Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [21]
Although his father, an exception in the village, permitted his slaves to join his own children in the local schoolhouse, Henry puzzled over why “no other black children went there.” More disturbing still, he discovered that one of his companions, a slave child his own age who belonged to a neighboring family, was regularly whipped. After one severe beating, the boy ran away. “He was pursued and brought back,” Seward recalled, and was forced to wear “an iron yoke around his neck, which exposed him to contempt and ridicule,” until he finally “found means to break the collar, and fled forever.” Seward later would credit this early unease and personal awareness of the slaves’ plight for his resolve to fight against slavery.
The youthful Seward was not alone in his budding dislike for slavery. In the years after the Revolutionary War, the state legislatures in eleven Northern states passed abolition laws. Some states banned slavery outright within their boundaries; others provided for a system of gradual emancipation, decreeing that all slaves born after a certain date would be granted freedom when they attained adulthood. The slaves Seward knew as a child belonged to this transitional generation. By 1827, slavery would be fully eradicated in New York. While Northern legislatures were eliminating the institution, however, slavery had become increasingly important to the economic life of the cotton-growing South.
At fifteen, Seward enrolled in upstate New York’s prestigious Union College. His first sight of the steamboat that carried him up the Hudson was one he would never forget. Invented only a decade earlier, the steamboat seemed to him “a magnificent palace…a prodigy of power.” His first glimpse of Albany, then a rural village with a population of twelve thousand, thrilled him—“so vast, so splendid, so imposing.” Throughout his life, Seward retained an awe of the new technologies and inventions that fostered the industrial development of his rapidly expanding country.
At Union, Seward’s open, affable nature made him dozens of friends. Upon his arrival, he later confessed, “I cherished in my secret thoughts aspirations to become…the valedictorian of my class.” When he realized that his competitors for the honor seemed isolated from the social life of the school, he wondered if the prize was worth the cost. His ambitions were revitalized, however, when the president of Union announced that the Phi Beta Kappa Society “had determined to establish a fourth branch at Union College,” with membership conferred on the top scholars at the end of junior year. There were then only three active branches of Phi Beta Kappa—at Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth. To gain admission, Seward realized, would place him in the company of “all the eminent philosophers, scholars, and statesmen of the country.”
He made a pact with his roommate whereby the two “rose at three o’clock in the morning, cooked and spread our own meals, washed our own dishes, and spent the whole time which we could save from prayers and recitations, and the table, in severe study, in which we unreservedly and constantly aided each other.” Years later, his jovial self-confidence intact, Seward wrote: “Need I say that we entered the great society without encountering the deadly blackball?”
Seward began his senior year in good spirits. Without sacrificing his popularity with classmates, he was poised to graduate as valedictorian. But his prideful character temporarily derailed him. Strapped by the stingy allowance his father provided, he had fallen into debt with various creditors in Schenectady.