Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [89]
Seward stood before his Cleveland audience and called for the abolition of the black codes that prevented blacks from voting, sitting on juries, or holding office in Ohio. Slavery, he conceded, was once the sin of all the states. “We in New York are guilty of slavery still, by withholding the right of suffrage from the race we have emancipated. You in Ohio are guilty in the same way, by a system of black-laws still more aristocratic and odious.” Seward’s support that day for the black vote, black presence on juries, and black officeholding was startlingly radical for a mainstream politician. Even a full decade later, during his debates with Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln would maintain that he had never been in favor “of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry.”
Although the difference in their positions was due largely to the contrasting political environments of the more progressive New York and the conservative, Southern-leaning Illinois, Seward was more willing than Lincoln to employ language designed to ignite the emotions of particular crowds, tailoring his rhetoric to suit the convictions of his immediate audience. Knowing that his audience in the Western Reserve was likely far more progressive than many Eastern audiences, Seward ventured further toward abolitionism than he had in the past. Even so, the Cleveland Plain Dealer charged, Seward fell short of the antislavery zeal that put the Reserve a decade ahead of the East Coast.
Nor did Seward stop with his condemnation of the Black Laws, he proceeded to deliver a powerful attack against the Fugitive Slave Law, written, he claimed, in violation of divine law. He brought his speech to a close with a stirring appeal intended to rouse his audience to act. “‘Can nothing be done for freedom because the public conscience is inert?’ Yes, much can be done—everything can be done. Slavery can be limited to its present bounds, it can be ameliorated, it can be and must be abolished and you and I can and must do it.”
Seward’s speech worried Weed. Though he agreed that slavery was “a political crime and a national curse—a great moral and political evil,” he predicted that “this question of slavery, when it becomes a matter of political controversy, will shake, if not unsettle, the foundations of our Government. It is too fearful, and too mighty, in all its bearings and consequences, to be recklessly mixed up in our partisan conflicts.”
At a time when professed abolitionists remained an unpopular minority, subjected in some Northern cities to physical assault, Weed warned Seward that his provocative language would place him in the same camp with extremist figures such as William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. Seward weighed Weed’s concerns, acknowledging that the emancipation issue had not fully “ripened.” In the weeks that followed, he muted his stridency on slavery, allowing Weed the space necessary to carry his protégé to the next level. Weed ingratiated Seward with the legislators one by one. He rounded up the liberals and assured the moderates that when Seward talked about slavery, he “wanted to level society up, not down.” Furthermore, he promised the Taylor administration that Seward would loyally follow the moderate party line. Despite the split in the party and Fillmore’s rising star, Weed managed to corral a majority and send his friend Seward to the Senate.
“Probably no man ever yet appeared for the first time in Congress so widely known and so warmly appreciated,” declared the New