Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [50]
At the September 1834 convention in Utica, New York, Weed convinced members of the newly organized Whig Party that the young, energetic Seward would wage the best campaign for governor against the heavily favored Democrats. Seward was thrilled. Needing all the support he could gather, he did not want to risk alienating the influential Albert Tracy. Promises he had made to his wife could wait.
Brimming with high expectations in his upstart race, Seward eagerly embraced the Whig platform that promised to deliver for the nation something of the progress he had achieved for himself. Despite Weed’s caution that he faced an uphill battle, his native optimism would not be dampened. The campaign, complete with slogans and songs, was a lively affair. To counter charges that the boyish, red-haired Seward was too young for high office, the Whigs offered a gallery of historical figures who had achieved greatness in their youth, including Charlemagne, Napoleon, Lafayette, Mozart, Newton, and, of course, Whig leader Henry Clay himself. Seward anticipated victory until the final votes were tallied over a three-day period in November 1834.
Defeat shook the usually buoyant Seward to the core. He began to reevaluate his present life, his marriage, and his future. Obliged to return to Albany that December for the final session of the state senate, where he was a lame duck, he fell into an uncharacteristic state of melancholy. Unable to sleep, Seward feared that his consuming ambition, which had kept him away from his wife and children for months, had jeopardized his marriage.
“What a demon is this ambition,” he lamented from Albany, baring his soul in a long, emotional letter to his wife. Ambition had led him to stray, he now realized, “in thought, purpose, communion and sympathy from the only being who purely loves me.” He confessed that he had thought her love only “an incident” among his many passions, when, in truth, it was “the chief good” of his life. This realization, he feared, had come too late “to win back” her love: “I banished you from my heart. I made it so desolate, so destitute of sympathy for you, of everything which you ought to have found there, that you could no longer dwell in it, and when the wretched T. [Tracy] took advantage of my madness and offered sympathies, and feelings and love such as I [never did], and your expelled heart was half won by his falsehoods…. God be praised for the escape of both of us from that fearful peril…. Loved, injured and angel spirit, receive this homage of my first return to reason and truth—say to me that understanding my own feelings, yours are not crushed.”
Failing to receive an immediate reply from Frances, Seward tossed in his bed. He felt cold, clammy, and feverish. For the first time, the possibility occurred to him that his wife might have fallen out of love, and he was horrified. “I am growing womanish in fears,” he admitted in a second heartfelt letter. “Tell me in your own dear way that I am loved and cherished in your heart as I used to be when I better deserved so happy a lot.”
Finally, Seward received the answer he longed to hear. “You reproach yourself dear Henry with too much severity,” Frances wrote. “Never in those times when I have wept the most bitterly over the decay of my young dreams…have I thought you otherwise than good and kind…. When I realized most forcibly that ‘love is the whole history of woman and but an episode in the life of man’…even then I imputed it not to you as a fault but reproached myself for wishing to exact a return for affections which I felt were too intense.