unfortunately seward was not in worcester massachusetts on the next night he was in springfield massachusetts giving a speech to a large audience of enthusiastic wigs and lincoln as best one can tell from the surviving newspapers was on a train headed home to springfield illinois so how did this story which is part of the accepted lincoln lore come to pass it's in a an account that francis carpenter who's from this part of the world wrote after lincoln's death during seward's retirement that seward told him this story did seward actually tell him this story and misremember himself did carpenter hear it incorrectly i don't know all i know is that although they meet on the stage in boston that lincoln and seward do not share a hotel room in worcester in fact they don't see one another from 1848 through the election of 1860. so let me cover that period briefly seward by the election of 1848 is new york's leading wig the leading voice against the expansion of slavery in new york and in the spring of 1849 the new york legislature dominated by the whigs that spring elect seward as its federal as new york's federal senator and sends him down to washington um he arrives in time to be part of the brief presidency of zachary taylor he arrives in time to be a senate colleague of henry clay daniel webster john calhoun jefferson davis his most famous speech is given a year later in opposition to what we know as the compromise of 1850. the compromise of 1850 arises out of the application of california to become a state and the southern resistance to simply making california a free state the southern insistence that there be some quid pro quo if the south was going to allow another free state to come into the union seward speaks against everything but the admission of california as far as he's concerned all of the other bits of the compromise are a mistake the proposed strengthening the fugitive slave law the proposed measures to um you know mollify the south his view it is so important to bring california into the union immediately that he says in one part of the speech that he would bring california in as a slave state if that is what the people of california indeed wanted now that bit of the speech this is a long speech three hours is quite inconsistent with another bit of the speech later on in which he describes the western territory as having been dedicated by god to purposes higher than slavery and that there is a higher law than the constitution which dedicates the western territories to freedom and just as in our own day long speeches are boiled down into sound bites the speech is soon boiled down into two words higher law indeed higher law becomes kind of a catchphrase for seward and seward's politics steward loses on the compromise of 1850 as every school child knows the compromise passes he loses on the kansas-nebraska act indeed if you look at his senate career it's something of a 12-year failure he basically loses on the major issues that he cares about and yet we tend i think to focus too much on slavery and the sectional tension as we look at the 1850s and forget some of the other issues that people cared about people here in new york cared about so for example seward was a firm advocate of a transcontinental railroad and he viewed the the disputes about the route as really sort of petty squabbles in his mind whatever the rooting of the railroad the de facto eastern end of the railroad would be new york city similarly he supported subsidies for the collins steamship line which was a new york answer to the british steamship lines he supported indeed was the kind of floor manager for the bill to build the transatlantic telegraph again a measure that was going to heighten the importance of new york as one end of the new york london financial pairing uh the telegraph actually works briefly before the civil war before failing and seward as secretary of state has to make do with other means of communication letters and votes rather than the telegraph by 1860 as the run-up to the that presidential election seward is once again a leading candidate this time he's the leading candidate for the republican nomination for president and if there had been betting on presidential candidates in 1860 he would have been kind of the odds-on favorite you know 85 percent perhaps likelihood of seward's nomination you know single digits for these other characters like chase and lincoln but as we all know in may of 1860 um the republican convention in chicago nominates lincoln not seward uh why why this you know unsuccessful one-term unknown congressman from illinois why not the successful governor and then senator of new york state there are a lot of reasons but at least one and if i had to name one only one i would say the most important comes back to those catholic school children in new york city people didn't forget that seward had been a friend of the immigrants and many republicans in 1860 were if not anti-immigrant at least not very friendly to immigrants one whom some of you may remember from the lincoln movie thaddeus stevens of pennsylvania remember yeah he said that pennsylvania would never vote for a man who ruined the common school system of new york city to curry the favor of immigrants he was very admirable on some issues later but on some other issues not so and even those in chicago who were not themselves prejudiced against immigrants had to listen when leaders like stevens said look you nominate seward you're going to lose pennsylvania or the the candidate for governor of indiana said look you