Lincoln won on the 3rd ballot to win the 1860 Republican nomination for president. William H. Seward was the heavy favorite going into the convention. Based on what he said leading up to and during the convention can we speculate on what a Seward administration might have been like? Probably similar to Lincoln’s, or likely very different? How did their positions on the impending Civil War differ?
Moderator Action
While Sewerd’s positions on many things can be factually cited, the rest of this calls for too much speculation and opinion for GQ. Let’s move this over to IMHO.
Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
Their views weren’t radically different. They both believed in the Republican platform, which was anti-slavery, pro-industrialism, and favored western expansion and better transportation. Seward was fairly influential in shaping the Republican party in its early years, and Lincoln believed very much in the party, so you wouldn’t expect their beliefs to differ too much.
Seward was a bit more vocal in his opposition to slavery. The Republican party had two main groups within it. One was the northern industrialists, who opposed the southern agricultural economy and thought that the south was holding back progress and preventing the country from moving forward with a more industrial based economy. The other was the abolitionists. While Seward played well to the abolitionists, he came off as a bit too vocal with respect to slavery for the industrialists. One thing to keep in mind was that the industrialists generally didn’t really give two hoots about slavery and human rights. They were more concerned about making money with industry.
I don’t know if Lincoln’s views were really all that different from Seward’s with respect to slavery, but Lincoln at least handled the politics of it better. Lincoln knew to tone down the anti-slavery rhetoric when speaking to a mostly industrialist audience, instead focusing on industry, transportation, and loyalty to the Union. This made Lincoln less controversial and less frightening to the industrialists.
Both Lincoln and Seward seemed to know that war was coming, but again Lincoln’s handling of the politics of it was better. Seward’s “irrepressible conflict” speech in 1858 made it seem like Seward was much less open to any kind of compromise, which many thought would drive the South to secession. It’s pretty likely that the South would have seceded if Seward had been elected president, but I think at that point the South would have seceded if any Republican had been elected. It didn’t matter if it was Lincoln or Seward or someone else. Part of the Republican platform was that the new western territories would become free states, and the South could see the writing on the wall. If those territories became free states, then free states would outnumber slave states in Congress, and sooner or later the slave states would have slavery voted away from them.
Seward, despite having said in his “irrepressible conflict” speech that the country had to eventually either become all slave or all free states and that any compromise couldn’t last, still fought to keep the South in the Union right up until the bitter end.
Overall, the impression I get is that Seward’s views weren’t all that different from Lincoln’s. This makes me think that Seward’s administration wouldn’t have been too drastically different than Lincoln’s was.
Agree completely. Seward ended up with a very powerful position in Lincoln’s cabinet, and although not the VP, was sorta like (Cheney + Rumsfeld) was to GWB. So the actual Lincoln administration was probably not too far off what a Seward administration would have been policy-wise.
Look at “Team of Rivals” by Doris Kearns Goodwin. I think that Seward was Secratary of State and Loncoln took a lot of advice from his cabinet. Not one to surround himself with yes-men. Seward later bought Alaska (Seward’s folly) from Russia.
I suspect the real difference would have come after. Seward might not have created a fusion ticket (Andrew Johnson was a border state Democrat) in 1864 and might, of course, not gone to the theater that night, so post-war policies might have been very different.
As a matter of fact, Seward was attacked in his home on the same night that Lincoln was assassinated, and it’s mostly due to luck that he wasn’t killed as well. Assuming that the South still would have lost the war, and thus Booth’s conspiracy still would have been in operation, a dedicated assassin would probably have found President Seward wherever he was.
To me an interesting question lies in Seward’s conduct of the war; specifically things like promotions of generals. Would Seward have stuck with McClellan as long as Lincoln did? Would he have been willing to appoint Grant to overall command, despite the rumors of Grant’s drinking? I don’t know enough about Seward to know the answers to those questions, but I wonder whether such differences might have made some difference to the outcome of the war, or if they would have just slightly changed the timing of inevitable Union victory.
One big difference was that Lincoln was a very patient man and Seward was something of a hothead. Lincoln could keep his eyes on his ultimate goal and suffer fools if it got him to that goal. Seward, on the other hand, took things personally.
So a Seward administration in the United States probably would have experienced some of the same problems the Davis administration experienced in the Confederate States. Seward probably would have gotten into disputes with members of his cabinet, generals, members of Congress, and governors that would have hurt the war effort.
Overall, the two possibilities that would have had the greatest impact would have been if a Seward administration led to Britain and France intervening in the war or if Seward lost the 1864 election to a “peace” candidate.
The Union’s frequent failures to end the matter early were largely because of Lincoln’s patience with generals being excessive, though. Seward knew the federal government and military much better then, and may have dumped McClellan and Meade much earlier. But then, the war might have been won before the country had become ready for full abolition, and who knows how messy the eventual resolution would have been.
Meade wasn’t appointed until 1863 and he remained in command of the Army of the Potomac until the end of the war, albeit under Grant’s direct command. Meade was not a brilliant general but he was not an incompetent like McClellan.
I think the difficulty with answering this question is that there is no way to predict how someone will react to all the policy issues, political issues and tremendous personal stress that comes with being the commander-in-chief in wartime. It’s easy to say what Seward’s policies and politics going into the term of office would have been, but the crucible of war is the ultimate test of leadership.
To put it another way, who could have predicted that an obscure one-term Congressman could turn into such an impressive war leader?
True. But we can make some pretty good guesses with Seward. He was one of Lincoln’s top advisers throughout the war so we know his views on how issues should be addressed. We just have to figure if he had been President, he would have done the things he advised Lincoln to do.
A good book for someone interested is “Cry Havoc!” by Nelson Lankford. It covers, basically day by day, the events of April 1861 and what the background was. Based on what I’ve seen there and in other sources I’ve often thought Seward may have been able to avoid war.
He was basically the “dove” and maintained contact with the Southern states even after Sumter and made it pretty clear that he was willing to sacrifice his views on slavery completely if that would preserve the Union without bloodshed. He would have possibly had a better chance to swing the Upper South into remaining in the Union rather than joining the 7 Confederate States which could have changed things greatly and he was ready to (and actually made moves you could construe as) withdraw from Sumter and the other fort still held by the Union. No match to start the fire, no American Civil War. The Deep South, being heavily knee-jerk against anything Republican Party would have still made waves and war could still have resulted. But my opinion is that a combination of Seward and the Corwin Amendment could have resulted in a peaceful resolution.
I’m not sure what you mean by avoiding war. Are you saying President Seward would have accepted southern secession? Or are you saying there was some offer that could have been made that would have brought the southern states back into the United States? For what it’s worth I disagree with both of these opinions.