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William Henry Seward was born in New York in 1801. After graduating from Union College in 1820, he passed the state bar exam in 1822 and began to practice law. He first entered politics by running unsuccessfully for the New York State Senate in 1828. Two years later, he won the office on the Anti-Masonic Party ticket with the help of his political mentor, Thurlow Weed. After an unsuccessful bid for the New York governorship in 1834, he was elected four years later as a Whig and served two terms. Seward compiled a progressive record as governor, supporting prison reform, immigrant rights, and financial aid to parochial schools. His unwillingness to extradite three black fugitives to Virginia won him the support of antislavery advocates across the nation.

After leaving the governorship in 1842, Seward returned to private law practice in Auburn, New York, while remaining active in Whig Party affairs. In 1846 he was heavily criticized for representing the black former convict William Freeman in a murder trial, using an insanity defense. Although Freedman was convicted, Seward's eloquence in attacking racial prejudice during the trial marked him as a man of principle. He campaigned actively for the Whig presidential candidate Zachary Taylor in 1848 and was himself elected to the U.S. Senate early the following year.

Seward entered the Senate in time to participate in debates over Henry Clay's compromise resolutions, which were aimed at resolving the issue of slavery in newly acquired U.S. territories. Seward soon became a leader of the antislavery forces and an opponent to southern domination of the federal government. After the disintegration of the Whigs in 1853-1854, he joined the new Republican Party and was seen as a likely presidential prospect. In 1860, however, he unexpectedly lost his party's nomination to Abraham Lincoln.

Taking the post of secretary of state under Lincoln, Seward guided U.S. foreign policy in the midst of the Civil War. He succeeded in his primary mission of keeping Great Britain and France from recognizing the Confederacy and entering the conflict. A strong believer in the Monroe Doctrine, he helped prevent France from maintaining a puppet state in Mexico under Emperor Maximilian. On April 14, 1865, the night that Lincoln was killed, Seward himself narrowly escaped assassination. He stayed on as secretary of state when Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency. In 1867 he signed a treaty with Russia for the purchase of Alaska, an accomplishment that was ridiculed at the time as "Seward's folly." After leaving office in 1869, he traveled to speaking engagements and took a yearlong trip around the world. He died at his Auburn home in 1872.

References:

1. Auer, J. Jeffrey, ed. Antislavery and Disunion, 1858-1861: Studies in the Rhetoric of Compromise and Conflict. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.

2. Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.

3. Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005.

4. Holt, Michael F. The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

5. Lothrop, Thornton K. William Henry Seward. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1899.

6. Nevins, Allan. Ordeal of the Union, Vol. 1: Fruits of Manifest Destiny, 1847-1852. New York: Scribner, 1947.

7. Potter, David M. Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1942.

8. Taylor, John M. William Henry Seward: Lincoln's Right Hand. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

9. Van Deusen, Glyndon G. William Henry Seward. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

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