nominate seward you're going to lose indiana and he needed the republicans needed all of these states if they were going to win the presidency not merely nominate a candidate so not for the first time not for the last time in american history the delegates at a presidential convention went for a candidate who had a little thinner record and thus could be sort of all things to all people in that case abraham lincoln seward uh is in his garden in auburn uh candidates didn't go to conventions in those days he's in his garden in auburn um when he learns that he's not going to get the nomination and he actually sort of learns it even before he gets the telegram because the man running from the office sort of runs towards seward saying oh god oh god it's all gone abraham lincoln has been nominated and he was disappointed there's no question that he was disappointed there's a story i think apocryphal but there's a story that a year later when he was secretary of state someone told him that a candidate a german-american candidate would be disappointed if he didn't get a senior position in the state depart in in europe and seward reportedly said to this person disappointment you speak to me of disappointment i who was entitled to the republican nomination and had to see it go to this unknown lawyer from illinois as i said i don't think he really said that but i have no doubt that he was as disappointed as that quotation makes him out to be and one of the really great moments of his life is how he deals with that because he doesn't simply sulk in auburn or as the new york times predicted based on an interview with seward in auburn serve out his his remaining time in the u.s senate he goes out on the campaign trail for abraham lincoln candidates by and large don't campaign for themselves at this time so if lincoln is going to become president he needs good campaigners out there speaking for him and nobody in 1860 was as good a campaigner as william henry seward he campaigns all over the country up into new england out west of minnesota out to kansas i say all over the country everywhere kind of north of the mason-dixon line because there was really no point going down there in those days you know people voted by taking ballots no one was even going to dare to hand out republican ballots in places like mississippi and south carolina and that's why when you see the presidential results for those years you see lincoln getting a zero in the southern states it's not that there wasn't there weren't one or two people who might have voted for him down there it's that there was no one who was brave enough to hand out a printed ballot uh for lincoln down there um and coming back to new york state he campaigns here in new york um in most of the other states you have kind of three candidates against lincoln you have stephen douglas the northern democrat uh breckenridge the southern democrat and john bell on the constitutional union uh platform which was basically just will stick to the constitution and say nothing further and in most states those three kind of divide the vote and so lincoln in a number of cases is able to get the electoral votes of a state even though he wins a minority of the votes but here in new york after an extended negotiation and somebody really needs to write the story of this a fusion party is formed or a union party so called because its adherents thought that the only way to preserve the union was to deny abraham lincoln the presidency and indeed one newspaper that i found not far from here in a tiny historical society said in announcing the formation of this fusion party that they could confidently on this day say that abraham lincoln would not be the president because everyone could do the math without the electoral votes of new york state abraham lincoln could not become president there just was no way with the southern states effectively off limits without new york he couldn't become president so seward after this long western tour wants to rest but he can't he has to go out on the campaign trail again and he does first up here in upstate new york then down in new york city to try to ensure that the fusion ticket does not deny lincoln the electoral votes of new york state he succeeds not by a lot a few thousand votes here in new york a few thousand votes elsewhere and abraham lincoln would not have been president but um seward and the others campaigning for lincoln ensure that lincoln wins here in new york he wins in pennsylvania he wins in a sufficient number of northern states to become president so when people ask me well why is seward lincoln's indispensable man in a sense his indispensability starts even before he gets to the state department it is in the election of 1860 and ensuring that abraham lincoln rather than stephen douglas or someone else becomes our president during that secession winter as the southern states leave seward is back in washington as senator as the widely reputed secretary of state to be and he is the leader during that winter of the forces in favor of compromise it's curious i mean here's this man who has a reputation as a radical on the issue of slavery higher law seward or as he said in rochester in 1858 that there was an irrepressible conflict between the systems of slavery and freedom in the united states but as the southern states secede seward is among those keenest to see if some form of compromise like the compromise of 1850 which he denounced so vigorously as a senator can be cobbled together to hold the southern states in the union or maybe