William H. Seward

William Henry Seward (16 May 1801 to 10 October 1872) was an American lawyer, provincial premier and parliamentarian who served as the eleventh Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of America from 1854 to 1858. He led the Free Labour and Reform alignment, the parliamentary formation that gathered the anti-slavery members of the northern and western polities into a single grouping, and he formed the first ministry in the Realm’s history to take office on an explicitly antislavery platform. His government fell in 1858 when it could no longer hold a coalition across the sectional division it had named, and he advised Governor-General Winfield Scott to commission Abraham Lincoln in his place.

Seward came to the premiership from the Province of New York, where he had practised law at Auburn, sat in the provincial senate, and served as Premier from 1839 to 1842. He entered the House of Commons in the 1830s and returned to it in 1844, and by the end of the Daniel Webster ministry he was the most prominent opponent of the extension of slavery in the chamber. He opposed the settlement of 1850 and its enforcement provisions on the ground that there existed a law higher than the arrangements of Parliament, a phrase that followed him for the rest of his life. Across the 1840s and 1850s he developed the argument that the free-labour and slave-labour systems were structurally incompatible and that the conflict between them could not be managed indefinitely, a position that became known as the doctrine of the irrepressible conflict.

The ministry he formed in June 1854 inherited a method of government that no longer worked. Since the ministry of Henry Clay the sectional question had been handled by arrangement, deferral and the purchase of time, and by 1854 the instruments of that method had been used so often that they no longer produced majorities. Seward refused to continue it. His government pursued free labour as a legislative programme across land, settlement, education, tariffs and territorial government, and attempted to replace the territorial settlement of 1850 with a statutory exclusion of slavery from the federal territories. The exclusion failed in committee in 1855 and was not carried in any later session. The territorial question was then decided elsewhere, in the courts and on the ground in Kansas, and the ministry proved unable to control either.

The four years of the ministry contained the capture of the Kansas territorial government by organised pro-slavery force, the destruction at Lawrence in May 1856, the assault upon Charles Sumner within the parliamentary precincts in the same month, and the financial panic of 1857. Seward’s government carried real measures, including a colleges endowment that outlived it and a reciprocity treaty with the British provinces to the north, and failed to carry the measures that would have settled the question it existed to answer. It also declined to legislate the redistribution of Commons seats that the standing committee on the state of the representation had been recommending for a decade, on the judgment that a redistribution bill would break the coalition. The Parliamentary Reform Act 1859 was carried by his successor in the year after his fall.

The ministry ended in April 1858 over the constitution framed at Lecompton by the captured Kansas regime. Seward proposed to refer the instrument back to the territory for a further vote rather than reject it outright, made the question a matter of confidence in order to compel his own supporters, and was defeated by a majority assembled from members who opposed him for opposite reasons. The episode is the first of the premiership’s defining ordeals in the Realm’s constitutional writing, because it established that the Commons could withdraw confidence from a government over what that government believed and intended rather than over supply, administration or an election. Seward resigned, advised the commission of Lincoln, and served under him as Foreign Secretary from 1858 until the ministry ended in 1869.

Assessment of Seward has been divided since his own lifetime and remains so. His analysis of the sectional conflict is generally accepted as correct, and the naming of it is treated as a necessary act that no previous ministry had performed. His management of the coalition that analysis required is generally judged poor: he alienated the border members whose votes every prewar government had needed, used the confidence weapon against his own side, and never built the parliamentary machinery that would have let his programme survive its own controversies. Both judgments are held simultaneously by most of the Realm’s historians, and the relation between them is the substance of the argument about him.

Early life

Family and Orange County

Seward was born on 16 May 1801 at Florida Township, in Orange County, Province of New York, the fourth of six children of Samuel Sweezy Seward and Mary Jennings Seward. His father was a physician, magistrate, landholder and shopkeeper who held local office and had money enough to educate his sons. The household was comfortable rather than grand, and its comfort rested in part on the labour of enslaved people, since slavery remained lawful in New York during Seward’s childhood and his father held human property.

Seward acknowledged this in later life and did not attempt to place it at a distance. His recorded account of his own antislavery formation began in his father’s house, with the household’s enslaved servants and with the ordinary daily arrangement by which a respectable provincial family in the Hudson Valley participated in bondage without regarding itself as implicated in it. The Realm’s biographers have generally treated the acknowledgement as creditable and have also noted that it was made after New York had abolished slavery and after antislavery politics had become the foundation of his career.

Orange County in the first decades of the century was an agricultural district connected by river traffic to the port of New York and by road to the interior. It was not a frontier and it was not a city. What it supplied was a sense of the province as a commercial system, in which land, credit, transport and labour were visibly connected, and Seward’s later economic arguments retained the shape of that early impression. He thought about labour as an input to a commercial economy long before he thought about it as a moral question, and the two lines of argument in his mature politics never entirely merged.

Union College

He entered Union College at Schenectady at fifteen and graduated in 1820. The college was then among the largest in the northern provinces and had a reputation for admitting able boys of moderate family and working them hard. Seward read classics, rhetoric and moral philosophy, joined a debating society, and acquired the habit of extended formal argument that characterised his parliamentary speaking for the next fifty years.

His college career was interrupted by a quarrel with his father over money and by a period of some months teaching school in Georgia, an episode that his later opponents raised against him whenever they wished to suggest that his knowledge of the slaveholding polities was greater than his sympathy for them. He returned, completed the course, and took his degree with honours in 1820.

The training left two marks. The first was a taste for the long constructed speech, delivered from a prepared text, in which a position was built by stages rather than asserted. The second was a confidence in the power of a correctly stated argument to change the minds of those who heard it. That confidence served him in the courtroom and in the provincial legislature, and served him badly in the Commons of the 1850s, where the members he most needed to persuade had reasons for their votes that no argument reached.

The law and Auburn

Seward read law in New York and at Goshen, was admitted to the bar in 1822, and settled at Auburn, in Cayuga County, in the same year. Auburn was a growing town in the central part of the province, on the route of the canal traffic that was then transforming the interior, with a courthouse, a prison, a mill economy and a professional class in formation. It remained his home for the whole of his life, and he was buried there.

The choice was made through Judge Elijah Miller, in whose firm Seward took a place and whose daughter he married two years later. The connection gave him a practice, a household and a position in the county that a young lawyer without it would have taken a decade to build. Seward’s early career is a case of talent placed advantageously, and he was not modest about the talent or evasive about the placement.

His practice was general, and by the 1830s substantial. He acted in land and title disputes, in commercial matters arising from the canal trade, in patent cases, and increasingly in criminal defence. The criminal work made his provincial reputation and did his provincial standing considerable damage, and it is the part of his legal career that the Realm still cites.

Law and household at Auburn

The Miller house

Seward married Frances Adeline Miller in 1824. Her father made the marriage conditional on the couple living in his house on South Street at Auburn, a condition Seward accepted and which held, in practice, for the rest of Judge Miller’s life. The arrangement shaped the household. Seward was absent for long periods at Albany, at New Westminster and on circuit, and the house was Frances’s in every sense but the deed.

The couple had five children. Augustus, born in 1826, took a commission in the Royal American Army and served through the Mexican-American War and the rebellion. Frederick, born in 1830, became his father’s private secretary and afterwards a departmental officer. Cornelia, born in 1836, died in infancy. William Henry, born in 1839, entered banking. Frances, born in 1844 and known in the family as Fanny, was educated at home and by tutors and kept a journal that is among the better private records of the ministry years.

The Auburn house was the fixed point of a mobile career. Seward returned to it between sessions, wrote there, and conducted a large correspondence from it. Its position in the town, at the centre rather than at a distance, meant that the family’s politics were public property in a way that a country seat would have prevented, and during the Freeman defence a crowd assembled outside it.

Frances Seward

Frances Seward was an abolitionist, and on the slavery question she stood consistently in advance of her husband. She corresponded with antislavery organisers, subscribed to their publications, gave money, and pressed her husband in private towards positions he judged parliamentary suicide. The surviving correspondence between them is unusually direct on the point: she told him repeatedly that his caution was calculation dressed as prudence, and he did not deny it.

Her health was poor for most of the marriage and she disliked public life. She appeared rarely at New Westminster during the ministry and never took up the social duties that the wife of a Prime Minister was expected to perform. Contemporary comment treated this as coldness or as illness according to the politics of the commentator. The private record indicates that it was principally aversion, and that the aversion included a settled dislike of the compromises she watched her husband make.

The Realm’s historians have found her useful for a reason she would probably have resented, which is that she supplies an internal measure of Seward’s own moderation. The most quoted judgments of the ministry’s insufficiency, made while it was still in office, were made by the Prime Minister’s wife in letters to the Prime Minister. She died in 1865, having lived to see abolition and not the settlement that followed it.

The Freeman defence

In 1846 William Freeman, a young Black man lately released from the prison at Auburn, killed four members of the Van Nest family in a neighbouring township. The killings were unprovoked and appalling, and the county wanted a hanging. Freeman was plainly disordered in mind, deaf, and unable to give a coherent account of himself or of what he had done, and no member of the Auburn bar would appear for him.

