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.

Corbyn, leadership – and Lincoln

The British Labour Party’s tearing itself apart in a contest to choose a new leader, Owen Smith – or possibly to re-elect the existing one, Jeremy Corbyn. 

For many, the dispute is about principle or policy, but in reality it’s about something far more fundamental. It’s about leadership itself, which is hard to define, but easy to spot when we see it. And one historical figure has shown it far more powerfully than any other.

When Abraham Lincoln won the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, he started as far from the front-runner.

That position belonged to William Seward, who’d taken a strong position against slavery, the most controversial issue in the United States at the time. Another candidate, Salmon Chase of Ohio, had been even more strongly outspoken, and had the backing of the abolitionists within the party. The Republican Party was, however, new and had been formed by disparate, sometimes incompatible trends; the conservative faction, inclined to preserve the Republic’s traditions, even at the cost of retaining slavery, had its in Edward Bates, from the slave state of Missouri.

The most powerful expression of leadership

Despite his personal abhorrence of the institution, Lincoln’s position on slavery was that it had to be tolerated where it was already established, but it should not, on any account, ever be allowed to extend into any of the new territories of the still expanding United States.

Lincoln was initially in poor second place to Seward. But the latter, as well as enthusiastic supporters, had also made numerous enemies within the Republican Party. As supporters of other candidates switched, Lincoln closed the gap, overtaking him and winning the nomination on the third ballot.

At a time when it was regarded as inappropriate for candidates to campaign on their own behalf, Lincoln had to depend on others to canvass for him. In what is an extraordinary tribute to his generosity, no one campaigned more extensively than Seward. He started with a nine-state tour, addressing huge rallies; he ended with an intense campaign in his own state of New York, without which Lincoln might have been denied his victory.

If Lincoln wasn’t campaigning, that didn’t mean he was uninvolved. From his home in Springfield, he directed operations throughout the country, gave newspaper interviews and decided the content of the campaign. He kept himself astonishingly well-informed, as one visitor discovered to his consternation. Doris Kearns Goodwin tells the tale in her highly readable book, Team of Rivals: “I found that he was more conversant with some of our party performances in Oneida County than I could have desired.”

On campaign content, his view was that he would say nothing more than he had already published. But he was careful about the messages others were communicating. In another passage, Goodwin tells us:

John Wentworth, now the mayor of Chicago, was continually making references to an argument the party was trying to avoid – that a Republican win would bring an eventual end to slavery altogether. Knowing Wentworth was set to introduce Seward [at a public meeting], Lincoln asked the New Yorker to reassure the audience that Republicans “would not interfere with slavery where it already existed.” Seward readily agreed… In distancing themselves from Northern abolitionists, the Lincoln team was far more concerned with reassuring Northern conservatives than with conciliating the South.

A brilliantly-run campaign, to which Lincoln was able to recruit even his most powerful recent foe, with judicious use of silence or at least moderation on the key issue of the day, won Lincoln the presidency.

One of his first official actions was to form a Cabinet. As Secretary of State, the most senior position, he appointed William Seward. As Secretary of the Treasury, the second, he chose Salmon Chase and as Attorney General, Edward Bates. So all three his rivals for the Republican nomination were in his Cabinet.

The other four posts in the then seven-strong government went to Democrats. Not just rivals, but opponents of his party. With just one change, the appointment of Edwin Stanton, also a Democrat, as Secretary of War, Lincoln had the team that would help him win the Civil War for the Union – one of the most effective Cabinets the US has seen.

As the nation descended into civil war, Lincoln’s discretion on slavery proved invaluable once more. It was instrumental in keeping four slave states in the Union, and out of the Confederacy. And that was crucial to victory.

What about the question of slavery itself?

In January 1865, just months before he was murdered, Lincoln engineered the passage by Congress of the 13th Amendment banning slavery from the US for ever. Something he could never have done without winning the presidency and then the Civil War, by then all but over.

The lesson for us?

The road to political success is often a tortuous one. It takes a great deal of ingenuity, even deviousness, to follow it. It’s not enough to grab a megaphone and keep blaring out the message, however principled it may be, or even right. Sometimes, a little silence is far more effective.

You also have to use the political structures in which you live to bring in the changes you know are needed. Lincoln built a cabinet that maximised support for his government; he worked with Congress to build majorities for the measures he knew had to be passed; and because he handled the issue with care, he exorcised the great bane, slavery, that had poisoned his country at its roots since its foundation.

It’s too much to ask that Labour today finds itself a leader of the calibre of a Lincoln. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable that we set that kind of leadership as a benchmark to aspire to. And, sadly, our present leader, unable to win the support even of his own parliamentary colleagues, falls far below that standard.

