Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [197]
As Seward no doubt anticipated, his speech had little impact on the seven states of the Deep South, where the secession movement continued its course. The following week, five Southern senators, including Jefferson Davis, rose to deliver farewell speeches to their colleagues before resigning their seats and heading south. Davis delivered the most wrenching farewell. Unable to sleep for days, he appeared “inexpressibly sad,” very ill, and “in a state of mind bordering on despair.”
“I am sure I feel no hostility to you, Senators from the North,” he began. “I am sure there is not one of you, whatever sharp discussion there may have been between us, to whom I cannot now say, in the presence of my God, I wish you well.” The friendships forged over the years were not easily discarded. Seward himself had visited Davis every day during a painful illness several years earlier, when it seemed that Davis might lose his eyesight. Seated by Davis’s side, Seward would recount all the speeches delivered that day by both Democrats and Republicans. The ever-genial Seward told how at one point, “Your man outtalked ours, you would have liked it, but I didn’t.” The families of the senators likewise suffered as Southerners prepared for departure. Old Man Blair’s daughter, Elizabeth Blair Lee, and Varina Davis had been close friends for years. “Mrs Jef asked me if I was going down south to fight her,” Elizabeth told her husband, Phil. “I told her no. I would kiss & hug her too tight to let her break any bonds between us.”
As the senators from the seceded states packed up their belongings to return to their hometowns, it was clear that a “regime had ended in Washington.” The mansions of the old Southern aristocracy were closed; the clothes, papers, china, rugs, and furniture that embellished their lives were stowed in heavy trunks and crates to be conveyed by steamers to their Southern plantations.
Seward understood the momentum in the Deep South. His words and hopes that winter were directed at the border states. His “great wish,” young Henry Adams observed, “was to gain time,” to give the Union men in the border states “some sign of good-will; something, no matter what, with which they could go home and deny the charges of the disunionists.” In this respect, he seemed to succeed.
“As an indication of the spirit in which the Administration of Mr. Lincoln will be conducted,” a New York Times editorial concluded, the speech “must convince every candid man that its predominant and paramount aim will be to perpetuate the Union,—that it will consult, with scrupulous care, the interests, the principles, and the sentiments of every section.” While none of the concessions would recall the seceded states back into the Union, “many are sanguine in the hope that its wide diffusion through the border Slave States will stay the tide of secession.”
During the tumultuous time from Lincoln’s election in November 1860 to his inauguration in March 1861, Seward “fought,” Henry Adams judged, “a fight which might go down to history as one of the wonders of statesmanship.” In the weeks that followed, “the Union men in the South took new courage.” In the critical state of Virginia, the Union party prevailed. Its members defeated the secessionists by a large margin, and proposed a Peace Convention to be held in Washington with the implied promise that no further action would be taken until the convention had completed its work. Days later, Tennessee and Missouri followed suit. “Secession has run its course,” the New York diarist George Templeton Strong happily noted, betraying the false optimism throughout the North.
Seward was in the best of spirits after the speech, believing, as he told his wife, that without surrendering his principles, he had gained time “for the new Administration to organize and for the frenzy of passion to subside.” Unfortunately, hard-liners read Seward’s speech differently. Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, and Salmon Chase were outraged by his conciliatory tone in the face of what they considered treason on the part of the