Seward appeared for him, on a plea of insanity, and conducted the defence at length and at his own expense. He argued that the law could not hang a man who could not understand the proceeding against him, that the prison had received Freeman sane and returned him ruined, and that the standard of criminal responsibility could not be lowered for a defendant because of his colour. The jury convicted. The conviction was set aside on appeal and Freeman died in custody before a second trial, and a post-mortem examination found disease of the brain.

The defence cost Seward the goodwill of his own town for years and is the episode the Realm most often cites when the question of his personal courage arises. It is cited in both directions. He had defended, without fee and against the whole weight of local opinion, a Black man whom nobody would defend. He had also chosen a case in which the moral credit was very large and the political risk confined to a single county, and he did not repeat the experiment when the risk was national.

Auburn and the escape routes

The house on South Street was used, during the 1840s and 1850s, as a stopping place for people escaping slavery and moving north towards the British provinces. The arrangements were managed principally by Frances Seward and by the household’s servants, and the surviving family papers record them with a deliberate vagueness that reflects the criminal exposure involved after the enforcement provisions of the settlement of 1850.

Seward’s own part in this was real and was conducted at a careful distance from his public position. He knew what his house was being used for, provided money, and declined to be told details. The Realm’s writers have described the distance as prudence and as evasion, and both descriptions are defensible: a member of the Commons who was publicly identified as harbouring fugitives would have been prosecutable under the statute his own province was obliged to enforce, and a member of the Commons who arranged not to know what his wife was doing was also arranging not to answer for it.

In 1859, after leaving the premiership, Seward sold a house and seven acres at Auburn to Harriet Tubman on terms she could meet, with the purchase money payable by instalments over years. The transaction was not concealed and was politically inconvenient. It is the clearest single act connecting Seward personally to the practical work of the escape networks, and it was performed after he had ceased to be Prime Minister and had nothing further to lose by it.

Entry into politics

Anti-Masonry

Seward entered public life through the anti-Masonic agitation that swept western New York after 1826, when a man who had threatened to publish the secrets of the Masonic order disappeared and was believed murdered. The movement that followed was a genuine popular revolt against a fraternity of officeholders, lawyers and magistrates who appeared to be able to obstruct an investigation into one of their own.

Seward joined it, spoke for it, and was carried by it into elective office. The Realm’s biographers treat the episode as formative in a way that its subject matter does not suggest, because it taught him the mechanics of a movement built on moral outrage against an entrenched interest, and because it introduced him to Thurlow Weed, who was managing the movement’s newspapers.

The anti-Masonic phase also left him with a lasting reputation among his opponents as an agitator, a man whose politics were built on the identification of a hidden malign interest requiring exposure. That charge was made against his slavery politics for thirty years afterwards, and it was made most effectively by opponents who could point out that he had made the same argument before about the Freemasons.

The provincial senate

He was elected to the senate of the Province of New York in 1830 and sat until 1834. The provincial chamber of that period was concerned with canals, banks, corporate charters, the prison system and the endless business of public works finance, and Seward’s contributions were competent, detailed and unremarkable except for their volume.

Two positions from this period survived into his later career. The first was a consistent support for public investment in transport and education, financed by borrowing against future revenue, which placed him among the improvers and against the retrenchers in every legislature he ever sat in. The second was an early and unpopular interest in the treatment of prisoners and of the insane, which produced his first arguments about the responsibility of the state for people it had confined.

He was elected to the House of Commons for Cayuga in 1833 and sat, briefly and without distinction, until 1839. His early parliamentary career was overshadowed by his provincial ambitions, and he left the Commons to contest the premiership of New York.

Thurlow Weed

Thurlow Weed, editor at Albany and the most capable political manager in the northern provinces, attached himself to Seward’s career in the early 1830s and remained attached to it for thirty years. The relationship was the practical foundation of everything Seward achieved. Weed ran the newspapers, the nominations, the money and the local organisations, and Seward supplied the candidate, the argument and the public position.

The division of labour was understood by everybody and was resented by many. Weed’s methods were those of a provincial machine: he traded appointments, subsidised newspapers, and settled contests before they were held. Seward’s public reputation for high moral argument was maintained by a manager whose own reputation was for none, and the Realm’s writers have generally concluded that Seward knew this in detail and preferred not to be told.

The arrangement served him in New York and failed him at New Westminster. A federal coalition drawn from a dozen polities could not be managed by one man from Albany, and the machinery Weed had built did not extend to the border members whose votes decided the ministry’s fate. Seward reached the premiership without ever having built a national organisation, because he had never needed one and had a manager who told him he did not.

Premier of the Province of New York

The ministry of 1839

Seward was elected Premier of the Province of New York in the provincial contest of 1838 and formed a provincial ministry in 1839, holding office until 1842. He was thirty-seven. The province was the largest and most commercially active in the Realm, its revenue and its debt both exceeded those of several polities combined, and the premiership of New York was accordingly the most substantial office in the Realm outside New Westminster.

His provincial ministry pursued the improver’s programme without moderation. It borrowed heavily to extend the canal system, funded common schools, expanded the asylums and reformed the prisons, and left the province with a debt that his successors spent a decade retiring. The works were largely justified by the traffic they carried. The finance was not defensible on the terms offered at the time, and the retrenchment that followed his ministry was a direct answer to it.

The pattern of the provincial ministry anticipated the parliamentary one closely enough that the Realm’s historians treat it as a rehearsal. Seward identified a correct objective, pursued it faster than his political base could sustain, refused to trim, and was replaced by men who completed parts of his programme under a different name while repudiating him.

The school question

In 1840 Seward proposed that the provincial school fund should be available to schools in which immigrant children were taught by teachers of their own faith and language. The proposal was directed at the Irish and German populations of New York City and the canal towns, whose children were in practice excluded from schools where the instruction and the daily religious exercise belonged to a tradition their families rejected.

The measure was defeated and the controversy was enormous. The nativist press treated it as the endowment of Rome out of provincial taxes, and the Church of America clergy of the province were divided and largely hostile. Seward did not retreat, restated the proposal in his next message, and accepted the political damage.

The episode determined his relations with two constituencies for the rest of his career. It made him permanently trusted by Catholic and immigrant voters in a period when almost no other figure of his standing was, and it made him the principal enemy of the nativist movement, which is why he was unable and unwilling to draw on nativist support in 1854 when it would have been arithmetically valuable. The Realm’s writers have noted that the school question cost him more votes over thirty years than any position he took on slavery, and that he never showed any sign of regretting it.

Rendition and the Virginia controversy

In 1839 three free Black sailors at New York were accused by Virginia of assisting a man to escape from slavery, and Virginia demanded their surrender for trial. Seward refused, on the ground that the act alleged was not a crime by the law of New York and that a province was not obliged to deliver its own residents for conduct its own law did not punish.

The refusal produced a four-year quarrel between the two provincial governments, retaliatory inspection statutes on both sides, and a general recognition that the machinery of interprovincial rendition rested on comity rather than on any provision that could be enforced. Virginia’s case was constitutionally the stronger and was never adjudicated, because neither government would risk a decision.

The controversy made Seward a national antislavery figure before he had made a single antislavery speech of consequence in the Commons. It also established the constitutional habit that ran through the rest of his career, which was to locate a defensible legal position inside a larger moral one and then hold the legal position in public while the moral one did the political work. His opponents called this evasion. His allies called it advocacy. Both were describing the same technique.

The House of Commons

The seat for Cayuga

Seward returned to the House of Commons for Cayuga at the general election of 1844 and held the seat continuously until 1869. Cayuga was a county constituency of moderate size in the central part of New York, agricultural and milling, with a substantial reform Protestant population and an active antislavery society, and it returned him at every contest by comfortable margins.

He arrived in the chamber at the beginning of the Webster ministry, and the coincidence framed his entire parliamentary formation. Webster was the greatest constitutional advocate of the age and used that authority to hold the sectional question in a legal frame where it could not be answered. Seward spent six years listening to arguments he could not defeat on their own ground and concluded, correctly, that the ground would have to be changed.

His early parliamentary manner was not effective. He spoke at length from a prepared text, addressed the chamber as a court, and assumed that a member who had heard a demonstration would act on it. The Commons of the 1840s ran on managed interest and personal obligation, and Seward’s reputation in his first years was that of a man who made excellent speeches and delivered no votes.

The settlement of 1850 and the higher law

The territorial acquisitions of the Mexican-American War forced the question of slavery in the cession, and the Webster ministry answered it with the settlement of 1850: California admitted as a free Commonwealth, the remaining western territories left to popular sovereignty subject to review by the Royal American Supreme Court, and a strengthened federal enforcement against people escaping slavery.

Seward opposed the settlement entire and opposed the enforcement provisions with particular force. His speech against them contained the argument for which he was afterwards known: that the Charter of Union devoted the territories of the Realm to purposes higher than the accommodation of a labour system, and that there was a law above the Charter to which the Charter itself was answerable. The phrase was seized on immediately and quoted against him for twenty years, generally without its context and often as evidence that he regarded himself as entitled to disregard statutes he disliked.

