Seward: three telling tales retold

Picking up where I left off last time, it must have been a terrible blow to William Seward not to win the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1860. And even more galling to see the country lawyer Lincoln go on to win the Presidency in his stead. Even so, at a time when candidates did not campaign for themselves but relied on their allies to campaign for them, Seward was by far the most active promoter of Lincoln’s cause, travelling from State to State, apparently tireless in his canvassing on behalf of his rival.

William Seward
In defeat, a loyal friend to his successful rival

It was only reasonable that his reward should be the highest non-elective office in the land, that of Secretary of State. But Seward viewed the role’s responsibilities rather differently from his boss. He must have thought that the relatively untried Lincoln would be out of his depth as President, and needed someone to guide him, or even to run the government in his name.

“Whatever policy we adopt,” Lincoln quotes him as saying in a response he drafted but never sent, “there must be an energetic prosecution of it.” And Seward apparently suggested that “either the President must do it himself… or devolve it on some member of his cabinet. Once adopted, debates on it must end, and all agree and abide.”

Seward obviously had a candidate in mind for the Cabinet member to whom such authority might devolve.

What did Lincoln feel about this? He noted: “I remark that if this must be done, I must do it.”

The man elected to the post with the power would exercise it and no one else. That, no doubt, is what Lincoln explained to Seward face-to-face, rather than in a letter. In that quiet tone, without aggression, without raising his voice.

What I like most about this story is that Seward took the point and never again tried to challenged Lincoln’s authority. Indeed, he became Lincoln’s strongest and most loyal supporter. Which didn’t mean that he never stood up to him – on the contrary, he learned to respect Lincoln, though that didn’t stop him offering advice, even if necessary in opposition to the President’s own views..

My second anecdote concerns just such a moment.

The Trent affair was one more crisis in the seemingly uninterrupted sequence of crises of a life-and-death civil war. The British mail ship RMS Trent had been stopped on the high seas by a US warship and two commissioners (diplomatic envoys) from the Confederacy – the self-proclaimed rebel government in the South – removed from it.

That profoundly displeased the British government. Which, in turn, was bad news for the US, one of whose primary war aims was to stop Britain or France intervening on the side of the South. Indeed, that was the very reason the Commissioners had been seized: to stop them appealing for support in Europe.

You can imagine, however, that there was joy in the North over the capture of these two leading rebels. And when objections were raised, a feeling that the US couldn’t possibly back down and hand them over. What a humiliation that would be.

Seward felt that was exactly what they should do, humiliating or not. As a higly effective lawyer he put together a powerful brief: the seizure, because it was carried out on the High Seas and not in US waters, was illegal; it was precisely to stop this kind of attack on neutral shipping by the British that the US had gone to war in 1812; and, in purely pragmatic, political terms, handing the commissioners back would disarm those in Britain who wanted to back the South.

Lincoln listened to the argument but wasn’t convinced. A good lawyer himself, he told Seward he would prepare a counter-argument and present it at the following day’s cabinet meeting.

In fact, at the Cabinet meeting next day, all the discussion was on how the handover of the Commissioners to the British should be undertaken, who should contact whom in the British government to make it happen, how the decision should be communicated to other politicians and the public.

As they emerged from the Cabinet room, Seward asked Lincoln what had happened to the case he had planned to present against him.

“I found,” Lincoln replied, “that I could not make an argument that would satisfy my own mind, and that proved to me that your ground was the good one.”

Is that anecdote about Seward or about Lincoln? I leave it to you to decide. Although I’m not convinced it matters.

My final anecdote comes from several days after Lincoln’s assassination.

Not everyone realises that the President was not the only planned victim of the murder plot. Assassins were due to target the Vice President Andrew Johnson and the Secretary of State William Seward, too.

Seward had suffered a serious carriage accident and was bedbound already. Fortunately, his would-be assassin was intercepted by his carers and, though Seward suffered severe additional injuries, they were not fatal.

As he began to recover, he saw through his window that the flag on the Defence Department was at half-mast.

“The President is dead,” he announced.

As he’d been instructed, his attendant attempted to contradict Seward, to spare his feelings. But Seward knew better.

“If he had been alive he would have been the first to call on me… and there’s the flag at half-mast.”

He lay back on his pillow with the tears flowing freely down his face.

Lincoln and he had been adversaries. But they had become close collaborators and finally friends. Seward mourned the death of his erstwhile rival as sincerely as anyone in the country, if not more so.

It’s not the least of Seward’s outstanding qualities that he was able to walk that road to reconciliation, respect and ultimately grief.

A birthday that reminded me of a strange event

Google – or was it Wikipedia? there are so many of these things these days and it matters so little which is doing the talking – reminded me this week that William Seward’s birthday fell on the 16th of May.

It was his 218th birthday so I don’t imagine he was doing much celebrating. But I raised a glass to his memory. Because he’s one of those figures that I think deserves to be remembered with affection and a twinkle of humour.

