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By Root 6244 0

on the same platform in the spacious hall that served Boston as a religious and a secular meeting place. Seward, as the star attraction, spoke first, monopolizing most of the evening. Whereas most Whig speakers concentrated on internal improvements, the tariff, and public lands, Seward focused on slavery. He defended Taylor as a good man, trustworthy to support the Whigs’ determination to prevent slavery from expanding into those territories acquired by the Mexican War, though he hoped “the time will come, and that not far distant, when the citizens of the whole country, as well as Massachusetts, will select for their leader a freeman of the north, in preference to a slaveholder.” Gaining momentum, Seward predicted the “time will soon arrive when further demonstrations will be made against the institution of slavery,” eventually moving public conscience to liberate all the nation’s slaves.

The hour was late when Lincoln was introduced, but he captivated his audience with what the Boston Courier described as “a most forcible and convincing speech,” which scored a series of capital “hits” against both Democrat Cass and Free-Soiler Van Buren, whom he nicknamed the “artful dodger” of Kinderhook, referring to his frequent shifts of party and position. He concluded “amidst repeated rounds of deafening applause.” Recalling Lincoln’s “rambling, story-telling” speech more than two decades later, Seward agreed that it put “the audience in good humor,” but he pointedly noted that it avoided “any extended discussion of the slavery question.”

The next night, Seward and Lincoln shared the same room in a Worcester hotel. “We spent the greater part of the night talking,” Seward remembered years later, “I insisting that the time had come for sharp definition of opinion and boldness of utterance.” Listening with “a thoughtful air,” Lincoln said: “I reckon you are right. We have got to deal with this slavery question, and got to give much more attention to it hereafter than we have been doing.” While Lincoln had consistently voted for the Wilmot Proviso, he had not delivered a single speech on the issue of slavery or initiated anything to promote the issue. As the conversation drew to a close and the two men went to sleep side by side, they must have presented a comical image—the one nearly half a foot longer and a decade younger; Seward’s disorderly mass of straw-colored hair on the pillow beside Lincoln’s wiry shock of black hair.

Years later, as president, Lincoln recalled his trip to Massachusetts. “I went with hay seed in my hair to learn deportment in the most cultivated State in the Union.” He recalled in vivid detail a dinner at the governor’s house—“a superb dinner; by far the finest I ever saw in my life. And the great men who were there, too! Why, I can tell you just how they were arranged at table,” whereupon he proceeded to do just that.

The Whigs triumphed at the polls that November, bringing Zachary Taylor to the White House. It was to be the last national victory for the Whigs, who, four years later, divided on the slavery issue, would win only four states. To Chase’s delight, Free-Soiler Martin Van Buren polled more than 10 percent of the vote among the Northern electorate—enough to prove that antislavery had become a force in national politics. Indeed, in several Northern states, including New York, the votes for Van Buren that otherwise might have gone to the Democrats spelled victory for the Whigs.

When Lincoln returned to Congress for the rump session, influenced, perhaps, by his encounter with Seward, he drafted a proposal for the gradual emancipation of slaves in the nation’s capital, pending approval by the District’s voters. Similar proposals had been attempted before, but Lincoln now added several elements. He included provisions to compensate owners for the full value of the slaves with government funds and to allow government officials from slaveholding states to bring their servants while on government business. Finally, to mitigate the fears of Southern slaveholders in surrounding states, he added a provision