Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [198]
Thaddeus Stevens, the fiery abolitionist congressman from Pennsylvania, was beside himself. Writing to Chase, who had already spoken out against the adoption of any compromise measure, Stevens warned that if Lincoln “seeks to purchase peace by concession, and ignoring platforms, á la mode Seward, I shall give up the fight, being too old for another seven (or thirty) years war.”
The speech was particularly disappointing to those, like Carl Schurz, who had long considered Seward the leader of the great antislavery cause. “What do you think of Seward, my child?” Schurz asked his wife. “The mighty is fallen. He bows before the slave power. He has trodden the way of compromise and concession, and I do not see where he can take his stand on this back track…. That is hard. We believed in him so firmly and were so affectionately attached to him. This is the time that tries men’s souls, and many probably will be found wanting.”
In the heated atmosphere of Washington, the realization that members of his own party had lost faith in him took a heavy toll on Seward. Visiting the Capitol after the speech, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., was stunned by Seward’s altered appearance since their journey together on the campaign train the previous September. “There he was, the same small, thin, sallow man, with the pale, wrinkled, strongly marked face—plain and imperturbable—the thick, guttural voice and the everlasting cigar. Yet it was immediately apparent that his winter’s cares had told on him, for he looked thin and worn, and ten years older than when I had left him at Auburn.”
While his conciliatory address cost him the esteem of many longtime supporters, Seward still believed that offering his hand in peace in the attempt to prevent a civil war was the right judgment. His wife, Frances, profoundly disagreed. The final speech had reached her in Auburn by telegraph hours after it was delivered. She wrote her husband a blistering letter. “Eloquent as your speech was it fails to meet the entire approval of those who love you best,” she began. “You are in danger of taking the path which led Daniel Webster to an unhonored grave ten years ago. Compromises based on the idea that the preservation of the Union is more important than the liberty of nearly 4,000,000 human beings cannot be right. The alteration of the Constitution to perpetuate slavery—the enforcement of a law to recapture a poor, suffering fugitive…these compromises cannot be approved by God or supported by good men….
“No one can dread war more than I do,” she continued; “for 16 years I have prayed earnestly that our son might be spared the misfortune of raising his hand against his fellow man—yet I could not to day assent to the perpetuation or extension of slavery to prevent war. I say this in no spirit of unkindness…but I must obey the admonitions of conscience which impel me to warn you of your dangers.”
Stung deeply by her denunciation, Seward admitted that “I am not surprised that you do not like the ‘concessions’ in my speech. You will soon enough come to see that they are not compromises, but explanations, to disarm the enemies of Truth, Freedom, and Union, of their most effective weapons.”
Perhaps no one understood Seward’s painful position better than his oldest friend, Thurlow Weed. Weed loved the speech. “It will do to live and die by and with,” he said. Still, he realized that Seward had opened himself to continuing attack. “In the cars, most of the night,” Weed wrote, “I was thinking of the ordeal you are to pass. It is to be [a] great trial of Wisdom and Temper; in Wisdom you will not fail; but of our Tempers, at sixty, we are not so sure…. You had both once,