Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [52]
Yet, crossing into Virginia, the Sewards entered a world virtually unchanged since 1800. “We no longer passed frequent farm-houses, taverns, and shops,” Henry wrote as the family carriage wound its way through Virginia’s Allegheny Mountains, “but our rough road conducted us…[past] low log-huts, the habitations of slaves.” They rarely encountered other travelers, finding instead “a waste, broken tract of land, with here and there an old, decaying habitation.” Seward lamented: “How deeply the curse of slavery is set upon this venerated and storied region of the old dominion. Of all the countries I have seen France only whose energies have for forty years been expended in war and whose population has been more decimated by the sword is as much decayed as Virginia.”
The poverty, neglect, and stagnation Seward surveyed seemed to pervade both the landscape and its inhabitants. Slavery trapped a large portion of the Southern population, preventing upward mobility. Illiteracy rates were high, access to education difficult. While a small planter aristocracy grew rich from holdings in land and slaves, the static Southern economy did not support the creation of a sizable middle class.
While Seward focused on the economic and political depredations of slavery, Frances responded to the human plight of the enslaved men, women, and children she encountered along the journey. “We are told that we see slavery here in its mildest form,” she wrote her sister. But “disguise thyself as thou wilt, still, slavery, thou art a bitter draught.” She could not stop thinking of the “wrongs of this injured race.”
One day Frances stopped the carriage to converse with an old blind slave woman, who was at work “turning the ponderous wheel of a machine” in a yard. The work was hard, but she had to do something, she explained, “and this is all I can do now, I am so old.” When Frances asked about her family, she revealed that her husband and all her children had been sold long ago to different owners and she had never heard from any of them again. This sad encounter left a lasting impression on Frances. She recorded the interview in detail, and later read it out loud to family and friends in Auburn.
A few days afterward, the Sewards came across a group of slave children chained together on the road outside of Richmond. Henry described the sorrowful scene: “Ten naked little boys, between six and twelve years old, tied together, two and two, by their wrists, were all fastened to a long rope, and followed by a tall, gaunt white man, who, with his long lash, whipped up the sad and weary little procession, drove it to the horse-trough to drink, and thence to a shed, where they lay down on the ground and sobbed and moaned themselves to sleep.” The children had been purchased from different plantations that day and were on their way to be auctioned off at Richmond.
Frances could not endure to continue the journey. “Sick of slavery and the South,” she wrote in her diary; “the evil effects constantly coming before me and marring everything.” She begged her husband to cancel the rest of their tour, and he complied. Instead of continuing south to Richmond, they “turned their horses’ heads northward and homeward.” For decades afterward, indelible images of Southern poverty and the misery of enslaved blacks would strengthen Seward’s hostility to slavery and mold Frances’s powerful social conscience.
WHEN SEWARD RETURNED to Auburn, a lucrative opportunity beckoned. The Holland Land Company, which held more than three hundred thousand acres of undeveloped land in western New York, was searching for a manager to parcel the land and negotiate contracts and deeds with prospective settlers. The company offered Seward a multiyear