Seward's Non-Resignation

This portrait of William Henry Seward by Chester Harding can be found in the Hall of Governors at the New York State Capitol in Albany. It was painted more than two decades before today's date in 1862, when US Secretary of State Seward was awaiting his political fate, having submitted his resignation due to pressure from fellow Republicans in the Senate. This was not long after the disastrous Battle of Fredericksburg, which "depressed" Lincoln (as it does me).

Lincoln, however, managed to secure a resignation letter for Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, and then wrote a joint letter to him and Seward requiring both of them to stay in the Cabinet. The two men were perceived as political opponents, with Chase more in tune with the radicals in the Senate. But both were effective Cabinet members whose services were needed by their country. Both, despite or because of their positions in Lincoln's shadow, have more distinguished records of statesmanship than many American presidents.

And whatever their politics or the verdict of history, I find Seward, like Lincoln, more personally sympathetic than Chase. So did Henry Adams, who has a splendid description -- written much later -- of him in 1860, when he looked more like the photograph below. It comes from the same book, The Education of Henry Adams, which includes a grossly obtuse and unfair analysis of Grant. In the quoted paragraph, the "Governor" is Seward, and the "private secretary" (to his father) is Adams.

"A few days after their arrival in December, 1860, the Governor, as he was always called, came to dinner, alone, as one of the family, and the private secretary had the chance he wanted to watch him as carefully as one generally watches men who dispose of one’s future. A slouching, slender figure; a head like a wise macaw; a beaked nose; shaggy eyebrows; unorderly hair and clothes; hoarse voice; offhand manner; free talk, and perpetual cigar, offered a new type — of western New York — to fathom; a type in one way simple because it was only double — political and personal; but complex because the political had become nature, and no one could tell which was the mask and which the features. At table, among friends, Mr. Seward threw off restraint, or seemed to throw it off, in reality, while in the world he threw it off, like a politician, for effect. In both cases he chose to appear as a free talker, who loathed pomposity and enjoyed a joke; but how much was nature and how much was mask, he was himself too simple a nature to know. Underneath the surface he was conventional after the conventions of western New York and Albany. Politicians thought it unconventionality. Bostonians thought it provincial. Henry Adams thought it charming. From the first sight, he loved the Governor, who, though sixty years old, had the youth of his sympathies. He noticed that Mr. Seward was never petty or personal; his talk was large; he generalized; he never seemed to pose for statesmanship; he did not require an attitude of prayer. What was more unusual — almost singular and quite eccentric — he had some means, unknown to other Senators, of producing the effect of unselfishness. "