Not perhaps the most attractive of men
but a most attractive character

He was born into wealth and into a family which owned a few slaves in the last few years of that shameful institution in the state of New York. Whether or not his family’s experience of slave ownership played any role in the formation of his ideas, he grew up with an abiding and outspoken hatred of that abuse. Inevitably, he was one of the main figures in the launching of the Republican Party in the 1850s.

That party, as well as having a powerful conservative wing, was also the home of many US radicals, including most of those in favour of abolishing slavery. It was, above all and increasingly, the party of liberal Northern, business and financial interests, against a much more strongly agrarian and conservative current in the Democratic Party, in which Southern concerns played a forceful and growing role.

Funny how things have changed, isn’t it? The Liberal wing of Republicanism seems to have sunk without trace. It’s the Democrats today who represent the liberal currents of the wealthy North East, the West and of some central states.

By 1860, Seward had served two terms as Governor of New York and was approaching the end of his second term as a Senator for that State. He was one of the best-known and powerful voices in the Republican Party and his track record of public service was outstanding. No wonder that when his name was submitted to the Republican convention in Chicago that year, for selection as the party’s presidential candidate, he seemed not just the front runner but a shoo in for the nomination.

Back home in New York – candidates in those days didn’t attend the conventions, though it was there that nominations were decided, in a time before primaries – back home, his friends and family had put together a huge celebration to mark his selection including a battery of cannon to mark the great moment.

Unfortunately, however, he’d put off many of the more moderate members of his party. Or maybe it would be more accurate to describe them as prudent or even nervous. Many felt that to oppose slavery too openly would spell doom for the country, splitting it irretrievably and possibly even precipitating Civil War. Many felt it was wiser to adopt a less radical stance, perhaps of allowing slavery to continue where it was already practised but prevent its spread anywhere else.

Sadly for Seward, while he was able to command the biggest single bloc of convention delegates on the first ballot, it didn’t constitute a majority. And through the next three ballots, his vote remained static.

Instead, the less abolitionist majority, originally split among several candidates including Ohio Governor Salmon Chase and former Missouri Representative Edward Bates, began to coalesce around just one.

And who was he?

Well, his name is known around the world today, far beyond the borders of the United States. But you need to imagine yourself back into the atmosphere of the times to realise how extraordinary his nomination was.

He was a local politician of limited education, raised in agonising poverty, who earned his living practising law in a thinly populated state, and had only made any significant amounts of money when he began to take briefs for such enterprises as the railroads. His total experience as a politician at national level was a single two-year terms as a congressman eleven years earlier, when he had signally failed to make anything like a name for himself.

No Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, recognisable anywhere today after only a few months in office and so well-known, indeed, that she can simply be referred to as AOC.

A major national party nominated for President of a United States on the brink of Civil War, and at a crisis point over slavery that was as moral as it was political, a man barely known outside his State and with limited previous political experience.

He was, of course, Abraham Lincoln. He won the 1860 Presidential Election, though without winning a majority of the popular vote. Despite all the prudence of the moderates, the result of that vote precipitated the secession of the Southern states, and the Civil War they had hoped to avoid by selecting Lincoln in the first place.

One of his first acts was to appoint his rivals from Chicago to his Cabinet. Salmon Chase became Secretary of the Treasury. Edward Bates became Attorney General. And Seward, cheated of his coronation, became Secretary of State, the most senior member of the Cabinet, second only to the President himself.

Better, as Lyndon B. Johnson would later colourfully claim, to have them in the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.

I’m only going to tell three anecdotes about Seward, three of my favourites. But, this post being more than long enough already, I’ll come back to them in my next.

Happy 2017

1861 was a lousy year for the United States.

It started with southern States tumbling over each other to get out of the Union. Then in April civil war broke out. That was followed in July by the inexplicable conversion of the major Union victory at the First Battle of Bull Run into a catastrophic Union defeat (though it should be said that the notions of ‘major’ and ‘catastrophic’ would have to be significantly revised later in the war).

It’s no surprise, then, that on 31 December diarist George Templeton Strong wrote:

Poor old 1861, just going. It has been a gloomy year of trouble and disaster. I should be glad of its departure were it not that 1862 is likely to be no better.

155 years on, I feel we can safely echo Strong’s words. Particularly as 1862 turned out not only to be no better than 1861 but was, in fact, considerably worse. A feat 2017 is likely to repeat with respect to 2016.

The year just ended was one where many people, tired of the consensus that has predominated since the Second World War, decided that building bridges was no longer the way to go and we should have some new walls instead.

In June, the British people voted to turn the Channel once more into a moat rather than a mere waterway. Those who knew the sixties and seventies will remember the troubled times in which a former imperial power struggled to find a new vocation. By joining what became the European Union, Britain seemed to find one: no longer merely a diminishing force in the world, it would be a major contributor to the emergence of the Continent as a world power.

