1858 (39 page)

The angry Greeley not only left the triumvirate, but did so in spectacular fashion, denouncing the pair in a scathing letter that was printed in the
Tribune
and reprinted in dozens of leading newspapers across the country. He charged that not only had he been betrayed by Seward and Greeley, but that during all the years he worked for them he was paid low wages, just $10 a week. He railed that he was constantly overlooked as Seward and Weed gave cushy, well-paying state and federal jobs to others and that he had lost all of his money backing corporate schemes they advised him to invest in that failed. Then, at the end of his rant, he charged them with guaranteeing him the party nomination for governor and instead handing it to “that little villain [Henry] Raymond, who is of no advantage to our party, and a man whom to know is to detest.”
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In the spring of 1855, Greeley’s abandonment seemed to matter little to Seward, but it would matter greatly in just a few years.
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Seward could have won the Republican nomination for president in 1856, but Weed cautioned against trying to capture it. The Republicans were too new, not very well organized and gave too much influence to the members who were nativists, men opposed to immigration, a cause that Seward had long championed. The Republicans had merged with the Know-Nothings, Free-Soilers, and other traditional antislavery organizations disdained in the South. The new party was hammering together a platform with many good policies: against slavery in the territories, for the transcontinental railroad and more money for river and harbor improvements. But the new platform also contained radical language accusing the Pierce administration of numerous crimes against humanity, such as murder, that seemed questionable to radical Republicans and ridiculous to moderates.
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Seward could win the nomination at the convention, where he had been warmly received, but Weed insisted he would lose the election to James Buchanan, the old political war horse the Democrats had nominated. Buchanan, who vowed to leave slavery alone, had traditional Democratic support in the North and, importantly, throughout the conservative South. The Republican nominee, especially if it was Seward, would run strong in the North, but not in the South. Weed and Seward agreed that he should wait four more years, when the Republicans would be far stronger and Seward an even more famous and powerful leader of the party.
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Weed and Seward agreed the passive Buchanan would be an ineffective one-term president who would do little good or harm to the nation. For his own political future, Weed told the senator privately, Seward had to turn back any efforts to hand him the nomination; Seward wrote his wife that he agreed with Weed. Seward’s other advisers felt Weed was correct, too. George Baker, the editor of his first book and now an adviser, was against it and so was John Schoolcraft, a New York congressman and counsel, who warned him that the Republican presidential race would be “unwise and unsafe, on the grounds that the election would be impossible.”
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Seward, always under attack for his egocentric political behavior, did not want to say that publicly, so whenever asked about the nomination, he cleverly pleaded that he could not bend his beliefs, particularly those on immigrants, to win an office. “I would not modify them [his beliefs] to secure the Presidency,” he told all with an air of admirable nobility.
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Weed had been right; the Republican nominee, explorer John C. Fremont, lost. Reporters wrote much about the charismatic John C. Fremont’s dashing adventures and romantic good looks, but little about his stand on the issues. The Democrats howled that nominating someone who was not a public figure was absurd. One Democrat called Fremont a “poor ignoramus” and another charged that his only skills were that on his expeditions he had “subsisted on frogs, lizards, snakes, and grasshoppers and captured a wooly horse.”
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Despite the ineffectiveness of their standard-bearer, the Republicans did come close to winning. They ran a campaign filled with huge outdoor rallies, torchlight parades, and soaring speeches by supporters of “the pathfinder.” Illinois legislator Abraham Lincoln, as an example, tirelessly stumped across the Midwest for Fremont, delivering ninety speeches. Veteran politicians and journalists were astounded at the fervor of the Republican campaign and the ability of its organizers to get out the vote; 83 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots in the Northern states. The Republicans had turned traditional politics upside down and seemed on the rise everywhere.
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Their efforts were not enough, though, as Weed had predicted. As a new party, and with the loss of prospective radical voters to the third party, they could not marshal enough support to win. The American Party members, plus many Southern politicians such as Robert Toombs of Georgia, threatened to lead a secession movement if Fremont brought home the Southern states for Buchanan (Virginia governor Henry Wise said that if Fremont won he would raise an army of twenty thousand men, march on Washington, and seize the capital).
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In fact, many Southerners feared the very radical American Party, the successor to the Know-Nothings, more than the Republicans and campaigned actively against them.
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Fremont soon disappeared from the national stage, leaving Seward, without question, the front-runner for the 1860 race.
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The road to Rochester this night in October 1858, a week before the elections, began in fine fashion ten months earlier on New Year’s Day for William Seward. He sat in the kitchen of his home in Washington writing letters to family and friends while scribbling notes in a daily journal that he kept from time to time. He was buoyant because he felt his Republican Party was on the march and would capture both the House and Senate in the 1858 elections. He had written in his journal just a few weeks previously that “the Administration and slave power are broken; the triumph of freedom is not only assured, but near.” Now, on the first day of 1858, a sunny one, Seward wrote, “It is a bright and genial day and I trust it may be auspicious of a happy new year.”
