Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [51]
By return mail Seward pledged that he desired nothing but to return home, to share the family duties and read by the fireside on the long winter nights, “to live for you and for our dear boys,” to be “a partner in your thoughts and cares and feelings.” With Frances to support him, Seward promised to renew his Episcopal faith and attempt to find his way to God. He was “count[ing] with eagerness,” he concluded, “the hours which intervene between this period and the time when that life will commence.”
As Seward took leave of the many friends he had made in his four years in Albany, he decided against confronting Tracy. The day before his scheduled departure, however, a curious letter from his old friend provoked an immediate response. The letter opened with halcyon recollections of the early days of their acquaintance, when Tracy still possessed “golden dreams, of a devoted, peculiar friendship. How much I suffered,” he wrote, “when I was first awakened to the perception that these were only dreams…. For this you are no way responsible. You loved me as much as you could…but it was less far less than I hoped.” He explained that “this pain, this disappointment is my excuse for the capriciousness, and too frequent unkindness which I have displayed towards you.”
In an emotional reply, Seward explained that Tracy misunderstood completely the nature of the “alienation” that had befallen them. “Availing yourself of the relation existing between us,” Seward charged, “you did with or without premeditated purpose what as a man of honor you ought not to have done—pursued a course of conduct which but for the virtue and firmness of the being dearest to me” would have destroyed his entire family. Seward related his initial reluctance to read the letters Frances had surrendered to him; and his conclusion, after reading them, that Tracy “had failed to do me the injury you recklessly contemplated.
“Thenceforth Tracy,” he wrote, “you lost that magic influence you once possessed over me…. You still have my respect as a man of eminent talents and of much virtue but you can never again be the friend of my secret thoughts. I part without anger, but without affection.” Even at this heavy moment, Seward remained the consummate politician, unwilling to burn his bridges completely.
If Seward believed the crisis with Frances had forever muted the voice of his public ambitions with a contented domesticity, he was mistaken. No sooner had he returned to Auburn than he admitted to a friend: “It is seldom that persons who enjoy intervals of public life are happy in their periods of seclusion.” Within days, he was writing to Weed, pleading with his old friend and mentor to “keep me informed upon political matters, and take care that I do not so far get absorbed in professional occupation, that you will cease to care for me as a politician.”
In the summer of 1835, seeking distraction from the tedium of his legal practice, the thirty-four-year-old Seward organized a family expedition to the South. He and Frances occupied the backseat of a horse-drawn carriage, while their five-year-old son, Fred, sat up front with the coachman, former slave William Johnson. Their elder son, Gus, remained at home with his grandfather. Seward, as always, was thrilled by the journey. “When I travel,” he explained, “I banish care and thought and reflection.” Over a three-month period, the little party traveled through Pennsylvania and Virginia, stopping at the nation’s capital on their way back. While their letters home extolled the warmth and generous hospitality extended to them by Southerners all along their route, their firsthand encounter with the consequences of slavery profoundly affected their attitudes toward the South.
At the time of their journey, three decades of immigration, commercial enterprise, and industrial production had invigorated Northern society, creating thriving cities and towns. The historian Kenneth Stampp well describes how the