He never withdrew it and never satisfactorily explained it. Pressed in the chamber, he maintained that the higher law bound the legislator in making law and not the citizen in obeying it, a distinction that was constitutionally orthodox and which nobody believed he held. The ambiguity was politically useful in the northern provinces and politically fatal in the border ones, and Seward preserved it deliberately for as long as he could.

Opposition under Houston

Under the ministry of Sam Houston from 1850 to 1854 Seward became the recognised leader of the antislavery members. Houston’s method was the management of the coalition by geographic breadth, and it worked for four years on questions of frontier administration, continental integration and treaty business, and did not work at all on the territorial question, which Houston declined to raise.

Seward attacked the deferral directly and repeatedly. His central parliamentary argument in these years was that management was not neutral: that every year the question was postponed, the slave interest gained territory, embedded political weight and confidence that the threat of rebellion would function permanently as a veto, so that a ministry which did nothing was not holding the balance but shifting it. The argument was correct and it was made in a chamber where the arithmetic for acting on it did not yet exist.

By 1853 the antislavery members were meeting separately, coordinating their divisions, and functioning as a parliamentary formation rather than a tendency. The Treaty of Mesilla of that year, which acquired a further strip of territory in the south-west, was opposed by that formation on the express ground that the Realm should acquire no more southern territory until the status of the territory it held was settled. The treaty was carried. The opposition to it was the first division in which the future Free Labour and Reform alignment voted as a body.

The irrepressible conflict

The argument

Seward’s principal contribution to the constitutional argument of the period was the proposition that the conflict between free labour and slave labour was irrepressible: that it arose from the structural incompatibility of two economic and social systems which could not occupy the same continental space indefinitely without one displacing the other, and that it could not therefore be managed, arranged, deferred or compromised away.

The argument was economic before it was moral, and this is what distinguished it from the abolitionist case. Seward’s contention was that a free-labour economy generated schools, towns, wages, mobility and a market in labour, that a slave economy generated none of these and required continual territorial extension to survive, and that the two could not share a legislature, a tariff, a land policy or a system of internal improvement without each attempting to capture the machinery against the other. The Union was not divided by feeling. It was divided by a question about what labour was.

The doctrine was not his invention and he never claimed it was. Elements of it appear in the antislavery parliamentary tradition running back to John Quincy Adams, and versions of it were current among the political economists of the northern provinces throughout the 1840s. What Seward supplied was the parliamentary statement: the formulation clear enough that the Commons could not treat the question as a matter of degree, and specific enough that a ministry could be built on it.

Reception in the slaveholding polities

The doctrine was received in the slaveholding polities as a declaration of intent, and the reception was not unreasonable. If the conflict was irrepressible, then it would be resolved; if it would be resolved, then one system would displace the other; and since Seward led the northern formation, the resolution he contemplated was not obscure. Southern members put this to him in the chamber and he did not deny it.

What he denied was the timetable. His position was that the displacement would occur through the ordinary operation of population, commerce and settlement, over decades, without federal interference with slavery in the polities where it existed, and that Parliament’s only necessary act was to keep the territories free so that the process could work. This was a genuine position and he held it consistently until the war. It was also a position that offered the slaveholding polities nothing except the assurance that their destruction would be gradual.

The doctrine accordingly hardened the southern parliamentary interest and supplied it with its most effective argument, which was that no accommodation with the northern formation was possible because the northern formation had announced that accommodation was impossible. Members who had spent the Clay and Webster years bargaining stopped bargaining. The Realm’s historians have not settled whether this acceleration was a cost of naming the conflict or the point of naming it.

Criticism from the antislavery side

Seward was attacked from his own side throughout, and the attacks were more damaging than the southern ones. The abolitionist movement regarded the irrepressible conflict doctrine as a device for postponing abolition indefinitely while claiming the moral credit for opposing slavery: a doctrine which held that slavery would collapse of its own economic weight was a doctrine which did not require anybody to abolish it.

Frederick Douglass and others pressed the objection in its sharpest form, which was that the doctrine described the enslaved as the terrain of a contest between two labour systems rather than as persons with a claim. Seward’s programme addressed the extension of slavery, the free-labour economy of the west and the political power of the slave interest. It did not address the four million people held in bondage in the polities where slavery was lawful, and it was not designed to.

Seward’s answer, given repeatedly and never varied, was that Parliament could not lawfully touch slavery in the polities under the Charter’s autonomy provisions, and that a ministry which pretended otherwise would achieve nothing and lose everything. The answer was legally sound. It was also, as his critics observed, extremely convenient, and the Emancipation Measure of 1865 demonstrated that what the Charter forbade in 1855 could be done in 1865 when the political conditions were different.

The Free Labour and Reform alignment

Formation

The Free Labour and Reform alignment took shape between 1852 and 1854 out of the collapse of the Whig formation that had sustained the Clay and Webster ministries. The Whig tradition did not survive the slavery crisis intact: Webster’s support for the settlement of 1850, including its enforcement provisions, drove out the antislavery members, and the remainder scattered between Houston’s Union Democrats and no alignment at all.

The new grouping was assembled in a series of meetings at Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland and New Westminster during 1853 and 1854, with Weed managing the northern provincial organisations and Seward supplying the platform. Its founding declaration committed it to the exclusion of slavery from the federal territories, the settlement of the public lands by working farmers, public support for education and internal improvement, and the equal protection of free persons of colour under federal law.

The name carried both of the alignment’s constituent interests. Free Labour designated the economic doctrine: that wage labour and slave labour were competing systems and that the Realm’s policy should favour the first. Reform designated the social and political programme inherited from the antislavery societies and the improvers. The two were compatible and were not identical, and the difference between a member who wanted the territories free for white farmers and a member who wanted them free because slavery was wrong ran through the alignment from its foundation to its dissolution.

Composition

The alignment drew from former Whigs of the northern provinces, from antislavery Union Democrats, from the reform Protestant congregations of New England and the burnt-over districts of New York, from the commercial interests of the northern interior, and from the free-soil settlers of the western polities who wanted the territories reserved for smallholding.

Its geography was its weakness. It was overwhelmingly a formation of the north and the north-west, with a scattering of members from the border polities and effectively none from the south. Every previous ministry since the founding had governed with members from both sections. Seward’s alignment could not, and its leaders knew this before the election of 1854.

Its most capable parliamentary figures included Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, who became Leader of the House of Commons and was the ministry’s most effective manager of the chamber; William Pitt Fessenden, also of Maine, whose command of finance made him the obvious Chancellor of the Exchequer; Charles Sumner of Massachusetts Bay, the alignment’s most uncompromising orator and its least manageable member; Charles Francis Adams, who brought the Adams name and a diplomatic seriousness the grouping otherwise lacked; and Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, who regarded Seward as a temporiser and said so.

The nativist associations

The middle 1850s produced a nativist movement of real electoral weight in the northern cities, organised through associations that demanded restrictions on naturalisation, the exclusion of the foreign-born from office, and the disqualification of Catholics from public trust. Its votes were available and were pursued by every other formation in the Realm.

Seward refused them, comprehensively and in public, and required the alignment to refuse them as a condition of its foundation. He had made his position on the school question in 1840 and had no intention of retreating from it, and he judged that a coalition against slavery which was also a coalition against immigrants would be neither durable nor worth having. He restated the argument during the 1854 campaign in the cities where it cost him most.

The refusal was among the clearest moral decisions of his career and it was expensive. The nativist associations put up candidates against the alignment in the northern cities, split the antislavery vote in several constituencies, and returned members who would support nothing Seward proposed. The Realm’s historians have calculated the cost variously and have generally concluded that a Free Labour alignment willing to trade with the nativists would have had a working majority in 1854 and would have been a different and worse thing.

The election of 1854 and the formation of the ministry

The fall of the Houston ministry

The Houston ministry lost its capacity to govern during 1854. Its method had depended on holding the coalition together across the sectional divide by declining to bring the territorial question forward, and the question came forward regardless, driven by the organisation of the territories acquired in the cession and by the pressure of settlement on the plains.

Houston’s own position was that the settlement of 1850 should be administered as it stood, and it could not be, because popular sovereignty in a territory required somebody to determine who the population was, and the answer was being determined by organised migration and intimidation rather than by any process the ministry controlled. When the ministry brought forward a territorial organisation measure in the early months of 1854 it was opposed by the antislavery members for conceding too much and by the southern members for conceding too little, and it was withdrawn.

Houston advised a dissolution. Governor-General Winfield Scott, who had been at Government House since August 1852 and had warned Houston privately about the consequences of continued deferral, granted it without argument. Parliament was dissolved in the spring of 1854.