not to hold all the southern states but at least hold the border states virginia north carolina kentucky missouri these places which have not as lincoln is inaugurated joined the confederacy that are sort of sitting poised if you will between the united states and the confederate states and seward is very keen to try by any possible means to hold on to them he believes that if war can just be avoided for a few months that within the southern states themselves a union party will begin to form and one by one those states will begin to come back into the union and so he's in favor of compromise not just up until the time he becomes secretary of state he's in favor of compromise even thereafter and he and lincoln as president and secretary of state got off to a very rocky start because lincoln is nowhere near as keen on compromise as seward right at this juncture lincoln is keen to live up to the promises that he made in his inaugural address that he would hold and possess the places that belong to the united states starting he doesn't mention this inaugural address but everyone understands that what he means principally is fort sumter in the harbor of charleston south carolina one of the last bits of federal territory in the nascent confederacy seward is in favor of giving it up it's a sort of pointless flag in the middle of the harbor it doesn't do any good and he thinks that giving it up will help bring some of that union sentiment out in the south lincoln overrules seward sends a mission to reinforce fort sumter with supplies seward predicts that that will lead to civil war and indeed it does as the south fires on that mission and the north erupts in in a in a blaze of uh patriotic anger and the south likewise um erupts in a blaze of patriotic anger and volunteering second seward's kind of second indispensable role during the civil war is as a secretary of state in charge of our foreign relations and you can read a lot of histories of the civil war and not learn a lot about our foreign relations and in a sense that's sort of because seward handles them so well if we had gotten ourselves into a war with britain or france during the course of the civil war if that had distracted our attention from the civil war well that would form a large part of the history of the civil war seward's job was to prevent that perhaps the the most dramatic moment at which he prevents that is the trent crisis in late 1861. the trent was a british merchant ship um it um stopped by an aggressive union naval commander wilkes who had heard a rumor that there were some confederate diplomats on board there were he arrested two people who were two men mason and slidell who were on their way to be the confederate ministers to britain and france he arrested them put them on the union ship brought them he headed first for new york sewer diverted him to boston when news of this these reached the united states there was jubilation wilkes was hailed as a hero there was a motion in congress to cast a gold medal and people said you know this is wonderful right what a coup we're never giving up these these men when news reached britain there was almost an equally adverse reaction this was an insult to the british flag a violation of britain's neutrality and shortly before christmas 1861 seward has the formal demand from britain give up the four men the the two diplomats and their secretaries and apologize or else seward by the time that formal demand has arrived this takes a long time again there's no telegraph so everything you know goes by by ship back and forth across the atlantic he has more or less resolved that he's going to give them up he doesn't again it's a little bit like fort sumter he doesn't see them as being that valuable in themselves but lincoln is far from there indeed we have in the lincoln papers lincoln's draft of seward's response to the british minister in washington and it's a long legalistic document basically lincoln suggests that seward should propose arbitration that the issues the legal and factual issues in the dispute should be resolved by some neutral international arbitration well seward's a lawyer as is lincoln and seward knows that the british are just going to view that as a legalistic evasion sort of trying to delay matters for a year or two while holding on to the diplomats it's not going to work and seward brings lincoln around and brings the cabinet around during a course of two all-day meetings on christmas day and the day thereafter and then brings the public around with a very cleverly worded um response to the british minister which seward immediately publishes in the newspapers so that it reaches the american public long before it reaches london analogizing the situation with the war of 1812 and saying that he sewered could not hold on to the diplomats without disregarding the diplomatic principles of jefferson and madison and monroe so sort of wrapping himself in the american flag while at the same time handing over the four contested prisoners to the british as they demanded and thereby avoiding what would have been from the american perspective maybe i should say from the northern perspective a disastrous war with britain if if we had gone in my view if we had gone to war with britain during the course of the civil war the confederacy in some form would have survived the civil war so that's maybe seward's kind of second indispensability but seward did not limit himself to foreign policy he didn't just sort of sit in foggy bottom and you know write letters um he was in effect lincoln's