Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [48]
Seward’s gregarious nature was in perfect harmony with the clublike atmosphere of the boardinghouses, where colleagues took their daily meals together and spent evenings in one another’s quarters gathered by the fire. “My room is a thoroughfare,” he told Frances. Early in the session, he befriended an older colleague, Albert Haller Tracy, a senator from Buffalo who had served three terms in the U.S. Congress and had once been touted as a candidate for vice president. In recent years, however, a series of debilitating illnesses had stalled Tracy’s political ambitions and “crushed all his aspirings.” In Seward, perhaps, he found a young man who could fulfill the dreams he had once held dear. “I believe Henry tells him everything that passes in his mind,” Frances Seward wrote to her sister, Lazette. “He and Henry appear equally in love with each other.”
“It shames my manhood that I am so attached to you,” Tracy confessed to Seward after several days’ absence from Albany. “It is a foolish fondness from which no good can come.” His friendship with another colleague, Tracy explained, was “just right, it fills my heart exactly, but yours crowds it producing a kind of girlish impatience which one can neither dispose of nor comfortably endure…every day and almost every hour since [leaving] I have suffered a womanish longing to see you. But all this is too ridiculous for the subject matter of a letter between two grave Senators, and I’ll leave unsaid three fourths of what I have been dreaming on since I left Albany.”
Seward at first reciprocated Tracy’s feelings, professing a “rapturous joy” in discovering that his friend shared the “feelings which I had become half ashamed for their effeminancy to confess I possessed.” In time, however, Tracy’s intensity began to wear on the relationship. When Seward did not immediately respond to one of his letters, Tracy penned a petulant note. “My feelings confined in narrow channels have outstripped yours which naturally are more diffused—I was foolish enough to make an almost exclusive attachment the measure for one which is…divided with many.”
Tracy’s ardor would fuel an intense rivalry with Thurlow Weed. “Weed has never been to see us since Tracy came,” Frances told her sister during a visit to Albany. “I am sorry for this although I can hardly account for it.” Confronted with the need to choose, Seward turned to Weed, not Tracy, for vital collaboration. Although Tracy continued a cordial association with Seward, he harbored a smoldering resentment over Seward’s increasing closeness to Weed. “Love—cruel tyrant as he is,” Tracy reminded Seward, “has made reciprocity both the bond and aliment of our most hallowed affections.” Absent that reciprocity, Tracy warned, it would be impossible to sustain the glorious friendship that they had once enjoyed.
A strange turn in Tracy’s affections likely resulted from his mounting sense of distance from Seward. He transferred his unrequited love from Henry to Frances, who also was feeling distant from her husband. Though still deeply in love after ten years of marriage, Frances worried that her husband’s passion for politics and worldly achievement surpassed his love for his family. She mourned “losing my influence over a heart I once thought so entirely my own,” increasingly apprehensive that she and her husband were “differently constituted.”
In 1832, Seward convinced Frances to accompany him to Albany for the legislative session that