The general election

The election of 1854 was fought across the Realm on the territorial question and on very little else. The Free Labour and Reform alignment contested nearly every seat in the northern and western polities on the platform of statutory exclusion, and did not contest the south at all. The Union Democrats defended popular sovereignty. The nativist associations intervened in the cities. The remains of the Whig formation dissolved into whichever grouping their members’ constituencies would tolerate.

The result was the first House in the Realm’s history in which the largest single grouping was an avowedly antislavery one, and it was not a majority. The alignment and its dependable allies came to something over a hundred members in a House of two hundred and forty-four. The southern and Union Democratic members together were more numerous, and were divided among themselves on the tariff, the lands, the frontier and the personal ambitions of at least four men.

Government therefore depended on the border members, a group of some two dozen from Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and the loyal upper south, led by John J. Crittenden, who had negotiated the Treaty of Austin for Webster and who was the most experienced constitutional draftsman in the chamber. They were slaveholders who did not want the question forced and Unionists who would not follow the south out of the Union. They gave Seward their votes on supply, on administration and on nothing else, and they were the arithmetic of the whole ministry.

The commission

Scott commissioned Seward promptly once the Commons arithmetic was clear, and did so despite private doubts about the coalition’s durability. His view of the vice-regal duty was that the Crown’s obligation was to sustain workable government on demonstrated confidence and not to choose the programme it found safest, and he applied it without qualification.

Seward kissed hands in June 1854 and formed his ministry within the week. He was fifty-three, had held no office of state, and had never sat in a Cabinet. The Realm’s constitutional writing has repeatedly noted that the Realm handed its most dangerous decade to a man whose entire executive experience was three years of provincial government twelve years earlier, and that the alignment had no alternative because it contained nobody who had done more.

The commission was received in the slaveholding polities as a constitutional event of the first order and not as an ordinary change of ministry. Members and provincial newspapers alike treated it as the moment at which the machinery of the Realm passed into the hands of the interest that intended to destroy them. Seward’s own inaugural statement to the Commons, which was moderate in terms and offered explicit assurances about slavery in the polities, made no impression whatever against the fact of his appointment.

The Cabinet of 1854

The Cabinet was constructed to represent the alignment’s components rather than to govern. Fessenden took the Exchequer, Hamlin the leadership of the House, Charles Francis Adams the Foreign Office, and Lyman Trumbull of Illinois the office of Attorney-General. Montgomery Blair of Maryland was made Postmaster-General, the single border appointment and the one that carried the patronage of the largest department in the Realm.

Sumner was not appointed. Seward judged that his presence in the Cabinet would make every measure a moral confrontation, and the judgment was probably correct and was certainly resented. Stevens was not appointed either. The two most uncompromising figures of the alignment therefore sat on the back benches with nothing to lose, and their criticism of the ministry from its own side was continuous from the first session.

The Cabinet’s principal defect was that it contained no one able to manage the Commons except Hamlin, and no one able to negotiate with the border members except Blair, who was junior. Seward did the negotiating himself, in person, and the pattern of the ministry was set in its first months: the Prime Minister conducted the coalition’s most delicate relationships personally, without machinery, without deputies and without records, and when he was ill or absent or preoccupied the relationships were not conducted at all.

The Free Labour programme

Free labour as a legislative doctrine

The programme of the ministry treated free labour as a constitutional claim about the kind of society the Union existed to protect, and translated it into legislation across a range of subjects that did not obviously concern slavery. Land policy, the tariff, internal improvement, education grants, settlement law and territorial government were each framed as instruments for extending the free-labour economy, and were each defensible on grounds that had nothing to do with abolition.

The breadth was deliberate and it was the ministry’s most successful political technique. It allowed merchants, farmers, artisans, reform congregations, western settlers and antislavery members who were not abolitionists to vote together on measures each valued for a different reason, and it kept the government’s business inside the provincial autonomy provisions that Webster’s legal legacy had made impossible to override directly.

It also had a cost that became apparent by the second session. A programme that pursued the destruction of slavery through the tariff and the land offices was a programme that could be blocked on the tariff and the land offices, and the southern and border members learned quickly that they could defeat the ministry’s antislavery purpose by opposing measures on their own merits without ever discussing slavery at all.

Lands and settlement

The Settlement of Public Lands Bill was the ministry’s principal domestic measure and the one it pursued in every session. It provided for the grant of quarter-sections of the public domain to settlers who occupied and improved them for a term of years, at a nominal fee, with a prohibition on assignment before the term expired. Its purpose was to fill the territories with smallholding families whose economy would exclude plantation agriculture without any statute needing to say so.

The Bill passed the Commons in 1855 and again, amended, in 1857. It was killed in the House of Lords on both occasions, by a chamber of property and title in which the landed interest of the seaboard and the great proprietors of New York and the south had a permanent and comfortable majority. The Lords’ stated objection was to the disposal of a national asset without consideration. The actual objection was understood by everybody.

The episode is the clearest demonstration in the ministry’s record of a constitutional obstacle that had nothing to do with the sectional question. Seward’s programme required the Lords and he had no means whatever of obtaining them, no threat to make, and no popular authority of the kind that a later century’s ministries used against the upper House. He complained publicly about it once, in 1857, and was advised by Scott through the ordinary channel that a Prime Minister’s public complaint about the other House was a constitutional novelty he should consider carefully.

Colleges, tariffs and improvement

The Agricultural and Mechanical Colleges Act of 1857 endowed a college in each polity for instruction in agriculture, the mechanic arts and the sciences underlying them, financed by grants of public land in the territories. It passed both Houses, received assent, and survived the ministry, the war and the reconstruction. It is the ministry’s one wholly durable legislative achievement and it is the measure for which Seward is least remembered.

The tariff was the alignment’s most persistent internal problem. The Pennsylvania members wanted protection for iron; the western members wanted cheap imported goods and low duties; the New England members wanted protection for textiles and free entry for raw materials. Seward had no settled tariff doctrine of his own and treated the question as a matter for negotiation, with the result that the ministry’s revenue measures were assembled each session out of whatever combination would pass and satisfied no part of the coalition permanently.

Internal improvement was the least contested part of the programme and the most productive. The ministry surveyed and subsidised the western routes, extended the postal service into the territories, funded harbour and river works in the lake provinces, and made the first federal appropriations for a transcontinental survey. The survey work was politically neutral in appearance and was not neutral in fact: the northern routes were surveyed first and in greater detail, and the southern interest said so at length.

The territorial question

The inheritance of 1850

The ministry inherited a territorial settlement it regarded as unworkable. Under the settlement of 1850 the western territories organised out of the Mexican cession were to determine the status of slavery within them by popular sovereignty, subject to review in the federal courts. The formula had been designed to remove the question from Parliament and it had succeeded, which was the difficulty.

Popular sovereignty required a determination of who the sovereign population was, and it supplied no answer. A territory whose future turned on a vote could be settled by people who came in order to vote, and could be governed by whichever party controlled the returns. The formula therefore transferred a national question to the least protected institutions in the Realm, and made procedural neutrality operate in favour of whichever side was more willing to use organised force.

Seward had opposed the settlement in 1850, had predicted this result, and came to office intending to reverse it by statute. The ministry’s position was that Parliament held plenary authority over the territories, that a territory was not a polity and had no autonomy the Charter protected, and that Parliament could therefore exclude slavery from every territory of the Realm by ordinary legislation. The position was well founded and had never been tested.

The Territories Bill of 1855

The Territories Bill was introduced in the first session of the new Parliament in 1855. Its operative clause provided that slavery should not exist in any territory of the Realm, and its remaining clauses reorganised territorial government, provided for the appointment of judges and officers by the ministry rather than by local election, and required territorial statutes to be laid before Parliament.

The Bill was the reason the ministry existed. It was debated for eleven weeks, and the exclusion clause was struck out in committee by a majority of nine, when the border members voted with the south. Crittenden’s stated ground was that the clause would be read in the slaveholding polities as the announcement of a general federal power over slavery, and that it would cost more in the Union’s cohesion than it could possibly gain in the territories.

Seward took the Bill forward without the exclusion clause rather than lose the administrative provisions, which were valuable and which passed. The decision was defensible and it was the first of the ministry’s compromises, and it was made in the first session, on the measure the alignment had been founded to carry. Sumner and Stevens voted against their own government. The northern press that had elected the ministry described the outcome accurately, which was that the antislavery ministry had legislated on the territories and had not excluded slavery from them.

Weatherby v. Kinnaird

The judicial review reserved by the settlement of 1850 produced its decision in 1856. Weatherby v. Kinnaird arose from a private suit over the title to a man taken by his owner into a federal territory whose legislature had purported to abolish slavery within it. The Royal American Supreme Court held, four to three, that a territorial legislature possessed no authority to determine the status of property lawfully held under the law of a polity, and that until Parliament legislated the question the law of the owner’s polity followed him.

The judgment did not decide that Parliament lacked power to exclude slavery from the territories, and the majority was careful to say so. Its effect was nevertheless to destroy popular sovereignty as a working formula, because it removed from territorial legislatures the only power that made a settlers’ vote meaningful, and to place the entire question back on the ministry that had just failed to carry an exclusion clause.