deputy president so just two other ways in which he does this during the first year of the war seward handles what we would call internal security arresting suspected spies again i think the story is apocryphal but it captures him he reportedly tells lord lions the british minister that he has a little bell on his desk and that he can by ringing his little bell order the capture of any man and woman in america and that nobody other than the president could order their release and then he says can even queen victoria say as much again i'm i'm 99 sure that story is apocryphal it first appears this is one reason it's nice to be doing research in the 21st century i can do computerized research the first place that story appears is in opposition newspapers in 1863 arguing that lincoln and seward have disregarded the constitution sort of thrown people in jail without allowing them the chance to appeal but again it captures his feeling at the time which was that there were dangerous people who needed to be arrested and he was going to arrest them and he wasn't going to worry too much about the fine print of the constitution that is roughly seward's approach to domestic security during the first year of the war he handles not only that he handles politics for lincoln and so um in the election of 1864 for example lincoln gives no campaign speeches but seward sewer does give campaign speeches he comes up here to new york to visit his family in auburn and gives a couple of you know pretty stern campaign speeches in which he analogizes the the democratic party in the north which was running on a peace platform with what he called the democrats enrichment i.e the confederates and said that really if you vote for mcclellan the democratic candidate you're effectively voting for jefferson davis because they want the same thing they want an armistice and an end to the war um pretty harsh rhetoric not lincoln would never have engaged in it but an important message that seward conveys for lincoln or to take another example with which many of you are probably familiar the 13th amendment in january of 1865 after the election lincoln and seward decide that they're going to make a big push to get the house of representatives to pass what we call the 13th amendment it was not by the by called the 13th amendment at the time because no one knew would it be the 13th amendment would it be the 14th it would depend on sort of what happened in the future it was called at the time the anti-slavery amendment to whom does lincoln turn to get the votes in the house of representatives to his political operatives in the white house or maybe to you know a close friend in the house of representatives no he turns to his secretary of state william henry seward and william henry seward in turn hires a bunch of shady new york lobbyists many of the votes that need to be gotten are from new york democrats and seward you know knows the people who know those people and he hires those lobbyists and as depicted in the movie there are substantial indications that money is involved one bit they excluded from the movie i wish they had included one of the lobbyists goes up to new york and he writes the sewer don't worry i'm sure the amendment will pass the house if patriotism is not sufficient money will surely do the trick as as depicted in the movie the the amendment does pass the house of representatives and is sent by um you know out to the states uh to be ratified one thing i wish the movie had emphasized it was urgent we didn't they didn't know it at the time but lincoln only had another three months to live if that amendment had not passed the house of representatives in january of 1865 with lincoln and seward twisting arms to get it through andrew johnson when he became president was not going to twist any arms to pass an amendment to end slavery indeed you know he resists mightily the 14th and 15th amendment he being president andrew johnson seward and lincoln hoped to see the end of the war in 1865 and to see as seward had hoped before the war to see the union come back together lincoln tragically doesn't live to see that many people forget that seward almost didn't live to see it either on the night of the assassination booth and the other assassins targeted not only lincoln but vice president johnson general grant and seward why seward some scholars have written that seward was targeted because of a statute at the time which charged the secretary of state with organizing elections in the event of the death of both the president and the vice president to which i say roughly nonsense booth was not a lawyer he was he was an actor a shakespearean actor and he wanted to kill the man whom he viewed as the tyrant lincoln but also the deputy tyrant seward the the deputy president um he wanted to have a different ending for his version of the play julius caesar and the assassins nearly do kill seward um he's in his sick bed confined by wounds um and an assassin bursts into his sick room with a pistol in one hand the pistol isn't working uh a bowing knife in the other um i've seen the bowie knife it's in the huntington um in california it is a fearsome weapon in the hands of a huge tall confederate veteran he presses seward into the bed with one hand and with the other slashes down in sort of a theatrical motion he fails it's not clear why whether it's the brace on seward's head to to protect his jaw whether it's because sewer rolls or whether it's because of the screams of seward's daughter fanny he's wrestled off of seward by seward's