Editor's Note
Today’s guest post is by Jeffrey Ludwig, who earned his PhD in history from the University of Rochester in 2015. His dissertation was an intellectual biography of late social critic, Christopher Lasch. He now works at the Seward House Museum as Director of Education. This is the first in a series of two posts relating to William Seward for USIH.
William Henry Seward’s name turns up regularly enough as an answer on Jeopardy, the state of Alaska recognizes him with an annual legal holiday every March, and he was recently portrayed in multiple popular films: Lincoln and Harriet. Seward’s first biographer, Frederic Bancroft, published a two-volume account in 1900, and nearly every generation since has interpreted Seward.[1] His most recent chronicler, Walter Stahr, claims: “Seward was not only important… he was fascinating.”[2] Enigmatic, duplicitous, idealistic, contradictory, and eminently quotable, Seward remains an elusive puzzle for historians to attempt to solve.
Henry Adams, one of the brighter stars in the nineteenth-century intellectual universe, found himself equally captivated by Seward when he was a young man. His Education memorably captured the impression Seward made: “A slouching, slender figure; a head like a wise macaw; a beaked nose; shaggy eyebrows; unorderly hair and clothes; hoarse voice; offhand manner; free talk, and perpetual cigar… Complex because the political had become nature, and no one could tell which was the mask and which the features… He chose to appear as a free talker, who loathed pomposity and enjoyed a joke.”[3] But even if Seward wasn’t personally interesting, his historical contributions and proximity to historic events would warrant serious consideration.
Born during the early months of Jefferson’s first year in the White House, Seward died shortly before Grant’s reelection. A Whig and later founding member of the Republican Party, Seward ascended to Washington as a U.S. Senator in 1849, developing a national reputation for the flair of his anti-slavery rhetoric, which aptly spoke to “higher laws than the Constitution” and “irrepressible conflicts.”[4] The presumed favorite for the Republican Presidential nomination, his unlikely defeat at the hands of Lincoln, whom Seward once bitterly referred to as “a little Illinois lawyer” is the topic of countless spilled words.[5] So too with his eventual admiration for Lincoln, and the loyal and vital service rendered as his Secretary of State and confidant during the Civil War. For his troubles, he was nearly murdered the same night of Lincoln’s assassination by an accomplice of John Wilkes Booth who left the aging Secretary badly injured. Next up, from the nadir of Reconstruction and service under Andrew Johnson, Seward masterminded the 1867 purchase of Alaska. A late chapter in his political life coming two years before his retirement, his acquisition of the Russian-American colony cemented his place in the textbooks at the expense of reducing his legacy to that so-called folly.
Along the way, Seward engaged in every major debate of his lifetime, often to his detriment. He went on the record as a pro-immigration advocate, champion of school and prison reform, believer in women’s rights improvements, a voice against slavery, and a proponent for a certain vision of the expansion of American empire.
When I first arrived at the Seward House Museum in Auburn, New York, fresh out of graduate school in 2015, Seward was once again enjoying a moment. Buoyed by the Lincoln film, visitation to his home was on the rise. The site itself is a rare gem—a carefully preserved historic house museum with a pristine original collection passed directly from the Seward family to museum hands in 1951. The sesquicentennial of the Alaska purchase in 2017 brought opportunities for reflection and exhibitions. Further, the designation of Harriet Tubman’s nearby home—sold to her by the Seward family in 1859—as a National Park in the final days of the Obama administration sparked new research. Our subsequent exhibit, located in the lower levels of the home, adjacent to an authentic 1850s stop on the Underground Railroad, traces a multi-layered relationship between the Seward and Tubman families.[6]
I’ve found myself wondering where Seward fits among intellectual historians. Uncomfortably, I think, as David Sim explored on this blog a few years back. But where Sim sought to pinpoint Seward within the historiography of American imperialism, I have lately been thinking differently. I’ve long followed S-USIH and read the blog, usually lurking in the background and rarely commenting. However, over the late summer of 2019 when Donald Trump began to float the improbable idea of the U.S. buying Greenland, I thought I saw parallels to Seward. I submitted an editorial to the Syracuse Post-Standard. One of the striking things about Seward and Greenland, and of greater interest to intellectual historians, was the way he enlisted experts in his pursuit.
Courtesy of the Seward House Museum
On the heels of his Alaska purchase, Seward entered into negotiations with Denmark that he hoped might net the U.S. the Danish West Indies, Iceland, and, yes, Greenland as well. Seward moved quickly throughout the spring of 1867 to fulfill a vision of territorial expansion.[7] Relieved of any old fears that new lands added to the republic would be subjected to slavery, Seward charted an aggressive course for creating a massive commercial empire stretching in every direction from the continental U.S. He operated at an accelerated clip in hopes of preventing his initiative from getting entangled with the growing scandals and unpopularity of Andrew Johnson. Unfortunately for Seward, that’s precisely what happened. Despite a respectable treaty in hand for the West Indies—with Iceland and Greenland presumed to follow— Congress rebuffed Seward, in part, as a rebuke of Johnson. Whereas Seward’s critics once derided Alaska as a wasteland of “polar bears and ice gardens” they asked why “should the public’s money be thrown away” on undesirable places afflicted by “earthquakes and cyclones.”[8] Greenland wouldn’t join the U.S.
More than just a curious footnote, Seward’s Greenland episode was emblematic of his tenure as Secretary of State. It also anticipated American foreign policy that emerged during the 20th century. As Secretary of State, Seward developed an intelligentsia network to advance his political ambitions. He built mechanisms of disseminating and controlling information and knowledge; he presided over the massive growth of intelligence gathering and counter-intelligence operations by the U.S. government; he put intellectuals, scientists, and other experts to work under his service; finally, he utilized strategies bordering on propaganda if not an outright attempt to weaponize ideas. None of this was done expertly, little of it was done with deliberate malice, and much about it seems experimental. In piecing these patterns together, a different kind of picture of Seward presents itself.
[1] A bit of a silence followed Bancroft’s The Life of William Seward (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1900), evidently because Seward’s descendants disapproved of the critical assessment and closed the family papers to future scholars. They were subsequently given to the University of Rochester in an agreement reached in 1945, and a new spate of biographies followed. These include Burton Hendrick’s serious treatment of Seward in his Lincoln’s War Cabinet (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1946); Glyndon Van Deusen’s William Henry Seward (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); John Taylor’s William Henry Seward: Lincoln’s Right Hand (New York: HarperCollins, 1991); and Walter Stahr’s Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012).
[2] Stahr, 5.
[3] Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Random House, 1931 edition) 104.
[4] References to two of Seward’s more famous speeches. “On the Admission of California” (Washington DC, March 11, 1850) and “The Irrepressible Conflict” (Rochester, NY, October 25, 1858).
[5] Quoted, among other places, in Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005) 327.
[6] Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2004); Kate Clifford Larson, Harriet Tubman: Bound for the Promised Land (New York: Ballantine, 2003).
[7] The historian Ernest Paolino suggests that Seward shifted his energies from Russia to Denmark as early as March 30, 1867, the very day the Alaskan treaty was publically formalized and approved. Ernest Paolino, The Foundations of American Empire: William Henry Seward and U.S. Foreign Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press) 118.
[8] A critique aimed more at the Danish West Indies than Iceland or Greenland, as Seward reflected in his autobiography. He lamented “the inflamed state of the public mind” that Johnson’s many enemies “eagerly seized upon for political effect… They said it was no wonder Denmark wanted to get rid of the islands. They were not worth having at any price.” Frederick Seward, Ed., Seward at Washington as Senator and Secretary of State (New York: Derby and Miller, 1891) 371.
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