Seward: Lincoln's Indispensable Man

A fine thought-provoking biography of a man central to the political history of the years leading up to the Civil War, the war itself, and its immediate aftermath.

Walter Stahr is good at laying out the facts of William H. Seward's life in a clear and readable narrative. I especially benefited from learning more about Seward's years as governor of New York, his role in the election of Abraham Lincoln and during the "succession winter", and his work serving President Andrew Johnson. And, of course, here the famous purchase of Alaska and other diplomatic efforts are also brought to life.

Mr. Stahr, although willing to point out flaws in his subject, is obviously captured by him and finds reason to excuse or discount most of Seward's most dubious actions.

I would rank William H. Seward as a first-rate politician of his time but not (as Mr. Stahr does) the foremost statesman--barring presidents--of nineteenth century America. I think his loyal service to the disgraceful President Johnson coupled with his failure to be concerned with the post-war civil rights of former slaves are serious blots on his legacy.

I hope to read more from the pen of the able Mr. Stahr and would suggest to him the need for a modern biography of John Hay.

William Henry Seward, the Secretary of State whose foresight, diplomacy and skill at political infighting, enabled the United States to purchase the Alaska territory from Russia in 1868 for $7,200,000 (two cents an acre), ranks second only to John Quincy Adams, his mentor, among the 68 Americans who have held that post. Just for fun, imagine our concern if Russia had still owned that territory when the Cold War started.

To set the stage for his splendid biography of Seward, Walter Stahr quotes Alex de Tocqueville to the effect that Americans were political by nature when he visited in the 1830's. de Tocqueville also observed that law permeated every part of American society. Lawyers came into their own as citizen statesmen when they were called upon to deal with the complex legal issues that arose during the course of the American Revolution. The lawyer as statesman flourished in the Nineteenth Century, and Seward, born in 1801, was very much a Nineteenth Century man. He chose the law as his profession and public service as his mission.

Elected to the New York State Senate at 29, he honed the legislative and political traits that he would rely on throughout his life. In national office, he sought, as with the acquisition of Alaska, to expand our "empire" to assure his country a commanding place in the world. He was equally determined to see the country grow from within by educating its immigrants, treating members of all religions with respect and bringing about the end of slavery. As this political biography of Seward's extraordinary achievements makes clear, he met goal after goal against odds that would have thwarted anyone else.

How did he do it? He possessed "a rare capacity for intellectual labor, with an industry which never tired and required no relaxation," according to his life-long friend, Thurlow Weed. And, as his biographer puts it, the "intelligence, diligence, eloquence, sociability, likeability," that made him an effective political leader, "were already in place" by the time he took his seat in the New York Senate.

Before he became Lincoln's "indispensable man," his Secretary of State, Seward was twice elected Governor of New York, twice elected U.S. Senator from New York, and at least that often seriously considered as his party's likeliest candidate for president. At each step, he fought for laws that would carry out his goals. In what Stahr describes as his most important speech as a U.S. Senator, Seward, on March 11, 1850, weighed in on the slavery issue making clear his objections to the fugitive slave law. As he saw it, "the people of the North could not `in our judgment, be either true Christians or real freemen, if we impose on another a chain that we defy all human power to fasten on ourselves.'"

But it was as Lincoln's right hand man that Seward made his most important contributions. Both men were accomplished lawyers, both used to talking things over, often at length, looking for alternatives, minding the nuances, seeking solutions, going out of their way to avoid giving offense, willing to bend but not to break. Because Seward lived just across the street from the White House, the President and his Secretary of State could and did confer frequently. They had each other's full confidence and trust. The decisions they made, often on a daily basis, were critical to winning the Civil War.

This is a political biography. As such, it does not purport to be a full blown biography of Seward's personal life. For example, Stahr addresses without decoding the Sewards' complicated married life. On the other hand, Seward's character traits are on display: his rumpled, often out-of-style suits; his ever-present cigar, his penchant for a glass or two (but rarely more) of good wine, his hospitality (he often mixed business and pleasure). He was what we would call today a workaholic; no hour was too late to go to his office to send a cable, no hour too early to meet a visitor from out of town. Auburn, New York, Seward's home town, was dear to him and he relished his opportunities to get back there when he could.

You will be impressed by Stahr's scholarship. There are 110 pages of notes, and a 43-page index. Doris Kearns Goodwin, the author of "Team of Rivals", her fine group biography of Lincoln's cabinet, provides the first of five highly favorable dust jacket blurbs for the book. Seward, she says, finally has the biography he "so justly deserves."