son and a army sergeant and seward is left sort of with these terrible cuts around his face and neck but fortunately none of the the main arteries are severed and he survives he survives and he remains our secretary of state through the controversial presidency of andrew johnson and it's during that period that he purchases alaska um and i think the one thing that almost everyone knows i mean when i would tell taxi drivers what i was working on they would say oh seward seward's folly people know that when the purchase of alaska which was at the time called russian america was announced that people laughed they called it seward's folly and seward's icebox and they joked about the walruses on the icebergs well i've read a lot of newspapers from the period right after the treaty was announced and i'm here to tell you that they didn't call it seward's folly almost all of the newspaper coverage was favorable they thought it was a good idea to acquire all of this territory with the timber and the minerals they thought it was a good idea to have a bridge to asia which was becoming more important they thought it was a good idea to kind of acquire alaska and thus strengthen our potential claims on british columbia they thought it was a good idea to strengthen our relations with russia which was a major ally of the united states during the civil war yes it's true that one newspaper the new york tribune said that there that it's that there was i think the phrase was that no treaty um that we can remember has embraced so much folly but that was the closest i could get to seward's folly and i think the the sort of nail in the coffin is that the senate ratified the treaty within a couple weeks after it was presented by a vote of 37 to 2. senators don't vote for things that are viewed as folly by a vote of 37 to 2. so seward happily almost gleefully acquires alaska and he hopes to acquire a lot of other places he hopes to acquire british columbia he hopes to acquire hawaii he actually signs a treaty with colombia to acquire the rights to build the panama canal he has in short a vision of empire which doesn't come to pass during his lifetime doesn't even come to pass um during the the 19th century but ultimately becomes roughly the american empire and so i think you know were he to return today and see that you know new york is the center of international finance and that washington is the headquarters of the world bank and that we have not merely alaska but hawaii and that we built the panama canal and here in cornell you know that that we have achieved um if not what he said in one speech he said in one speech that the united states the american empire will not be truly great until we have not only expanded our territory and built our economy but produced a milton and a shakespeare well we haven't perhaps produced a milton and a shakespeare but we have some incredibly fine universities i think if seward could come back and see all this that he would be tremendously proud of what we have accomplished and of his small role in those accomplishments so thanks i will take some questions so the question if i got it right was how did the civil war itself influence later territorial expansion by the united states some of the territorial expansion that occurred was kind of in the works before the civil war and the civil war puts a kind of stopper on it so there had been some very preliminary discussions about russian america before the civil war basically nothing happens during the civil war but after the war seward restarts those um but there are some other instances in which the civil war itself points out to seward and other like-minded people the need of other territory so for example the caribbean was a real source of weakness to the united states and strength to the confederates the caribbean served kind of as the base for a lot of the blockade runners and seward in his letters talked about how important it would be to acquire a naval base in the caribbean and so really the first bit of territory that he sets out to acquire right after the civil war is a naval base and he works all the way through his time and it continues into the grant administration efforts to acquire either a bay or an island or a set of islands and again he signs a treaty he signs a treaty with denmark to acquire what we call the virgin islands for a very modest price the treaty is not ratified and then 40 years later the united states winds up acquiring the very same islands for i don't know four or five times the price so and and similarly the panama canal um you know one another problem for the united states during the civil war was that it had no means of communication with california and oregon or you know between those two bits and the railroad was part of the answer but seward saw the canal as another important part of what was going to link the east coast with the west coast so again his experiences during the war i think help sort of focus his attention on the fact that that a merely continental empire is not sufficient that you need to have some other little bits and pieces to accomplish what in his mind the united states should ultimately accomplish union college when he attended it was unlike a lot of other schools it wasn't associated with any one denomination but it was headed by a presbyterian minister and had a definitely a sort of a religious cast and that was agreeable to steward i mean he he grows up in um presbyterian and becomes episcopal and he's not a very denominational christian he's not maybe the most um attentive