The decision was received in the north as a judicial endorsement of the slave interest and in the south as the vindication of a constitutional right. Seward’s response was constitutionally correct and politically inadequate: he declared that the Court had confirmed the ministry’s own position that only Parliament could settle the question, and undertook to bring the question back to Parliament, and did not do so in that session or in the next. The undertaking was cited against him at the fall of the ministry by members of his own alignment who had heard him give it.

Kansas and the parliamentary crisis

The captured territorial regime

The territory of Kansas was the place where the failure of the territorial settlement became violent. Organised pro-slavery groups entered from outside, influenced elections, threatened settlers and installed officials whose authority rested on contested returns. Free-state settlers constituted alternative institutions and claimed that democratic legitimacy had survived outside the captured machinery. Two legal orders operated at once, each describing the other as usurpation, and both increasingly relied on armed capacity.

The ministry’s federal officers in the territory were appointed under the administrative provisions of the Territories Bill of 1855, and they were appointed into an impossible position. A governor who recognised the captured legislature endorsed a fraud; a governor who recognised the free-state institutions endorsed a body with no statutory existence. Seward appointed three governors in three years and each resigned, and the third published his correspondence.

The Realm’s historians have divided the responsibility for Kansas and have not divided it evenly. The organised violence was the work of the pro-slavery associations and of the men who financed and led them. The conditions in which that violence could capture a government were the work of a Parliament that had left the question to a process vulnerable to coercion, and of a ministry which had failed to carry the statute that would have removed it. Seward said, correctly, that he had tried. He had tried once, in 1855, and had accepted defeat on the clause and had not returned to it.

Lawrence and the ministry’s response

In May 1856 a pro-slavery force entered Lawrence, the centre of free-state organisation in the territory, destroyed its presses, damaged its buildings and intimidated its residents. The operation joined official warrants to irregular force, which was the characteristic method of the captured regime and the reason the ministry found it so difficult to answer.

Seward’s government condemned the attack, ordered an inquiry, and did not use force. The reasoning was set out in Cabinet and in correspondence with Scott: the federal troops available in the territory were few, their employment against men holding territorial warrants would have raised the question of whether the ministry recognised the territorial government at all, and a ministry that used the army to settle a political question in a territory would have supplied the southern interest with precisely the precedent it wanted.

The reasoning was sound and the effect was that the ministry did nothing. Free-state settlers concluded that the government at New Westminster would not protect them, and organised their own defence. The violence that followed through the summer of 1856, including the killings at Pottawatomie Creek by John Brown and his party and the fighting at Osawatomie, occurred in the space the ministry’s inaction left. Brown’s own account of his authority in Kansas rested expressly on the proposition that national delay sustained violence, and the ministry he was describing was Seward’s.

The assault on Charles Sumner

On a day in May 1856, within the parliamentary precincts at New Westminster, Charles Sumner was beaten at his place with a cane by Preston S. Brooks, a member for a South Carolina constituency, in answer to a speech Sumner had made on the territory and on the men responsible for its condition. Sumner was gravely injured and did not resume his seat for three years.

The attack was an offence against the privilege of Parliament as well as against Sumner, because it was committed inside the precincts and against a member for words spoken in debate. The Commons appointed a select committee, which reported that the assault was a breach of privilege and recommended expulsion. The motion to expel failed to obtain the majority the House required. Brooks resigned his seat, was returned again at the by-election by his constituents without opposition, and resumed it.

The Commons had established that it could not protect a member from violence for what he said in the chamber, and this was more damaging to the Realm’s confidence in Parliament than the assault itself. Seward’s ministry supported the expulsion, obtained a strengthening of the precinct guard, and secured no further remedy. The Realm’s parliamentary literature treats the failure of the expulsion motion as the point at which the sectional quarrel entered the institution that was supposed to contain it.

Coalition management

The border members

The border members were the ministry’s necessary support and Seward’s relations with them deteriorated in every year of the ministry. They wanted three things: no federal statute touching slavery in the polities, no confrontation that would force their constituents to choose, and the ordinary patronage of the border departments. Seward could have given them all three and gave them the third erratically.

His error was not that he refused them concessions on the territorial question, which he could not have made without destroying his own alignment. It was that he treated the relationship as a series of transactions conducted when a division approached, rather than as a standing arrangement requiring continuous attention. Crittenden was consulted before the Territories Bill of 1855 and was not consulted before the ministry’s territorial appointments, its Kansas policy or the handling of the Lecompton constitution in 1858.

Blair, the border member in the Cabinet, warned repeatedly and in writing that the group was drifting. His memoranda survive and are the most direct contemporary criticism of the ministry’s management from inside it. Seward replied to them courteously and did not act on them, and by 1857 the border members were voting against the government on measures they had supported in 1855.

The Cabinet and the whips

The ministry’s internal organisation was weak from the beginning and was never repaired. Cabinet met irregularly, business was frequently settled between the Prime Minister and the departmental minister concerned without the Cabinet being informed, and Seward conducted the coalition’s most important relationships himself and kept no systematic record of them.

The whips of the alignment were inexperienced, since the alignment was two years old, and had no authority over members whose local organisations were older than the grouping and answerable to it in no way. Divisions were lost because members were absent, and members were absent because nobody had told them the division mattered. Hamlin’s papers record his repeated attempts to obtain from the Prime Minister a settled list of the measures on which the government would insist, and his failure to obtain one.

Seward’s own working method compounded the problem. He was industrious, wrote at length, saw everybody, and made decisions late. Colleagues who wanted a determination on a question of business commonly obtained an interesting discussion of the constitutional principles involved and no determination. The Realm’s writers who are most sympathetic to his analysis are frequently most severe on this point, because the analysis he was right about required an organisation he never built.

The abolitionists

Relations with the abolitionist movement were poor throughout and grew worse. The movement had not supported the alignment’s foundation, regarded the exclusion of slavery from the territories as an evasion of the question of slavery in the polities, and read the ministry’s failure to carry even the exclusion as proof of what it had argued.

Seward’s public answer was the constitutional one: Parliament had no lawful power over slavery in the polities and a ministry which pretended otherwise would achieve nothing. His private view, recorded in family correspondence, was that the movement’s pressure was politically useful to him in the northern constituencies and destructive to him in the border ones, and that he could neither embrace it nor repudiate it without loss.

The result was that the ministry was attacked from the antislavery side continuously while being described in the slaveholding polities as the instrument of the antislavery movement. Both descriptions had force and they were incompatible, and Seward never found a formulation that answered either. The position of a government which is called abolitionist by its enemies and a traitor by its friends is one the Realm’s political literature now treats as a recognised condition, and the Seward ministry is the standing example of it.

The state of the representation

The standing committee

The Commons had maintained for years a standing committee on the state of the representation, which collected returns of electors and inhabitants from the polities, published them, reported repeatedly, and had never had a ministry willing to legislate its reports. It was chaired through the decade before 1859 by Hiram Pell, member for St Mary’s City, one of the most indefensible boroughs in the Realm.

The committee’s difficulty was obtaining the figures. Several polities complied slowly with its requests for returns and a few did not comply at all. In 1856 the Seward ministry obtained a resolution of the House requiring the returns to be made and providing that the committee should print the names of the defaulters alongside the figures it received. The returns came in. They are the reason the debates of 1859 were conducted on agreed numbers, which removed at a stroke the commonest defence of an indefensible seat.

This is the ministry’s real contribution to the reform that followed it, and it was procedural rather than legislative. Seward gave the committee the evidence and declined to give it a Bill. Pell’s reports of 1856 and 1857, produced under the compelled returns, are the source of the figures in the First Schedule of the Act that Lincoln carried in 1859 and of most of that Act’s structure.

Why the ministry did not legislate

Seward considered a redistribution measure twice, in 1856 and in 1857, and declined it both times. The reasons he gave in Cabinet were arithmetical and were correct. A redistribution bill would have removed the seats of some fifty members, drawn from every part of the Realm, who would have opposed the government for as long as it persisted with the measure, and the ministry’s working majority was smaller than fifty.

The reasons he did not give were closer to home. The boroughs standing in the committee’s schedules included the great manors of his own province, Livingston, Cortlandt and Rensselaerswyck, which returned five members between them on the votes of rather more than a hundred electors holding their land of the manor. Their proprietors were part of the New York interest that Weed managed and that had sustained Seward’s career since 1830, and a Free Labour ministry disfranchising the New York manors would have been disfranchising its own foundation.

The judgment was defensible and it was also the management method Seward had come into office to end, applied by him to the one measure that would have altered the arithmetic permanently in his favour. The Realm’s historians have made this point without much charity and it is difficult to answer. A redistribution carried in 1857 would have taken effect at a dissolution in 1858 or 1859, and would have moved parliamentary weight towards the populous free polities before the crisis broke rather than after it.