End note. Seward's standing as one of the great figures of his times, if not of all our history, has largely gone unhonored by his countrymen. Seward, Alaska, is named for him, as is the highway connecting Seward to Anchorage. And the last of the eleven forts built in Alaska during the Gold Rush in Haines bears his name. There is a full-sized bronze statue of him at the entrance to Madison Square Park in New York City, dedicated in 1876, and another in Seattle's Volunteer Park - more life-like than the New York version because the sculptor has Seward dressed in rumpled-looking clothes. Auburn, New York, has a minor league baseball team. Two years ago it created a William Henry Seward bubblehead doll to honor the town's most prominent son. It's a good bet that it is paired with one of Abner Doubleday, Auburn's more famous, if not as important, son.

William Seward should have been the last man on earth to support Abraham Lincoln .Seward was one of the 19th centuries most controversial politicians , helping to found the Republican party against tremendous opposition . Thinking he was going to be the party's nominee for president in 1860 he was shocked to find himself upended by an virtually unknown railroad lawyer from the west . But Seward put the country first and joined Lincoln's War Cabinet becoming it's most influential member .

One of the country's best new popular historians follows his terrific book on John Jay with the first biography of Seward in nearly 40 years .If you want to go deeper into the personality of the most fascinating man from "Team of Rivals" you would do well to start here.

William Seward was Abraham Lincoln's secret weapon. Yet until recently, few people had ever heard of him. It is as if he were a bit player in a drama in which the real stars overshadowed him. Doris Kearn's Goodwin introduced us to Seward in her book A Team of Rivals, but only as a character whose competitors were equally accomplished actors. In this book Stahr gives Seward his due, a staring role in his own biography. The problem with appreciating William Seward is the same problem astronomers have in identifying extrasolar planets, which are dim and thus cannot be separated from the brilliant light of the companying stars. In this book Stahr gets past the brilliant light of Lincoln to detect Seward, his indispensable man.
Stahr begins his book with a few remarks about Seward's father and notes that although the Sewards kept slaves, they retained a uniquely humane attitude towards them. This remarkable attitude challenged Seward, as he struggled to keep the nation together when threatened by civil war. Although he was initially an abolitionist, his attitude became more modulated in the years just prior to and then during the Civil War. Preservation of the Union took precedence over emancipation.
Stahr traces Seward's career by describing how he went from New York legislator, governor, and senator to Secretary of State under Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. The author dealt with these issues with a deluge of carefully researched details. The myriad of facts gives an impression of diligence, which one cannot help but admire. However, much of the detail, is irrelevant and in the author's own estimation unreliable, resulting in a book that is difficult to read, and a narrative that is easily dismissed. The danger of this writing style is that one tends to miss the forest through the trees. Nevertheless the search for Seward is worth the effort. Stahr's unrelenting prospective description is abandoned temporarily when he summarizes Stewards' governorship and senatorial terms. Significantly, he minimizes Seward's accomplishments both as a governor and then as senator, as if in anticipation of greater glories to come.

Seward's major achievements occurred while he was Secretary of State under Lincoln and Johnson. Ironically, it was during those times that it becomes the most difficult to separate his accomplishments from those of the respective presidents. It would appear that Lincoln's first inaugural address was equally an accomplishment of Seward as it was Lincoln. That glorious expression "the mystic chords of memory" is attributed to Seward. The conciliatory tone of the first inaugural address was apparently due to a joint effort between the statesmen. It is not clear whether the settlement of the Trent affair was due solely to the efforts of Seward or was he simply carrying out the policies of Lincoln. The problem of separating a Secretary of State from a president is not a new one. Who was responsible for the cold policy, Eisenhower or John Foster Dulles? Who opened China, Kissinger or Nixon? These questions have no clear answers, and they perplex historians to this day.
Seward's vision for America was manifested mostly during the Johnson administration. His achievements in furthering this vision were apparently his alone. He saw the United States as a western hemispheric power. He initiated negotiations with Columbia concerning the building of a canal across the Isthmus of Panama. He favored acquiring British Columbia, the Danish West Indies a portion of the Dominican Republic, Panama and the Hawaiian islands. Although he failed to achieve all of his goals, he placed the United States on a path to being a major global power. His most famous achievement was the purchase of Alaska from Russia. Although known as Seward's Folly, the wisdom of the purchase became evident as time went on. He assured the nation "The purchase of Alaska will take the people a generation to find out. "Well we have found out and have finally have learned to appreciate this man. We thank Stahr for this. He was a better man than we knew.

