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 Read more