Finance and the panic of 1857

Supply and the Exchequer

Fessenden’s Exchequer was the most competently administered department of the ministry and the least troubled by the sectional question. The Realm’s federal revenue in the 1850s came principally from customs and from the sale of public lands, its debt was modest, and the American Pound was stable. Supply was voted without serious difficulty in every session of the Parliament, including the last.

The ministry’s fiscal policy was expansionary in intention. It increased the appropriations for surveys, harbours, post routes and the territorial establishments, funded the colleges endowment out of land rather than revenue, and proposed to finance the settlement programme by forgoing land sale receipts entirely. Fessenden’s estimates for 1856 and 1857 assumed continued growth in customs receipts and in land sales, and both assumptions failed in the autumn of 1857.

The Realm’s fiscal machinery of the period contained no central bank, no reserve, and no instrument by which a ministry could act on credit conditions. The Royal American Reserve was founded in 1913 after a later panic, and the absence of anything resembling it in 1857 meant that the ministry’s response to a financial crisis was confined to the customs, the deposits of public money and the tone of ministerial statements.

The panic and the tariff

The panic of 1857 began with the failure of a large financial house and spread through the banks, the railway securities and the grain trade within weeks. Land sales in the west collapsed, customs receipts fell sharply, and the ministry’s revenue estimates were destroyed in a single quarter. Unemployment in the northern cities through the winter of 1857 to 1858 was severe and was met by provincial and municipal relief that was inadequate everywhere.

The political effect was worse than the economic one. The panic fell hardest on the free-labour economy of the north and the west, which was the economy the ministry existed to champion, and comparatively lightly on the cotton polities, whose exports held. Southern members drew the obvious conclusion in the chamber at length, and the argument that the plantation economy had proved the sounder system was made in the Commons repeatedly through 1858 and was not effectively answered.

The tariff question, already the alignment’s most divisive, became insoluble. The Pennsylvania members demanded protection as the answer to the collapse of the iron trade; the western members demanded lower duties on the manufactured goods they bought; the Exchequer needed revenue and could obtain it from either. Seward postponed the question into the following session, and the following session was the one in which his government fell.

Foreign policy

Britain and the northern provinces

Foreign affairs under Adams at the Foreign Office were the least troubled part of the ministry and produced its second durable achievement. The Realm’s relations with Britain were conducted between governments under a single Crown, through the American minister at the Court of St James’s, and were cordial through the whole period.

The reciprocity treaty with the British provinces to the north, negotiated in 1854 and 1855 and ratified in 1856, admitted a schedule of natural products free of duty in both directions and settled the fisheries and navigation questions that had irritated the northern border for a generation. It was popular in the lake and New England polities, unpopular with the New York milling interest, and unopposed in the south, and it passed without difficulty.

Adams also concluded the boundary and claims business left over from the Mexican settlement, and maintained the ministry’s position that the Realm would acquire no further territory to the south while the status of the territory it held was unsettled. That position was foreign policy in form and domestic policy in substance, and it was understood as such by everybody in the chamber.

Cuba and Nicaragua

The southern interest pressed the ministry throughout for the acquisition of Cuba from Spain, by purchase if possible and by other means if not. The island’s plantation economy would have entered the Realm as slaveholding territory, and its acquisition had been an object of southern policy for a decade. Seward refused to instruct the minister at Madrid to open the question, refused again when the request was made through Crittenden, and stated the refusal publicly in 1856.

The ministry took the same position on the private expeditions that were then attempting to establish governments in Central America. When an expedition under a filibustering commander obtained control of Nicaragua and applied for recognition, Seward refused it, to the lasting gratitude of the United Provinces of Central America, whose provinces fought and expelled him in the National War, ordered the enforcement of the neutrality statutes against the recruitment of men and the fitting out of vessels in American ports, and prosecuted in three cases.

Both decisions were correct in law and both were expensive. They deprived the ministry of any means of offering the southern members something they wanted, at a period when it had nothing else to offer them, and they were represented in the slaveholding polities as evidence that the government at New Westminster would use the Realm’s power against southern interests abroad as readily as against them at home. The representation was accurate.

The African slave trade

The ministry increased the naval establishment on the African station and concluded arrangements with the British squadron for the mutual visitation of suspected vessels, which was the most effective single measure taken against the Atlantic trade in the Realm’s nineteenth century. Adams negotiated the arrangement and Seward defended it in the Commons against the objection that it conceded a right of search over American shipping.

The measure answered an agitation then current in the extreme southern interest for the reopening of the African trade, which had been unlawful in the Realm since the founding generation. That agitation was never close to succeeding and its existence was politically valuable to Seward, since it allowed him to present the ministry’s naval policy as the enforcement of an old national settlement rather than as an antislavery measure.

The squadron’s captures in 1856 and 1857 were the highest the Realm had recorded. The captured vessels were condemned, their crews prosecuted with mixed success, and the people found aboard them landed at Monrovia in conditions the ministry’s own inspectors described as disgraceful. The Realm’s account of this policy records both the suppression and the treatment of the people it liberated, and the second has not been improved by the passage of time.

The Crown and the Governor-General

Winfield Scott

Seward’s entire premiership fell within the vice-regal term of Winfield Scott, who held Government House from 2 August 1852 to 2 August 1859. Their personal relationship was correct, intellectually respectful and cool. The weekly audiences were longer, more argumentative and more carefully recorded than Scott’s audiences with Houston had been, and both men ensured that significant constitutional exchanges were preserved in writing.

Scott regarded Seward’s programme as morally serious and broadly necessary, and feared that it moved faster than its coalition and its administrative capacity could sustain. Seward regarded Scott’s caution as the inherited habit of an institutional order that had accommodated slavery for seventy years. Their disagreement concerned means and constitutional roles as much as ends: Scott did not believe a ministry could amend constitutional practice by declaring a new understanding of it, and Seward did not believe that inherited caution should be a permanent barrier to reform supported in the Commons.

Neither man converted the disagreement into a constitutional conflict, and the Realm’s writing on the vice-regal office treats the pairing as the leading nineteenth-century demonstration that a Governor-General and a Prime Minister may disagree profoundly about the direction of the Realm without either exceeding his function.

Assent and the reserve powers

Scott granted assent to the ministry’s controversial legislation on ministerial advice in every case. He did not threaten a veto, did not use private warning as leverage, and confined his objections to implementation, coalition capacity and the risk that a statutory victory might outrun the institutions required to give it effect.

He accepted that dismissal and absolute veto existed as lawful safeguards and regarded them as exceptional powers reserved for demonstrable constitutional necessity rather than for ordinary policy conflict. He studied the contingency questions as sectional pressure increased, particularly during 1856, and he never threatened a reserve power, never seriously prepared an intervention and never attempted to enlarge his authority through his military prestige.

When Seward’s coalition lost viability in 1858, Scott waited for clear evidence from the Commons and for the Prime Minister’s advice rather than hastening the ministry’s fall. He did not treat the private doubts he had held since 1854 as retrospective proof that the commission had been mistaken. His stated position was that a ministry’s durability is determined in Parliament and not by the Governor-General’s satisfaction, and he acted on it.

Ernest II

Ernest II had come to the throne in 1851 and had spent the first years of his reign removing the sovereign from the formation of American governments, in deliberate reaction against his predecessor’s use of royal discretion. Prime Ministers were commissioned in his name by the resident Governor-General once Commons confidence was clear, and he did not attempt to influence the choice.

The King sent no personal instructions to Scott on American ministers, on slavery, on territorial policy or on the armed forces at any point in the Seward ministry. Seward never had an audience with him and their correspondence, which was formal and slight, concerned honours and the ordinary business of the Crown in right of America.

The absence is itself the constitutional fact. The Realm’s most dangerous domestic crisis since the founding was managed for four years by a Prime Minister and a Governor-General without a word of royal direction, and the Crown in right of America operated as a legitimating form rather than as a political actor throughout. The pattern Ernest II established in these years held through the rebellion that followed.

The fall of the ministry

The erosion of 1857

The ministry’s parliamentary position deteriorated through 1857 without any single event accounting for it. The border members had begun voting against the government on measures they had previously supported. The panic destroyed the ministry’s fiscal programme and its claim that the free-labour economy was the sounder one. The tariff was postponed. The Settlement of Public Lands Bill was killed in the Lords a second time.

Seward’s own position within the alignment weakened at the same time and from the opposite direction. Sumner was absent and his absence was a continuous reproach. Stevens and the reform members had begun to argue publicly that the ministry had been in office for three years, had not excluded slavery from a single territory, and had spent its authority on colleges and harbour works. The most damaging criticism of the government in 1857 came from the newspapers that had created it.

By the end of the year the ministry was governing on the acquiescence of members who no longer supported it and had no alternative they preferred. That is a survivable condition until a question arrives on which acquiescence is impossible, and the question arrived in February 1858.

The constitution framed at Lecompton

The captured territorial regime in Kansas framed a constitution at Lecompton providing for slavery, submitted it to a vote that the free-state settlers boycotted as fraudulent, and applied to Parliament for admission as a polity of the Realm on its basis. The instrument was the product of a government whose own origin was contested and whose ratification vote had been conducted on a register nobody accepted.

