Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [139]
WHILE LINCOLN MOVED CAREFULLY, step by step, Seward, Chase, and even Bates had grown so eager for the presidential nomination that they made a number of costly errors as they headed down the final stretch.
In the crucial months before the nomination, Seward, at Weed’s rare misguided suggestion, took an extended tour of Europe. Certain that Seward had the nomination locked up so long as he refrained from the radical statements that frightened more moderate elements of the party, Weed recommended that his protégé remove himself from the increasingly contentious debate at home by traveling overseas for eight months. “All our discreet friends unite in sending me out of the country to spend the recess of Congress,” Seward joked.
Fourteen-year-old Fanny Seward, at home with her mother, was desolate at the prospect of an eight-month separation from her father. In the days before his ship was set to sail from New York, she could think of nothing else, she confided in her diary, but his approaching departure. An intelligent, plain girl, Fanny had been encouraged from an early age to read broadly and to write. Beyond her daily journal, she tried her hand at poetry and plays, determined, she once vowed, never to marry, so that she could live at home and devote herself to a literary career. While extremely close to her mother, a relationship she described as “‘my affinity’ with whom I think instead of speak,” she idolized her father. The night before he left for Europe, she could barely contain her tears.
In Europe, Seward was entertained by politicians and royalty alike, who assumed that he would be the next president. He met with Queen Victoria, Lord Palmerston, William Gladstone, King Victor Emmanuel of Italy, King Leopold I of Belgium, and Pope Pius IX. Moving from one dazzling social occasion to the next, Seward was ebullient. His letters home revealed the great pleasure he took in his sojourn, which carried him to Egypt and the Holy Land. Yet in the countdown to the presidential nomination, eight months was a critical absence.
Upon his return to Washington for the new congressional session that began after the New Year in 1860, Seward took Weed’s advice and prepared a major address. Designed to reassure Northern conservatives and moderate Southerners that he was a man who could be trusted to hold the Union together, the speech was to be delivered on the Senate floor on February 29, 1860. The reporter Henry Stanton later recalled that Seward showed it to him beforehand and asked him to write it up for the New York Tribune, with an accompanying description of the scene in the Senate chamber as he was speaking. “The description was elaborate,” Stanton claimed, “the Senator himself suggesting some of the nicer touches, and every line of it was written and on its way to New York before Mr. Seward had uttered a word in the Senate Chamber.” Seward was in “buoyant spirits,” assuring Stanton that with this speech they would “go down to posterity together.”
Frances Seward was less enthusiastic, perhaps fearing that her husband would bend too far to placate the moderates. “I wish it were over,” she told her son Will on the morning of the speech. Fanny, however, seated in the gallery directly opposite her father, was thrilled to witness the great event. “The whole house of Reps were there,” she gushed, “the galleries soon filled, alike with those of North and South, ladies and gentlemen, even the doorways were filled.” When the three-hour speech started, Fanny recorded, “no Republican member left his seat…the house was very still.” Everyone understood that this speech could influence the Republican nomination.
Seward took as his theme the enduring quality of the national compact. Though he maintained his principled opposition to slavery, he softened his tone, referring to