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Outlined in the notes he went over on the platform at Rochester that night, Seward’s ire over slavery probably began during the debates over Kansas’s proposed Lecompton Constitution at the end of the recent winter. That constitution favored slavery in the territory. The Kansas debate was yet another example of the way in which Seward was seen as the leading public figure in the antislavery movement. Senator William Lowndes Yancey, one of the South’s most respected political leaders, was by 1858 routinely referring to the Republicans as “Seward and his…party.” Seward’s office was deluged with letters from disturbed residents of Kansas and political leaders in the Midwestern territory who kept in touch with him as the violence there spun out of control and when the two constitutions were forwarded to Congress.
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All were convinced that the Lecompton debates would be important for the future of the institution of slavery because its passage as a proslavery document would set precedent for similar constitutions in all the other prospective states that would eventually be carved out of the western territories. All of the nation’s leading newspapers published stories about the upcoming Senate deliberations weeks prior to opening of the Senate session. It was a critical moment in the year, and in history. The Democrats and Republicans both understood that. President Buchanan, in presenting the Lecompton Constitution, warned Congress that “dark and ominous clouds” were passing over the Union because of the strife in Kansas. Seward’s aide George Baker wrote him that “slavery will be turned inside out this session as never before.”
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To many, Lecompton would make all of 1858 a year of debate on slavery, from the halls of Congress to taverns in New England to general stores in Kansas. Buchanan knew that slavery would dominate his term when he took office, no matter how much he tried to downplay the issue. In his annual message, he said, “The great object of my administration will be to arrest, if possible, the agitation of the slavery question at the North, and to destroy sectional parties. Should a kind Providence enable me to succeed in my efforts to restore harmony to the Union, I shall feel that I have not lived in vain.”
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On the Senate floor on March 3, Seward blasted President Buchanan for supporting the
Dred Scott
decision, once again flayed Southern slaveholders, and said he was fed up with the illogical Southern claim that cold-weather states like Kansas would become cotton empires. He lashed out that the move to make Kansas and other territories slave states “will only fail to be a great crime because it is impracticable and, therefore, will turn out to be a stupendous imbecility.”
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Predictably, the speech was applauded by the Republicans and abolitionists and denounced by the Southerners. Senator James Hammond of South Carolina was irate that Seward, like all Northerners, treated the South as a defeated duchy. He railed that the South was home to millions of Americans and that its production of cotton made it a worldwide force. “No, sir, you dare not make war on cotton,” said Hammond in one of the most quoted lines in history. “No power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is king!”
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President Buchanan was so piqued by the attack that he barred Seward from the White House. Chief Justice Taney was even angrier and boldly vowed that if Seward was elected president in 1860, as was anticipated, he would refuse to administer the oath of office to him.
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The four-way governor’s race in New York, with added candidates from the People’s Party and the American Party, infuriated Seward and Weed, who knew that they now faced more hard work than in any campaign of their lives to hold the state for the Republicans. The American Party was formidable in New York. Their gubernatorial candidate in the last New York election, Erastus Brooks, won 130,870 votes, 22 percent of the total votes cast. If their candidate this year, Lorenzo Burrows, did as well, draining votes from the Republicans, Democrat Amasa Parker could back his way into office.
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Weed and his lieutenants spent the fall in an unprecedented drive to get out the vote. The pages of Weed’s
Evening Journal
and other Republican papers in New York were filled with columns urging voters to go to the polls and publishing the locations of each polling place in each town in the state. Rallies were held in large cities and small villages, concluding with a mass rally in Albany just before the election. Efforts were made to win the ethnic vote, especially the German American vote.

The Republicans fought two campaigns that autumn, one traditional campaign against the Democrats and a second unconventional campaign against the American Party and Smith’s People’s Ticket. They rallied the people against the Democrats with the standard denunciation, but focused more on national issues than local ones, continually castigating the administration over its policies on slavery. The Republican leadership even cleverly put President Buchanan “on trial” in their newspapers and in campaign speeches, always finding him guilty.
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The battle to win the votes of the antislavery American Party and Smith’s supporters might have been even more critical. The Republicans bluntly told those committed to both fringe parties that their votes would be wasted. “Every vote cast for the American ticket may render the Republican triumph the more difficult, but not less certain. The Republicans, unaided, can beat the Democrats; but with the votes of Americans who are in sympathy with the cardinal principles of the Republican party, the Democrats would be hopelessly overwhelmed.”
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