Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [172]
Though Seward had pledged his support to the Republican ticket in a public letter, he was so dejected in the aftermath of his defeat that he considered resigning immediately from the Senate. Without the onerous demands of the congressional session, he could remain in Auburn, surrounded by his loving family and consoling friends. “When I went out to market this morning,” he told one friend, “I had the rare experience of a man walking about town, after he is dead, and hearing what people would say of him. I confess I was unprepared for so much real grief, as I heard expressed at every corner.”
But he understood that a decision to resign would look petulant and would, as his friend Israel Washburn warned, “give the malignants” an opportunity to damage him further. In the end, he determined to return to Washington in late May to complete his Senate term. The journey back to Capitol Hill “in the character of a leader deposed by [his] own party” was agonizing for him, however, as he admitted in a long letter to Frances. “I arrived here on Tuesday night. Preston King, with a carriage, met me at the depot, and conveyed me to my home. It seemed sad and mournful.” Even the pictures hanging on the wall, “Dr. Nott’s benevolent face, Lord Napier’s complacent one, Jefferson’s benignant one, and Lady Napier’s loving one, seemed all like pictures of the dead.” When he reached the Senate, “good men came through the day to see me…. Their eyes fill with tears…. They console themselves with the vain hope of a day of ‘vindication;’ and my letters all talk of the same thing. But they awaken no response in my heart.” His only solace, he told her, was the realization that “responsibility has passed away from me, and that the shadow of it grows shorter every day.”
Frances was delighted at the thought of her husband’s permanent return to their Auburn home when his Senate term ended the following March. “You have earned the right to a peaceful old age,” she assured him; “35 years of the best part of a mans life is all that his country can reasonably claim.” This was not the time, however, for Seward to fade contentedly from public life. Weed’s report of his visit with Lincoln perhaps roused Seward’s own resolve. To withdraw from this fight would be an abdication of his fierce political ambition and his belief in the Republican cause.
In the weeks that followed the convention, Seward was overwhelmed with speaking requests from dozens of Republican committees throughout the North. “Your services are more necessary to the cause than they ever were,” Charles Francis Adams wrote. “And your own reputation will gain more of permanency from the becoming manner with which you meet this disappointment, than it would from all the brilliancy of the highest success.”
“I am content to quit with the political world, when it proposes to quit with me,” Seward told Weed in late June. “But I am not insensible to the claims of a million of friends, nor indifferent to the opinion of mankind. All that seems to me clear, just now, is that it would not be wise to rush in at the beginning of the canvass, and so seem, most falsely, to fear that I shall be forgotten. Later in the canvass, it may be seen that I am wanted for the public interest.” So he delayed, while entreaties to join streamed in, finally committing himself to an electioneering tour in nine states in late August and early September. The announcement that Seward “was about to take the platform