William H. Seward

William Henry Seward was born on May 16, 1801, in FloridaFloridaFlorida is a U.S. state occupying mainly the Florida peninsula, with its capital at Tallahassee; its most populous city is Jacksonville. It entered the Union on March 3, 1845, as the 27th state, and had a population of 21,538,187 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, Orange County, New York, into a large, well-to-do family. His father, Samuel Seward, was the town postmaster and a slaveholder.⁠[1][2][3]

Seward entered Union College in Schenectady, New York, at fifteen and graduated with honors in 1820. He studied law with John Anthon in New York City and with John Duer and Ogden Hoffman in Goshen, and was admitted to the New York bar at Utica in 1822. In January 1824 he became junior partner in an Auburn law firm led by Elijah Miller, then first judge of Cayuga County.⁠[3][4][2][5]

In 1824 Seward married Frances Adeline Miller, daughter of Elijah Miller. The judge required the couple to live with him, and in October 1824 Seward moved into Miller’s house at 33 South Street in Auburn.⁠[2][3][6]

Seward was elected to the New York State Senate in 1830 and served from 1831 to 1834. Originally aligned with the Anti-Masonic faction, he moved to the Whigs in 1834 and that year narrowly lost the race for governor of New York to the Democrat William Marcy.⁠[5][3][2]

Seward was elected governor of New York in 1838 at the age of thirty-seven and served two two-year terms, not running again in 1842. He supported internal improvements, government spending to stimulate the economy, public education and compensated voluntary emancipation.⁠[2][3][7]

Seward defended William Freeman, a mentally ill young Black man who confessed to murdering a white family of four, including a two-year-old child. Freeman died of tuberculosis while awaiting a new trial.⁠[2][5]

After a split in the New York Democratic Party, Seward won election as a U.S. senator from New York, taking his seat in 1849, and he was reelected in 1855.⁠[7][4][5]

On March 11, 1850, Seward gave his first Senate address, “Freedom in the New Territories,” in the debate over whether slavery could expand into the newly acquired western territories. With competing compromise plans put forward by President Zachary TaylorZachary TaylorZachary Taylor (1784–1850) was an American army general and politician who rose to fame through his victories in the Mexican-American War. He became the 12th president of the United States in March 1849 and died in office in July 1850, after about sixteen months.Open the full entry, Henry ClayHenry ClayHenry Clay (1777–1852) was an American lawyer and statesman who represented Kentucky for many years in the U.S. House and Senate, served as Speaker of the House and as Secretary of State, and was known for brokering sectional compromises such as the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850. He ran unsuccessfully for president three times.Open the full entry and others, Seward opposed all legislative compromise and demanded CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry’s unconditional admission as a free state. He granted that the framers had recognized and protected slavery where it existed but argued that the territories were governed by “a higher law than the Constitution,” and he called compromise “radically wrong and essentially vicious.”⁠[7][2]

The speech had its greatest impact outside Congress: within three weeks more than 100,000 pamphlet copies were distributed, with about as many reprinted in newspapers. Opponents denounced Seward as a reckless enemy of the Constitution while northern Whig allies defended him; the U.S. Senate’s account judges that the speech hastened the Whig Party’s split into proslavery and antislavery factions and alienated many of Seward’s natural allies.⁠[7]

On October 25, 1858, Seward declared in a speech at Rochester, New York, that North and South were engaged in “an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces.” The historian Allan Nevins judged the speech “still more unfortunate” than his 1850 address.⁠[8]

After the Whigs splintered, Seward joined the Republican Party and became the front-runner for its 1860 presidential nomination. The Historical Society of the New York Courts judges that his antislavery speeches were seen as too radical to win swing-state voters. Seward waited in Auburn while Thurlow Weed worked for him in Chicago; Abraham Lincoln was nominated on the third ballot, and Seward then campaigned for Lincoln.⁠[2][4][5][8]

After his election, Lincoln offered Seward the State Department, and Seward accepted at the end of December 1860.⁠[4][8]

Seward was appointed secretary of state on March 5, 1861, and entered on duty on March 6. During the Civil War he worked to limit foreign recognition of the Confederacy, sent agents to influence European opinion and worked with Minister Charles Francis Adams to stop the construction of Confederate warships in Britain. In the Trent Affair, after a Union captain seized the Confederate envoys Mason and Slidell from a British ship, Seward ordered their release without apology, averting war with Britain; in 1862 he negotiated the Lyons–Seward Treaty to end the Atlantic slave trade.⁠[4][2][5]

