Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [140]
Departing from the bold assertions of his Rochester speech, Seward now claimed that “differences of opinion, even on the subject of slavery, with us are political, not social or personal differences. There is not one disunionist or disloyalist among us all…. We have never been more patient, and never loved the representatives of other sections more, than now…. The people of the North are not enemies but friends and brethren of the South, faithful and true as in the days when death has dealt his arrows promiscuously among them on the common battle-fields of freedom.”
The Republican Party in the North, he pledged, did not “seek to force, or even to intrude, our system” upon the South. “You are sovereign on the subject of slavery within your own borders.” The debate revolved only around the expansion of slavery in new and future states. Retreating from the larger vision of the nation’s future manifest destiny in some of his earlier speeches, he promised that Republicans did not harbor any ulterior motive “to introduce negro equality” in the nation at large.
Seward’s powerful conclusion—an altered form of which would appear in Lincoln’s inaugural address—was an impassioned testimony to the Union. The nation could never be sundered, for its bonds were not simply “the written compact,” or even the radiating network of roads, train tracks, trade routes, and telegraph lines that facilitated “commerce and social intercourse.” Rather, Seward urged his audience to conceive of the strongest bonds holding the Union together as “the millions of fibers of millions of contented, happy human hearts,” linked by affection and hope to their democratic government, “the first, the last, and the only such one that has ever existed, which takes equal heed always of their wants.”
The speech produced deafening applause in the galleries and widespread praise in the press. Reprinted in pamphlet form, more than half a million copies were circulated throughout the country. Some, of course, considered Seward’s tone too conciliatory, lacking the principle and fire of his previous addresses. That speech “killed Seward with me forever,” the abolitionist Cassius Clay reportedly said. Charles Sumner wrote to a friend that “as an intellectual effort,” Seward’s oration was “most eminent,” but that there was “one passage”—perhaps the one disclaiming any intention to support black equality—which he “regretted, & [Seward’s] wife agrees with me.”
Nevertheless, Seward’s goal had not been to rally the faithful but to disarm the opposition and placate uneasy moderates. “From the stand-point of Radical Abolitionism, it would be very easy to criticize,” Frederick Douglass observed in his monthly paper, but “it is a masterly and triumphant effort. It will reassure the timid wing of his party, which has been rendered a little nervous by recent clamors against him, by its coolness of temper and conservatism of manner…. We think that Mr. Seward’s prospects for the Chicago nomination will be essentially brightened by the wide circulation of this speech.” Seward, he concluded, was “the ablest man of his party,” and “as a matter of party justice,” he deserved the nomination.
“I hear of ultra old Whigs in Boston who say they are ready to take up Mr. Seward upon his recent speech,” a Massachusetts delegate told Weed. “All the New England delegates, save Connecticut’s, will be equally satisfactory.” And in Ohio, Salmon Chase admitted that there “seems to be at present a considerable set toward Seward.” Seward himself believed that the speech had been a great success, the final step in his long journey to the presidency.
In the heady weeks that followed, Weed assured