in going to church there's a great story during the war um actually sort of early before the war starts when on easter sunday morning 1861 he summons a military aide and says go get me so and so and he says well i'll do it after church and he says blank to church this morning go get me so and so um he has of the two senators he knows both andrew johnson and jefferson davis as senators of the two he's actually much closer with jefferson davis there's some really quite touching stories davis had eye disease and at one point is confined to his room for several weeks and there's some question about whether he'll lose his sight seward comes every day to visit his friend jefferson davis just to tell stories just to talk about what's going on in the senate what's going on in washington to to to gossip um and at one point tells davis's wife that in tears that he he hopes and prays that davis will not lose his sight he's such a fine specimen of manhood that it would be a tragedy if he lost his sight he's not particularly close with andrew johnson and remember that johnson is not vice president for most of the war hannibal hamlin of maine is vice president up to the election of 1864 and vice presidents in those days were not what they are today they were not included in the cabinet there was not much dealing with the vice president so seward really had very little to do with either hamline as vice president or johnson as vice president until johnson becomes president did the fact that quincy adams was our ambassador to russia have any influence on seward's interest in russian america i love doing these events because i do get questions that i have never thought about i think the answer is yes um in a round in in sort of two respects um uh one is that um seward idolized john quincy adams he he met him first as a young man um and and and then had a connection kind of with three generations of the adams family john quincy adams our sixth president charles francis adams who serves for eight years as seward's minister to the court of st james in london uh and then the next generation uh henry adams and charles francis adams jr are you know younger men but but sort of proteges of sewards but the adams family and that strong relationship between the united states and russia i think is part of why seward is interested in russian america because he doesn't want it to become a source of conflict both the americans and the russians as they look at russian-american have very much the the history of texas on their mind um i mean here texas was part of mexico and then these american settlers start showing up and then there starts to be tension and then for heaven's sake they declare themselves an independent nation the russians didn't want that to happen in russian america and seward didn't want it to happen either he wanted if if russian america was going to become part of the united states and he thought it made sense for it to do so he wanted it to happen in a friendly way um through a negotiation rather than through a conflict and a war i'm glad you asked that question i went one of the things that that led me to be sure that i had to write a new biography of seward was that the prior biography didn't even mention harriet tubman um harriet tubman lives as most of you know in auburn um but you may not know that seward is her landlord up in auburn and i think and i think seward is a major the seward family not just seward but his wife are a major reason that she decides to settle there in auburn because it's a friendly place for someone who in essence has a price on her head he's a landlord but a very gracious landlord he doesn't charge much rent and when she doesn't pay the rent he doesn't chase her for the rent and he does help her after the war in getting a federal job you touch on the question he asked about uh he mentioned in the question uh tubman's um sort of activities in encouraging revolts and and john brown that's an interesting question that i don't completely know the answer to i know that she knew quite a bit about what john brown was going to do but i don't know whether how much she and others told seward about what john brown intended to do and of course with john brown it's hard to know even if somebody had a complete description of what he was intending on one day how closely that would relate to what he ultimately did but it's an interesting question what if anything seward knew ahead of john brown's raid about brown's plans so the question was was there seward lives for many years of his life in his father-in-law's house judge miller's house in auburn was there awkwardness was that difficult um how did you know we don't have all the family letters from that period um but i'm reasonably sure that it was somewhat difficult for seward to live there with judge miller but there were from his perspective advantages as well his wife didn't particularly like to travel as i mentioned she hated albany she hated washington and so by leaving his wife francis there in the household which was headed by judge miller until miller dies i think something like 1855. um you know he's he's leaving her basically in her home he's not uprooting her and forcing her to come with him which would have made it difficult for him to travel as much as he needed to for business and wanted to for pleasure um so i'm sure that that it was somewhat awkward particularly in the early years of his you know married life for him to be living there in the household headed by judge miller but he did the governor of new york governor