The major failing of this book is that the author never developed a personal relationship with Seward. As a result the reader must struggle to come to grips with Seward. We are told about his successes, but there is no explanation as to the root of his success. Was it intelligence, diligence or intense interest? We must find this out for ourselves. After all is said and done, we can attribute his success to his overriding ambition, an ambition that allowed him to sacrifice everything in the name of success. Seward's failure as a man is most clearly seen in the relationship with his wife. Although the author was willing to call this relationship "peculiar", he failed to explore it fully. Stahr was a lawyer and therefore skilled in gathering evidence but lacked the ability of an historian to make connections and to understand the complexity of people and events.
Stahr describes Seward's marriage as loving but he misses the fact that it was ultimately a failure. His wife led a troubled life of loneliness and dissatisfaction with her husband. Even their home was not that of her husband, but that of her father. She was a chronic depressive, essentially abandoned in life, by her ambitious and selfish husband. In the 19th century, women stayed at home with the children while men went outside the home where they related to men and experienced competition and the struggled for survival. Seward spent 50% of his time away from her, leaving her alone in their palatial home in Auburn, N.Y, while he lived in Mayville, NY and then Washington, DC. Seward apologized to his wife in a letter in which he regretted the resultant lack of husband-wife intimacy He wrote to Frances that he wanted to "adopt some system of life which will enable me to be what I never I fear been, a partner in your thoughts and cares and feelings." His intentions were good, but he seemed incapable of remedying his failures.
If one were to sum up William Seward, one could say he that above all he was a politician. It has been remarked that politicians are imperfect, but good men who devote themselves to furthering the interests of their country. The country was fortunate in being served by this man, in a time of utmost peril. He deserves to be honored and this book does that.

Walter Stahr has provided a good biography of William Seward, and while his writing is very good and keeps you moving through the life of this politician, I see the history not so much of a statesman as of a politician and sometimes a flawed one at that.

In his early political development, Seward initially allied with the Anti-Masonic party, serving four years in the New York State Senate. After that, he joined the opponents of the Jackson Democrats as a Whig. After an unsuccessful run for governor in 1834, he won four years later and was re-elected. When the Whigs gained a momentary control of the state legislature in 1849, he was sent to the senate of the United States.

Seward was controversial in that he favored prison reform, the inclusion of Catholics and immigrants in society, and developed into a free labor and anti slavery advocate, although not to the extend of an Abolitionist. It appears in the biography that his most famous speeches in the Senate were ones that were not only controversial, but in which he tried to perform damage control on, which alienated his supporters and did nothing to appease his opponents.

While it appeared to be a foregone conclusion that he would win the nomination for president in 1860 (Thurlow Weed had been preparing for this inevitability for years) a hard hitting Lincoln team won the nomination on the third ballot. The author does make an excellent point that Seward's fame (and sometimes controversial views) were more know nationally while Lincoln was more of an Illinois sensation and did not carry the baggage that Seward did, even though both thought that the nation could not endure divided between free states and slave.

Doris Kearns Goodwin in [[ASIN:0743270754 Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln]] points out that Lincoln's selection of cabinet members was an exercise in political brilliance. Lincoln selected accomplished men from different sections of the country and sometimes conflicting political stances to form an effective body of men. Seward, thinking that he would be the king pin in the group and effectively determine policy that Lincoln would accept soon became aware that Lincoln was in charge of the show, and Seward, like many others accepted their place in the pecking order of Lincoln's administration.

One interesting and flawed theory of Seward's was his idea to find a way to engage the United States into a war with a European power, thus bringing back the wayward states of the newly formed Confederacy in defense of the union. This was certainly not a good plan and quickly was relegated to the circular files.

The author does a thorough job of reviewing the Trent Affair, when it appeared that England and the United States might actually go to war over an American warship seizing Conferate envoys from a British ship enrout to England, but war was averted, as it had to be. Stahr attempts to make the point that it was the expert diplomacy of Seward who avoided this crisis and appeared to be ready to fall on the sword for the nation, in that his return of the detainees would make him immensely unpopular. I understand that, but he almost makes it sound as though Lincoln was in favor of escalating the incident. Lincoln was far too wise to allow that incident to get out of hand. Stahr tries to compare this event to the Cuban missle crisis of a hundred years later, and that, for me, is a bit of an historical stretch. It is not that Seward was not important during this time, but maybe not indispensable. In some ways, Stanton and Welles had great loyalty to the president and were as trusted in their thoughts as Seward, but the real hero in all this was Prince Albert, who came off a death bed and wrote a plea for peace between England and the United States.

He did offer good advise to Lincoln regarding the timing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Seward wanted the announcement held until a Union victory could be claimed. Lincoln, who understood the mood of the nation, agreed and only after the strategic victory of Antietam was it announced. For further information of relations with Britain during this crucial period, see [[ASIN:0375756965 A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War]] which is an excellent and comprehensive study of this important aspect. Also see [[ASIN:0871404117 The Long Road To Antietam: How the Civil War Became a Revolution]] to better understand the complexities of this event.

And, after nearly being killed in the Lincoln assassination events, Seward, in my opinion, did damage to his reputation by defending so vigorously Andrew Johnson, likely the single biggest failure of an American president this country has ever seen.

