Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [53]
He took a leave from his law firm and rented a five-bedroom house in Westfield, “more beautiful than you can have an idea,” hopeful that his wife and family would join him during the summer months. In the meantime, he invited Weed’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Harriet, to keep Frances company in Auburn, and to help with the two boys and their new baby girl, Cornelia, born in August 1836.
Seward soon found the land-developing business more engaging than law. The six young clerks he hired quickly became a surrogate domestic circle, though he assured Frances in his nightly letters that he missed her and his children terribly. Once more he reiterated how he yearned for the day when they would read aloud to each other by the fire. He had just finished and enjoyed three of Scott’s Waverley novels, but “there are a thousand things in them, as in Shakespeare, that one may enjoy more and much longer if one has somebody to converse with while dwelling upon them.” His children pined for him and the vibrant life his presence brought to the household. More than a half century later, his son Fred “so vividly remembered” one particular evening when his father read aloud from the works of Scott and Burns that he realized “it must have been a rare event.”
Life in Westfield, meanwhile, settled into a pleasant routine. So long as Seward kept intact the image of his happy home in Auburn, he could fully immerse himself in new adventure elsewhere. His serenity was shattered when his little girl contracted smallpox and died in January 1837. Returning home for three weeks, he begged Frances, who had plunged into depression, to come back with him to Westfield. She refused to leave her two boys and “did not think it would be quite right to take them both from their Grandpa.”
Back in Westfield, Seward wrote anxiously to Frances that the “lightness that was in all my heart when I thought of you and your sanctuary, and those who surrounded you there, was the main constituent of my cheerfulness.” But now “I imagine you sitting alone, drooping, desponding, and unhappy; and, when I think of you in this condition, I cannot resist the sorrow that swells within me. If I could be with you, to lure you away to more active pursuits, to varied study, or more cheerful thoughts, I might save you for yourself, for your children, for myself.”
The following summer, Frances was finally persuaded to join him in Westfield. In an exultant letter to Weed, Seward expressed his contentment. “Well, I am here for once, enjoying the reality of dreams,” he wrote. “I read much, I ride some, and stroll more along the lake-shore. My wife and children are enjoying a measure of health which enables them to participate in these pleasures.” He lacked but one thing to complete his happiness: “If you were here,” he told Weed, “we would enjoy pleasures that would have seduced Cicero and his philosophic friends from Tusculum.”
While Frances enjoyed her summer, she was unable to share her husband’s great contentment. Returning to Auburn in September, she told Harriet Weed she had “found Westfield a very pleasant little village…but it was not my home and you can very well understand that I am more happy to be here—There is a sort of satisfaction, melancholy it is, in being once more in the room where my darling babe lived and died—in looking over her little wardrobe—in talking with those who missed and loved her.”
By the fall of 1837, an economic slump had spread westward to Chautauqua County. This “panic” of 1837 brought widespread misery in its wake—bankrupt businesses, high unemployment, a run on banks, plummeting real estate values, escalating poverty. “I am almost in despair,” Seward wrote home. “I have to dismiss three clerks; they all seem near to me as children, and are almost as helpless.”
Once again, fortune smiled upon Seward