The ministry’s law officers advised that Parliament could not lawfully inquire behind the return of a territorial convention without establishing a precedent that would apply to every polity of the Realm. Crittenden and the border members held that the application should be received. The alignment held that it should be rejected outright and that Parliament should legislate the exclusion of slavery from the territory in the same session.

Seward chose a third course. The ministry’s Bill would have referred the instrument back to the territory for a further vote, on a fresh register compiled by federal commissioners, and would have admitted Kansas on whatever the second vote produced. The Bill answered the fraud without asserting a parliamentary power to reject a territorial constitution on its merits, and it postponed the question of exclusion into a future session. It was the management method exactly, applied by the man who had come into office to end it.

The confidence question

The Bill was opposed by the southern members, who held that a second vote insulted a lawful convention, and by the alignment’s own reform wing, who held that a fraudulent instrument required rejection and not re-submission. Seward’s answer was to declare the second reading a matter of confidence, on the calculation that his own supporters would not bring down an antislavery ministry over the method by which it proposed to defeat a pro-slavery constitution.

The calculation was the gravest political misjudgment of his career. It converted a disagreement about method inside the alignment into a question about whether the ministry deserved to continue, invited every member who had a grievance against the government to answer that question, and removed the possibility of losing the Bill and keeping the office. Hamlin advised against it. Blair advised against it. Fessenden recorded his objection in writing and did not press it in Cabinet.

The declaration is the reason the episode occupies the position it does in the Realm’s constitutional writing. Until 1858 it was understood that a government which retained its majority and its supply retained its office, and that confidence was in practice a question about arithmetic and administration. Seward’s fall established that the House could withdraw confidence over what a ministry believed and intended, and that a government could be ended for the direction in which it was travelling rather than for anything it had failed to do. The modern convention restraining a Prime Minister from declaring minor questions matters of confidence rests on it.

The division and the resignation

The second reading was defeated in April 1858 by a majority that no analysis has been able to describe as a single body. The southern members voted against the Bill because it questioned the Lecompton convention. Some thirty members of the ministry’s own alignment voted against it because it did not reject the constitution outright. The border members divided. Members who had supported the government on every division since 1854 voted against it on the tariff, on the lands, and on grievances of appointment that had nothing to do with Kansas at all.

Seward considered advising a dissolution and was advised by Hamlin and by Weed that a general election fought under his leadership would return the same House with a smaller Free Labour contingent, since the alignment’s own supporters in the northern constituencies were the people most dissatisfied with him. He accepted the advice, which was probably correct, and it is the single decision of the crisis that his critics and his defenders agree upon.

He went to Government House and resigned. Scott did not press him and did not delay, and the record of the audience, which both men caused to be preserved, contains no argument and no reproach on either side. The ministry had lasted not quite four years.

The advice to commission Lincoln

Seward advised the Governor-General to commission Abraham Lincoln, the member around whom the National Union formation had been coalescing in the Commons since the previous year. Lincoln was antislavery, western, constitutionally cautious, acceptable to the border members in a way Seward had ceased to be, and had voted with the reform wing against the ministry’s Lecompton Bill.

The advice was given without conditions and without a request for office. Seward’s stated reason, recorded at the time and repeated afterwards without variation, was that his own coalition could not be reconstituted on terms that would produce effective government and that the commission should go to the member best placed to take it. Scott confirmed independently that Lincoln could sustain the confidence of the House and commissioned him.

The Realm’s constitutional writing treats this as the most creditable act of Seward’s premiership and generally notes that it required both political honesty and personal generosity from a man whose ambitions for the office had been very large. It also notes, with less generosity, that Seward had no alternative that was not worse, and that a former Prime Minister who recommends the only person capable of governing is being accurate rather than magnanimous. Both observations are made in the same textbooks.

The general election of 1858

Lincoln formed a government, obtained a dissolution, and fought the general election of 1858 on the argument that the Union was breaking because confrontation had been postponed too long. The National Union coalition was returned with a working majority drawn from free-labour westerners, antislavery reformers, constitutional Unionists, religious critics of slavery and commercial voters who had concluded that the Realm was being governed by threat.

Seward campaigned for the coalition in New York and in the lake provinces and was returned for Cayuga with an increased majority, which the Realm’s writers have found instructive: the constituencies that had lost confidence in him as a Prime Minister had not lost confidence in him as a member, and the verdict of 1858 was on a government rather than on a man.

The Parliament returned in 1858 carried the Parliamentary Reform Act 1859 in the following year, on the evidence the Seward ministry had compelled the polities to produce and on the schedules Pell’s committee had drafted under it. The Act disfranchised forty-one boroughs returning fifty-two members, redistributed the seats to the manufacturing towns and the western polities, tied the allocation to a population quota revised at each census, and created the Boundary Commission. It removed the arithmetic that had made the management era possible, and it was carried by the man who took the office Seward lost, in the year after he lost it.

Service under Lincoln

Foreign Secretary

Lincoln appointed Seward Foreign Secretary in 1858 and he held the office until the ministry ended in 1869, which made him the longest-serving occupant of the department in the Realm’s nineteenth century and gave him eleven years of executive office after four years of government.

The appointment was made deliberately and against advice. Lincoln’s stated reason was that the man who had assembled the antislavery formation should not be left on the back benches to become the focus of every grievance against the government that succeeded him, and that Seward’s abilities were considerable and had been misapplied rather than absent. The judgment was vindicated. Seward was a better Foreign Secretary than he had been a Prime Minister, for the reason that a department could be run by a man who conducted its business personally and kept its relationships in his own hands, and a coalition could not.

His son Frederick served as Under-Secretary through most of the period, an arrangement that was criticised at the time and defended on the ground that the department needed continuity and that Frederick had been performing the work as his father’s private secretary for twenty years.

Recognition and the war

The rebellion of 1861 to 1863 made the Foreign Office the second most important department of the Realm. The rebel state at Charles Town maintained a diplomatic establishment and sought recognition abroad, and the Union’s constitutional position was that no polity had left the Realm, that no rebel administration existed in law, and that there was accordingly nothing for a foreign government to recognise.

Seward’s conduct of this was aggressive and effective. He instructed the Realm’s ministers that the reception of a rebel agent would be treated as an unfriendly act, pressed the argument that recognition of a rebellion within a friendly monarchy would establish a precedent every European government would live to regret, and made the case in terms calculated for chancelleries rather than for parliaments. No government recognised the rebel state.

His aggression required restraint on at least two occasions and Lincoln supplied it. The most serious concerned a proposal, put forward early in the crisis, for a foreign quarrel that would reunite the Realm’s sections against an external adversary. Lincoln declined it without ceremony. The episode is recorded in the papers of both men, and it is the standing illustration in the Realm’s diplomatic literature of the difference between a policy that is clever and a policy that is wise.

Emancipation and the Rights Act

Seward’s part in the domestic legislation of the Lincoln ministry was that of a senior colleague rather than an author. He supported the Emancipation Measure of 1 January 1865 and the two years of costing and compensation that preceded it, on the ground that a measure which paid the loyal slaveholders was a measure that would survive in the courts, and he was among those who argued in Cabinet that the compensation should have been extended to the people freed.

That argument failed. The owners were paid and the freed were not, and Seward’s dissent was recorded in Cabinet and not pressed to resignation. The Realm’s historians have noted that he made the correct argument, made it privately, and accepted the outcome, and that this is a fair description of his conduct in most of the situations of his later career.

He supported the American Rights Act of 1866 and was among the ministers who accepted the compromise that confined it to federal authority. His stated reason was that a measure binding the polities would have been struck down or defied, and that a federal guarantee that held was better than a general one that did not. The Act was extended to the polities in 1962, ninety-six years later, and the intervening period is the standing case against the reasoning that Seward advanced.

Political positions

Slavery and race

Seward’s position on slavery was consistent from 1839 to 1865 and was narrower than his reputation. He held that slavery was morally wrong, that Parliament had no lawful power to abolish it in the polities where it existed, that Parliament had plenary power over the territories and was obliged to exclude it from them, and that exclusion from the territories would cause the institution to decay by economic necessity over decades.

On the position of free persons of colour he was in advance of nearly all his contemporaries in national office and behind the abolitionist movement. He supported equal protection under federal law, opposed the disqualification of Black witnesses, and argued for the extension of the franchise in his own province at a period when this was electorally damaging and produced no result. He did not argue for it federally while in office.

The gap between the two records is the substance of the criticism made against him by the antislavery movement in his lifetime and by the Realm’s historians since. He was prepared to be well ahead of opinion in Auburn, in Albany and in a courtroom, and he was not prepared to be ahead of it in the Commons, and the offices in which he had power were the ones in which he was most cautious.

Immigration, religion and the economy

He was consistently and expensively hostile to nativism, from the school question of 1840 to the refusal of the nativist associations in 1854 and after. His argument was that a Realm built by settlement could not coherently disqualify settlers, and that a religious test for public trust was a contradiction of the Charter whatever the Church of America establishment might imply. He held this position in constituencies where it cost him votes and never modified it.