william henry seward when he was home in auburn lived in the miller house judge miller's house the question was how would seward approach immigration policy now and you know often when i get these questions about you know transplant sewer to the present it's hard to answer you know i don't know about a lot of things but i do know how he would view immigration today he would say bring him in he was always in favor of bringing people to this country not just as governor of new york i remember at that time there was really no federal immigration policy each state had its own policies and he saw immigrants as a source of strength to new york state at a time when many people disagreed but also as as our secretary of state he pushed for over the opposition of some people in the cabinet and in the congress immigration legislation to make it easier for immigrants to come to the united states and then he bragged in his annual message about how many immigrants were coming to the united states in 1864 and 1865 and 1866 again seeing these immigrants as a source of strength to the united states um so he i mean of course they didn't have to deal with the conundrum that we face today of sort of how do you sort of bring people to into a social safety net but he would have been at the far sort of most liberal extreme of the republican party in terms of immigration bring them into the united states right he's for the education of the immigrant children as well and and that continues again into the um into the lincoln administration um i don't have a letter from him in favor of the land-grant college bill but he votes for it as a senator before it's vetoed by buchanan in 1859 so i'm 99 percent sure that he's in favor of the land grant college bill the bill which ultimately leads to what we see here today at cornell talk about seward trying to turn down the post of secretary of state um in the spring of 1861 seward kind of first accepts and then tries to back away from being secretary of state um the context is that lincoln has arrived in washington he's shared with seward a first draft of his inaugural address and seward is roughly horrified uh lincoln's tone in this inaugural address in seward's view is bellicose it threatens war with the south it sort of waves the saber and seward gives lincoln being a careful lawyer he numbers every line of lincoln's printed address and he gives him comments on every line almost and at the very end he gives him a rough draft of what becomes that famous closing we are not enemies we must not be enemies we are friends the mystic chords of memory that the first draft of that is sewards he gives them all this and then as best one can tell there's a silence lincoln doesn't tell him what he's going to do in the inaugural address and seward grows more and more worried and finally on the eve of the inauguration he sends lincoln a letter saying that circumstances force me to withdraw my acceptance of the position of secretary of state lincoln sends him back a letter saying oh please please i need you the country needs you i beg you to withdraw your letter withdrawing and seward thinks about it overnight and i think he in particular thinks about the terrible situation the country is in with seven states having withdrawn and formed their own country and all the foreign policy issues that that is going to throw up indeed it is already throwing up and he meets with lincoln talks with him and says i'll do it i'll be your secretary of state um and so so there is a moment you know a day if you will when he has said to lincoln no i won't do it and and some authors see this as kind of a bluff i don't i see it more as an almost desperate attempt to ensure that the inaugural address has a conciliatory tone towards the south which i think fairly red it does it wasn't actually read that way by most southerners but but maybe the most important people are in the border states and it was read in virginia and north carolina by many as being conciliatory question was how does seward's attitude towards internal security echo forward into the future you know it's not only seward's attitude i mean this is you know lincoln and stanton the secretary of war they all have pretty similar attitudes during the civil war we would not today view them as being terribly careful about the constitutional safeguards for prisoners um and the the legal precedents that are developed during the civil war then become you know when lawyers talk about these issues the the legal precedents that are developed during the civil war ultimately become the precedents that are uh used today so to some extent you know if you want to you know look for the the antecedents of current approaches to these issues you look back and you find lincoln you know it's we we respect we almost revere lincoln to such an extent that we sometimes forget some of these slightly less savory bits of his um of his record but his civil rights or civil liberties record during the civil war is not an especially good one all right i will hang about uh i'm going to be out there i believe and signing books for either people who've already bought a book or wish to buy a book but i will hang about and answer questions as long as there are people who wish to answer ask them thanks this has been a production of cornell university on the web at cornell.edu

Channel: Cornell University

Views: 17,839

Keywords: government, lecture, abraham lincoln, william seward

Id: 6SAGMYoVH-w

Length: 66min 53sec (4013 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 12 2013