Unifying, dynamic, inclusive: Corbyn sets out his stall

So Jeremy Corbyn, within 48 hours of taking up the mantle of leader of the Labour Party and of the official British Opposition, has named his first shadow cabinet. And, like all such decisions, it contains the usual mix of things to excite disappointment or to excite admiration.

The biggest disappointment is that of the five top jobs, not one has gone to a woman. It’s true that two of these are determined by election not appointment – his own and his deputy’s – but the other three, Shadow Chancellor, Shadow Foreign Secretary and Shadow Home Secretary, were in his gift.

One of these, perhaps the greatest, the finance post of Shadow Chancellor, he’s awarded to a close ally, the man who ran his campaign for the leadership, John McDonnell. The Labour Party has recent bitter experience of a leader at loggerheads with his Chancellor: Gordon Brown was famous for working constantly to replace Tony Blair.

In the end, then, there were only two posts that he could have handed out freely. He chose men for both. It might have been pleasing to see a woman in one of them. Well, we won’t, at least for now. He has at least been generous in both those appointments: Hilary Benn, who already held the Shadow Foreign Secretary, keeps the position under Corbyn; and as Shadow Home Secretary, he’s appointed his closest rival for the leadership, Andy Burnham.

He might well have shown more of such generosity, but a great many people from other currents in the Labour Party decided they simply would not serve in a Shadow Cabinet under him. So if there has been a failure of behaviour, it hasn’t been on his part, but on theirs. 

He has described the Shadow Cabinet he appointed as “unifying, dynamic and inclusive.” Clearly, he could only be as inclusive as far as people would accept inclusion. Equally, he can only unify those who don’t set out to divide; one can only hope that the sheer scale of his victory will silence serious rebellion, at least for long enough to see whether he can prove himself, and his team, sufficiently dynamic.

As well as including people who disagree with him, he has also displayed a readiness to carry into practice as leader a willingness to compromise, that he’d increasingly exhibited during the campaign to win the position. He has for instance appointed Maria Eagle Shadow Defence Secretary – always fun to see a woman taking on so traditionally macho a brief – though she disagrees with him fundamentally on scrapping Britain’s nuclear deterrent (so-called: it’s so small as to make it difficult to imagine which nation it might deter) and on leaving NATO.

In passing, it’s amusing that as well as Maria Eagle he has also appointed her twin sister Anna as Shadow Business Secretary. I’m not aware of any previous Shadow Cabinet or actual Cabinet that has contained a pair of twins.

A first? Twins in the Shadow Cabinet?
One of them's Maria Eagle and the other one's Anna

Corbyn has also agreed to campaign for Britain to stay in the European Union, a position he certainly does not enthusiastically endorse. Hilary Benn, as his Shadow Foreign Secretary, confirmed that there were no circumstances in which Labour would campaign for Britain to leave the EU. That’s another significant concession.

The measure of his approach was perhaps best summed up by Chris Bryant, who takes the role Shadow Leader of the House of Commons:

It’s going to be a bumpy ride. In the conversations that I’ve already had with Jeremy, though I disagree with him on lots and lots of different things, I have to say that he has been accommodating. It’s evident there’s going to be quite a bit of give and take and when I said, ‘look I will hold my views very strongly and passionately and will put them across, sometimes too aggressively,’ he said ‘you and me both, mate.’

A refreshing attitude. Though by no means a wholly unprecedented one. The man who filled the position of President of the United States more brilliantly than any other, Abraham Lincoln, took a not dissimilar position. He appointed to his cabinet the man who most commentators, not least himself, expected to win his party’s nomination for the White House, William Seward. Indeed, for a while, Seward tried to behave as the real power in government, until Lincoln explained to him, quietly and courteously but with unshakeable firmness, that he would hold ultimate authority and not his Secretary of State.

Lincoln and Seward were both moderates on the slavery question, wanting it to wither slowly rather than to abolish it immediately. But Lincoln appointed to another senior position in his cabinet, Treasury Secretary, Salmon Chase who was on the radical wing of his party.

He never used Lyndon Johnson’s colourful expression concerning FBI Chief, J. Edgar Hoover, “it’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.” That was his guiding principle. And it worked: Lincoln focused on the main issue in hand, the defeat of the rebellion in the South and restoration of the Union, but by doing so, he achieved not only that objective but also the final, complete abolition of slavery through the 13th amendment to the US Constitution.

I don’t know whether Corbyn can achieve greatness as Lincoln did, and I certainly hope he doesn’t share his fate. What I can say is that by giving way on such issues as Trident and the EU, he does give his party a far better chance of focusing on the key questions; developing an alternative economic policy to austerity, and taking the battle to the Tories. While in his Shadow Cabinet appointments, he’s done everything his adversaries will allow him to do to unify the party. As for dynamism, he's already shown he has plenty of that.

Incidentally, though there are only men in the five top jobs, there are more women than men in the Shadow Cabinet as a whole.