In July 1862, when Lincoln wrote his first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, Seward advised waiting for a battlefield victory, warning that issuing it then would look like the “last measure of an exhausted government”; the victory came at Antietam. In December 1862, when Senate Republicans pressed for cabinet changes, Seward offered his resignation, but Lincoln refused it and kept him in office.⁠[1][8]

On April 5, 1865, Seward was seriously injured in a carriage accident and confined to bed at his home on Lafayette Square. On the night of April 14, as John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln, Lewis Powell (also given as Lewis Payne or Lewis Paine) and David Herold were sent as part of the same plot to kill Seward. Powell gained entry by claiming to bring medicine, attacked Seward’s sons and a male nurse, and stabbed Seward in the face and throat while his daughter Fanny looked on. Seward survived and recovered, but with permanent facial scars.⁠[1][8][3]

In June 1865 Seward’s wife, Frances, died of a heart attack, and his daughter Fanny died about a year after the attack.⁠[2][8]

Seward remained secretary of state under Andrew Johnson until March 4, 1869, clashing with conservatives and distrusted by Congress. He opposed French influence in Mexico by supporting the forces that defeated Maximilian, and during Johnson’s impeachment in 1868 he helped sustain the president.⁠[4][2]

On March 30, 1867, Seward accepted a renewed offer from the Russian minister, Edouard de Stoeckl, and the two signed a treaty in Washington for the purchase of Alaska for $7.2 million, Seward signing as plenipotentiary. After Charles Sumner, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, spoke for about three hours on April 8, the Senate approved the treaty 37 to 2 on April 9; Andrew Johnson signed the ratification on May 28, ratifications were exchanged on June 20, and Alaska was formally transferred to the United States on October 18, 1867. On August 1, 1868, the United States issued a $7.2 million check payable to de Stoeckl.⁠[9][10][11]

Skeptics mocked the purchase as “Seward’s Folly”; the Office of the Historian judges that Seward was vindicated when a major gold deposit was discovered in the Yukon in 1896. Seward himself later called the purchase his greatest achievement and said it would take the people “a generation to find out” its value. The same year the U.S. Navy occupied Midway Atoll, while Seward’s attempts to acquire the Virgin Islands and other Caribbean territories failed.⁠[9][2][4]

After leaving office, Seward made a journey around the world in 1870–1871.⁠[2]

Seward died on October 10, 1872, in the office of his home in Auburn, New York, surrounded by his family; his last words to his children were “Love one another.” He was buried in Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn.⁠[1][2][3]

Seward’s wife, Frances Adeline Miller, pressed for immediate emancipation, a more radical position than his own. Their children included their son Frederick, who was wounded in the 1865 attack, their daughter Fanny, and their youngest son, William Henry Seward II, who inherited the Auburn house.⁠[3][8][6]

Seward wrote that he concluded early in life that slavery was wrong and resolved to become an abolitionist; the Seward House Museum judges that he was in fact a moderate who opposed slavery and favored its gradual end. The Historical Society of the New York Courts describes him as the leader of the antislavery wing of the Whig Party.⁠[3][2][5]

In 1859, while Seward was on an eight-month tour of Europe, Frances sold land in Auburn to Harriet TubmanHarriet TubmanHarriet Tubman (c. 1822–1913) was an American abolitionist. Born into slavery, she escaped in 1849 and returned to Maryland many times to guide family and friends to freedom along the Underground Railroad; during the Civil War she served the Union Army as a scout, spy and nurse, and after the war she campaigned for women’s suffrage.Open the full entry, the Underground Railroad conductor. The National Park Service notes that the sale was technically illegal but was supported by Seward and made possible by New York’s Married Women’s Property Act of 1848. Harriet Tubman thereafter lived in Auburn as a neighbor and community leader alongside the Sewards.⁠[1]

Seward’s Auburn house was built in 1816 for Judge Elijah Miller as a ten-room townhouse. Seward oversaw an addition with a new kitchen, dining room and servants’ quarters in 1846–1848 and added a southern wing in 1865. The house passed to his youngest son, William Henry Seward II (1872–1920), and then to his grandson William Henry Seward III, on whose death the house and family possessions went to the Fred L. Emerson Foundation. In 1951 Betty Lewis was hired as the first director and curator, and in 1955 the Seward House Museum opened to the public.⁠[6]

A statue of Seward stands in Madison Square Park in New York City. The historian Nathaniel Wright Stephenson judged that Seward and Lincoln became “genuine comrades.”⁠[5][8]

Seward House Museum: Web page: https://sewardhouse.org/node/42 (opens in a new window).⁠[6]

Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State (William Henry Seward biography): Web page: https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/seward-william-henry (opens in a new window).⁠[4]