Finally, he is know for his purchase of Alaska from Russia, which at the time was called "Seward's Folly". This event was in some ways his most successful action of his lifetime, but I have to respectfully disagree with the author's premise that Seward was one of the most important Americans of the 19th century. He was prominent but not of the statesman like quality Walter Stahr portrays. I would cast that vote for Henry Clay and refer the reader to [[ASIN:0812978951 Henry Clay: The Essential American]] for further evidence. The one ,person indespensable to Lincoln was Grant, for very obvious reasons.

This book, although heavily foot-noted, hardly seems researched, relying instead on rehashed previous histories. The author does not take the time to contextualize the story, i.e., explain the historical context of events throughout the narrative. He also has the maddening habit of inferring what Seward's or others' intents and/or actions mean. He often seems to just shuffle the available facts and present whatever scenario he finds most believable. I read most of it; stopped after the assassination attempt because I just couldn't read any further.

I would not recommend this book to anyone and quite frankly, it's not worth the 68 cents that Amazon is willing to pay to buy it back.

This book represents a biography of one of Abraham Lincoln's "ream of rivals." An aspirant to become president, he ended up serving two presidents as a Cabinet member--Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. The book's goal is straightforward (page 5): ". . .to bring to life for a new generation one of the great Americans of the Civil War generation."

The book is organized chronologically--from his family background and his youth to the development of his career, concluding with the last years of his life. He had some noteworthy moments in his college career. His professional life really began when he became eligible to practice law. He worked out of his new home in Auburn, NY. Shortly thereafter, he married Francis Miller. Their marriage was different: she tended not to want to put up with the hurly burley of Washington, D. C. and spent much of her marriage at home, even when Seward was stationed elsewhere.

Sward's political career began when he was elected to the New York State Senate. After serving a rather brief time in that post, he ran for Governor on New York. During this period of time, he began his career long relationship with Thurlow Weed, a powerful political operative and newspaper editor. With time and experience, Seward began to have presidential aspirations and ambition. As a Republican, he made an effort to win the nomination in Chicago in 1860. Abraham Lincoln prevailed though.

In a major development, Lincoln appointed a number of major Republican figures to serve in his Cabinet, including some who themselves had been presidential contenders or wannabes. One of those was William Seward, whom Lincoln nominated to serve as Secretary of State. At the outset, Seward had a rather condescending view of Lincoln and offered his services in a much larger role than simply Secretary of State. Lincoln smoothed that over, and Seward became one of his most effective Cabinet members. It is clear that Lincoln considered Seward valuable, but he was also strong enough to move ahead on his own.

In this volume, we read Seward's achievements. His diplomacy, including trying to keep Great Britain out of the war, was important. His political advice on the Emancipation had some effect on the timing of Lincoln's issuance of that statement. Then, of course, Seward's effort to purchase Alaska from Russia. There were doubters, but--in the end--the purchase was made.

With Lincoln's assassination, Seward stayed on as Secretary of State with Andrew Johnson. He continued to work to advance the country's agenda and was more supportive of Johnson than one might have expected.

The book allows for an evaluation of Seward's contributions and career. The volume is written well and would be a useful addition to one's Civil War library.

uuugh.... author is the worst 'story-teller' ever. fact finding and very thorough .... yes.... and its soo dry.... forced myself to read this.. uuugh YAWN!@

I've learned about William Seward first from Abraham Lincoln's biographies. Although, like all of us, William Seward wasn't without his faults, he nonetheless in my honest opinion was born 200 years before his time.

It took quite a visionnary, quite a special man to advocate freedom of religion, equality of rights for Women and liberty for slaves from the 1830's onward. He stood alone on many issues and you know what, 200 years later we know he was right.
He saved the US from European involvement in the Civil War, time and time again he was a friend, a confident, a counselor for the Great Abraham Lincoln.

I am now more than convinced, William H Seward is still, in the 21th century, one of the most enlightening stateman, if not one of the very best, the US people had the chance to follow.

This is an excellent biography of a very good man who spent much of his political career defending the downtrodden, which in his time meant blacks and immigrants. Seward was certainly an important adviser to Abraham Lincoln, but may have been more "indispensable" to Andrew Johnson, whom he also served as Secretary of State. Many turned away from the blundering Johnson during his term as president, but Seward remained loyal. The author, Walter Stahr, is a wonderful writer, and his book is well researched. His points are insightful and fairly made, though I do question his assertion that Seward was the greatest statesman of the 19th Century, except for the presidents. What about Henry Clay or Daniel Webster? Still there are not many places where I disagreed with Stahr's conclusions. Seward needed a worthwhile biographer, and Walter Stahr has more than filled the bill.