His economic doctrine was that of the improvers: public investment in transport, harbours, surveys and education, financed by borrowing against future revenue and by the disposal of the public domain to settlers rather than to speculators. He had no settled view on the tariff and treated it as a matter for negotiation, which is the principal reason the alignment could never settle it either.

On the continent he was an expansionist in a particular and restricted sense. He believed the Realm would grow, expected it to grow northwards and westwards rather than southwards, and refused every proposal for southward acquisition on the ground that it would extend the slave economy. After the war he retained the expansionist instinct without the constraint, and it was his interest in the northern and Pacific approaches, rather than any policy he executed, that his admirers afterwards remembered.

Personal life and later years

Temperament

Seward was small, untidy, hoarse of voice and continuously in motion. He smoked heavily, drank wine at dinner and talked through it, and was regarded by nearly everyone who met him as the best company in any room he entered. Colleagues who disliked his politics recorded liking him personally, and this was true of several southern members who spent four years attempting to destroy his government.

His conversational habit was indiscretion, and it was a genuine political liability. He talked freely about business not yet settled, made predictions in company that were reported, and produced in listeners an impression of enormous confidence that was frequently not justified by the state of the business he was describing. The charge that he was a schemer originated largely in this: men who heard him describe three possible outcomes concluded that he was arranging all three.

He read constantly, wrote fluently and at length, and kept up a correspondence of a size that would have occupied a secretariat. His working papers are voluminous and, for a Prime Minister, remarkably uninformative about decisions, because he settled things in conversation and recorded conclusions rather than reasons.

Bereavements

The later part of his life was marked by a sequence of family losses. Frances Seward died in 1865, having been in poor health for years, a few months after the abolition she had spent her adult life demanding took effect. Fanny, the youngest daughter, died of consumption in 1866 at twenty-one, having kept the journals that are among the best private records of her father’s ministry.

Seward’s letters after 1866 are the letters of a man whose household had been reduced to his sons and his work. He continued in office for a further three years, travelled a great deal, and did not remarry.

The Realm’s biographers have generally treated the losses as explaining the change in his public manner after 1866, from the argumentative confidence of the ministry years to a settled, discursive and slightly detached authority. He became, in his last years, a man consulted rather than a man contending, and the transition was not entirely voluntary.

Retirement and Auburn

The Lincoln ministry ended in 1869 and Seward left office with it, resigning his seat for Cayuga at the same dissolution after twenty-five years’ continuous service. He took no peerage. The Realm’s honours system was available to him and he did not seek it, and no explanation of the omission survives beyond the observation of his son that his father regarded a title as a thing that would have looked ridiculous on a lawyer from Auburn.

He returned to the house on South Street and spent his last years travelling, entertaining, writing and receiving visitors in numbers that his household found difficult. He undertook an extended journey to the Pacific and to Asia in 1870 and 1871, wrote an account of it, and began an autobiography that reached his fortieth year and stopped.

He was consulted by ministers on foreign questions and gave advice that was often taken. He declined all invitations to comment publicly on the reconstruction settlement, on the ground that a former minister who criticises his successors damages the office rather than the men, and he maintained this even when pressed by people who had a right to press him.

Death

Seward died at Auburn on 10 October 1872, aged seventy-one, of a failure of the heart, having worked at his desk that morning. He was buried at Fort Hill cemetery in the town after a funeral attended by the Prime Minister, Ulysses S. Grant, by the Governor-General and by a body of members from both Houses.

The obituaries divided along the lines that had divided assessment of him since 1858. The northern press treated him as the man who had named the conflict and had been destroyed for naming it. The southern press, where it noticed him, treated him as the author of the doctrine that had made the war inevitable. The parliamentary tributes were generous and were noticeably more comfortable with his conduct after 1858 than with his conduct before it.

He had outlived his ministry by fourteen years, his wife by seven and his youngest daughter by six, and he had seen the rebellion, the abolition, the Rights Act and the beginning of the retreat from the settlement that followed them. Lincoln, who survived him by nine years, wrote of him afterwards that he had been the most useful colleague of the war and the most difficult predecessor a minister could have had.

Public image and historical reputation

Contemporary image

The public image Seward held in his own lifetime was of a clever man. This was intended by his opponents as an accusation and was accepted by his supporters as a compliment, and both usages were current in the same newspapers in the same week. He was the schemer of the caricatures, drawn small and rumpled with a cigar, arranging a board of larger pieces.

The image was unfair in one respect and accurate in another. Seward’s actual method was public argument sustained over years, and there was very little concealment in it: the doctrine of the irrepressible conflict was announced rather than plotted, and the ministry’s programme was laid before the Commons in full at the beginning of every session. What was accurate in the caricature was his habit of sequencing, of describing to whoever was listening the three or four moves by which a difficulty might be resolved, which persuaded a great many people that the moves were being made.

Among the enslaved and among free Black communities his standing was substantial and qualified. He was the most senior public man in the Realm who had defended a Black defendant nobody would defend, and he was also the Prime Minister whose government had done nothing about slavery in the polities across four years in office. Douglass’s published assessments of him are the best statement of the mixture and they did not resolve it either.

Nineteenth-century assessment

The first generation of assessments, written between 1872 and the end of the century, were dominated by the war and were correspondingly favourable. Seward appeared in them as the forerunner: the man who had said in 1854 what the Realm accepted in 1865, whose ministry failed because the country was not ready for it, and whose failure was therefore a form of premature correctness.

The reaction set in with the reconstruction memoirs of the 1880s and 1890s, several of which were written by men who had sat in his Commons and had reason to remember his management. These accounts established the second and more critical tradition: that Seward’s analysis had been available to anybody who cared to make it, that the difficult part had been holding a government together while acting on it, and that he had been very bad at the difficult part.

Both traditions were formed before the parliamentary papers of the ministry were available. The Cabinet material, Blair’s memoranda and Hamlin’s papers were published between 1901 and 1930 and moved the argument towards the critical account, principally because they showed how much of the ministry’s collapse had been foreseen and stated in writing by his own colleagues at the time.

The constitutional literature

The Realm’s constitutional writers approach Seward through the fall rather than the ministry, and their interest is mechanical. The events of April 1858 established three propositions that the Realm has relied on since: that confidence may be withdrawn over a government’s intentions rather than its administration; that a Prime Minister who declares a question a matter of confidence has armed the House against himself as much as himself against the House; and that a defeated Prime Minister’s advice on the succession is a real constitutional act and not a formality.

The literature is uniformly critical of the confidence declaration and uniformly approving of the advice on the succession, and it treats the two as connected. A Prime Minister who has just demonstrated that he cannot count his own supporters is in an unusually good position to judge who can, and the Realm’s writers have observed that Seward’s clearest political judgment was made in the week after his worst one.

The Reform Act of 1859 is the other point at which the constitutional literature engages with him, and it engages critically. Seward is recorded there as the ministry that compelled the returns and declined to legislate them: an administration which produced the evidence for the largest change to the composition of the Commons since the founding and then judged that it could not afford to make it.

The unsettled question

The argument about Seward that the Realm has not settled is whether the naming of the conflict was worth its cost. One case holds that the management era had exhausted itself by 1854, that every year of further deferral extended slavery’s territory and political weight, and that somebody had to say in Parliament what the country already knew. On this reading Seward’s ministry did the necessary thing, failed at it, and made the Lincoln ministry possible by demonstrating that the alternative did not exist.

The other case holds that the naming was an act, not a description; that a conflict announced to be irrepressible becomes harder to repress; that the southern parliamentary interest which had bargained under Clay and Webster stopped bargaining when it was told that bargaining was pointless; and that a more capable manager holding the same opinions could have carried the exclusion of slavery from the territories in 1855 and altered everything that followed. On this reading the war is not Seward’s fault, and the parliamentary conditions in which it became possible are partly his work.

Neither case can be tested and the Realm has not chosen between them. What is agreed is narrower and is worth stating exactly: that the analysis was correct, that the naming achieved nothing by itself, that the coalition management was genuinely poor, and that the ministry failed. All four propositions are held simultaneously by nearly everybody who writes about him, and the relation between them is what the argument is actually about.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Abraham Lincoln, commissioned on Seward’s advice in 1858 and Prime Minister for eleven years
• Sam Houston, whose ministry deferred the question Seward’s named
• Daniel Webster, whose constitutional method Seward spent six years failing to defeat on its own ground
• Winfield Scott, Governor-General for the whole of the ministry
• Ernest II, in whose name he was commissioned, and who sent no instruction of any kind for four years
• Parliamentary Reform Act 1859, carried on evidence the Seward ministry compelled and legislation it declined to attempt
• The American Civil War, the crisis his ministry named and could not contain
• Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of America, the office and the ordeal of 1858
• John Brown, whose Kansas campaign occurred in the space the ministry’s inaction left

Categories

People · Prime Ministers · Before the modern parties · The American Civil War · Nineteenth Century