In deciding to leave, it has chosen to go back to the time of its decline. Those were the days when Britain was regarded as the sick man of Europe, plagued by poor productivity and constant strikes, where only the wealthy could enjoy a good restaurant meal or a holiday abroad. The nation steadily sank through the economic league table, with Italy at one point celebrating il sorpasso, the moment when its economy overtook the UK’s.

The EU turned that around, but it also opened the doors to immigration from Continental Europe. Those arrivals continue to play a vital role across the British economy, in the health service, transport, farming and catering. Such, however, is today’s fear of the outsider that most voters preferred to give up on the benefits of EU membership in the hope of controlling immigration. Ironically, the hope is likely to prove vain. The loss of benefit, however, will be real.

The American vote, however, was far more significant than Britain’s. It’s sad, though constitutional, that the victor took nearly 3 million fewer votes than his adversary. Donald Trump’s lack of a popular mandate is, however, going to have no impact on the way he exercises power in a democracy.

He’s the wall-builder extraordinary. Not that the one he promised, along the Mexican border, is likely to be built. Even if it is, he’s already made clear that much of it will be fence. But that’s part of his style: he feels he can make any promise he wants, without being bound to deliver – presumably, he has convinced himself that his intentions are pure and, in our post-truth society, honouring his word matters less than getting into a position in which he can mould it as he feels it needs.

His principal concern seems to be to make a friend of Vladimir Putin and an enemy of China. Whatever he does with physical walls, he has a metaphorical one in mind which will include Russia on his side and China firmly on the outside.

Aleppo: handiwork of Trump's pal Putin and his mate Assad

Putin has shown himself to be a strongman and supporter of strongmen, such as Assad in Syria or his new-found friend in Turkey, Erdogan. It’s telling that Trump wants to be associated with that club, perhaps because he also rather likes the homophobic, patriarchal and autocratic views it represents. If so, the US is going to become a considerable less pleasant place to be if you’re gay or a woman (how long will abortion remain a right?) and a great deal more unpleasant for African Americans, Hispanics or Muslims.

Meanwhile, we’d better hope that his attitude towards China represents another promise he has no intention of keeping. If he sticks to the collision course he’s plotted so far, the Trump presidency risks being not just bad but terminal.

Oh, well. George Templeton Strong survived 1862. He got through the end of the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination. He saw the US reunited and prospering. We too may need to keep our nerve and nurse our patience and wait for better days to emerge in the future.

It happened for Strong, so it could happen for us.

In the meantime – happy New Year!

A fearsome anniversary

Today, the 29th of March, is the anniversary of the bloodiest single day’s fighting in the entire history of England – indeed of Britain. The key battle of the Wars of the Roses that took place near the village of Towton in Yorkshire on this day in 1461 confirmed the grip on the throne of the White Rose of York, in the person of Edward IV, and ensured that the Red Rose of Lancaster, represented by Henry VI, would never win it back.

Estimates vary but most commentators agree that about 28,000 were killed at the battle of Towton. The notoriously awful first day of the Battle of the Somme in the First World War cost just over 19,000 dead.

The dead at Towton represent about 1% of the English population at the time, which is pretty scary. To give a sense of what that means, it would take between eighteen and nineteen days for the number of passengers travelling through Heathrow airport in London to reach 2.8 million; the equivalent of Towton would involve something like 150 to 200 crashes over that period of just more than two and a half weeks, with every passenger lost.

Of course, as a friend pointed out, estimates suggest that the Black Death a bit more than a century earlier had killed between a third and over a half of the English population; without the Black Death, the Towton dead wouldn't have represented such a high percentage. Equally, by causing two or three million deaths, the Plague showed itself to be a more impressive killer than our puny little wars (only by the twentieth century had we progressed enough to become as efffective as diseases in killing our own kind).

Even so, wiping out 1% of the population in a single days remains prettry remarkable – the First World War achieved a bit over 2% in four years. Towton achieved that distinction with swords, arrows, axes and spears. There were no machine guns, tanks or modern artillery pieces.

Perhaps all this proves just how bitter civil wars are. After all, despite the terrible bloodletting in the Pacific theatre during the Second World War, despite the senseless butchery of Vietnam, the single conflict in which the United States suffered the greatest loss of life remains the Civil War. Americans have never died in such numbers as at the hands of their fellow Americans.

It’s also amazing how pointless Towton was. After all, who cares today whether the Wars of the Roses were won by the house of York or the house of Lancaster? Edward IV and Henry VI were both Plantagenets – they were cousins. We sacrificed 1% of our population to sort out a family tiff.

The spin masters of the time dressed it all up as a matter of noble sacrifice, heroism and glory. Shakespeare, over a century and a half later, made a pretty good job of giving the whole sorry tale the nobility of an epic in the third part of Henry VI. In reality, it was just two branches of a family sorting out their naked drive for power and possessions by means of violence. The poetry was better, but Shakespeare’s history plays were really just the equivalent then of The Sopranos today.

At Towton itself, there’s not much to mark the site of the Battle, no real monument. Perhaps it’s more appropriate that way.