Reckoning with Race. Gene Dattel
nominee, received only 102 votes. Seward had been the favored candidate from the most populous state in the Union. The awkward Illinois lawyer would go on to win the Republican nomination and then the presidential election with only 40 percent of the popular vote. In Lincoln’s administration these two ambitious competitors who earlier had barely known each other would develop a close working relationship. Seward, the most powerful New York politician of the nineteenth century, became Lincoln’s secretary of state, his “Right Hand,” his “Indispensable Man.”
Seward and Lincoln had distinctly different backgrounds. Seward grew up in an affluent family in the small southern New York town of Florida. His father, Henry Seward, was an enormously prosperous farmer, land speculator, and well-connected politician who left an estate worth millions in today’s dollars. Henry’s access to power allowed him a three-hour visit in 1831 with former president John Quincy Adams. The precocious son, William Henry, was a superb student, and after graduation from Union College and the study of law he traveled to Europe with his father, attending debates in the House of Commons, walking in the Swiss Alps, and speaking with the aging Lafayette in Paris. By then the son’s vision for America was fully formed: “[T]he fearful responsibility of the American people to the people of the nations of the earth, [is] to carry successfully through the experiment which . . . is to prove that men are capable of self-government.”
Formally educated, cosmopolitan, and well-connected, Seward contrasted sharply with the homespun, self-taught, crafty, pragmatic, opportunistic lawyer from Illinois. The man who wrote and delivered some of America’s most inspiring prose had no formal education and used no focus group. Perhaps one element of Lincoln’s background needs further comment: he was a corporate lawyer who represented the Illinois Central Railroad on various matters, including taxes.
Seward is best remembered for his consistent anti-slavery position and his realism. The anti-slavery stance is sharply revealed in his famous “higher law” speech of 1850, in which he appealed to “a higher law than the Constitution” in his condemnation of slavery. Seward’s “higher law” was handed down by “the Creator of the Universe.” Seward the realist foresaw an “irrepressible conflict,” a “collision” over slavery: “[T]he United States, must and will . . . become either entirely slave-holding or entirely a free-labor nation” (1858). There was no equivocation about his position on slavery.
Seward’s attitude toward blacks was also clear. He saw slavery as the paramount issue—it must be abolished for the country to survive; but free blacks were of little concern. Like most other anti-slavery politicians, Seward held blacks, either free or enslaved, in low esteem. In 1860 he spoke of black inferiority and the impossibility of black equality.
The great fact is now fully realized that the African race here is a foreign and feeble element . . . incapable of assimilation . . . a pitiful exotic unnecessarily transplanted into our fields, and which it is unprofitable to cultivate at the cost of the desolation of the native vineyard.
This is a damning statement from the man who was clearer in his attack on slavery than even Abraham Lincoln.
“The North has nothing to do with the negroes,” Seward said in conversation in 1866. “I have no more concern for them than I have for the Hottentots. They are God’s poor, they always have been and always will be so everywhere.” These remarks, published in 1888, are perfectly consistent with Seward’s earlier statements. As much as white Americans would like their heroes to be racially enlightened by twenty-first-century standards, they must face the truth of pervasive racial animosity in the North as well as the South.
Seward strongly adhered to the plan (Lincoln’s and then Andrew Johnson’s) for a swift and lenient integration of the Confederate states into the reconstructed Union. He believed the states, not the federal government, should determine regulations for black suffrage. In a cabinet meeting in 1865 he voted against black enfranchisement. He also advocated vetoing the bill that would have renewed and strengthened the Freedman’s Bureau, the agency set up to oversee the welfare of freed slaves. In April 1866 Seward reiterated his views on a prompt reconciliation without concern for blacks, and advocated no federal intervention on their behalf.
I am ready to leave the interests of the most intelligent white man to the guardianship of his state, and where I leave the interests of the white I am willing to trust the civil rights of the black. The South must take care of its own negroes as the North does. . . . The North must get over the notion of interference with the affairs of the South. . . . The South longs to come home.
Seward supported black suffrage in New York State, where “their numbers were negligible,” but in 1867 he opposed a bill that enfranchised blacks in the city of Washington because of the size of the potential black vote. Only in time, he thought, would black enfranchisement be appropriate. He also thought that the civil rights legislation of 1866 was “unconstitutional on technical grounds.”
Today historians may concentrate on the racial implications of Reconstruction, but Seward and many of his contemporaries were consumed with the grand vision of international trade. According to Seward, commerce was “the chief agent of . . . advancement in civilization and enlargement of empire.” Thus despite his impeccable anti-slavery credentials, he declared that if necessary he would vote to admit California to the United States, “even if she had come as a slave state.” In the scheme of economic expansion, the preponderance of free blacks was assigned to their oppressive role of cotton laborers, with highly limited freedom and mobility.
A rather large and imposing statue of William Henry Seward rises on the southwest corner of Madison Park in New York City. By twenty-first-century norms of political correctness, Seward was distinctly anti-black and squandered an opportunity to assist free blacks. His words and actions clearly illustrate the distinction between Northern anti-slavery sentiment and anti-black attitudes.
Seward’s New York was decidedly anti-black. In 1790 the total black population of the state, both free and enslaved, was 6.27 percent of the total. A law providing for gradual emancipation intervened in 1799, and on the eve of the Civil War, in 1860, the black population of New York was 1.9 percent—representing an explosive growth in the white population and the numbers of slaves sold to the South. In 1821 New York eliminated a property requirement for white voters while increasing the suffrage qualification fee for blacks from $100 to a prohibitive $250. Thus in 1861 only three hundred blacks in New York City could vote. The state’s black voting restrictions were upheld in 1846 by a vote of 224,336 to 85,406. In state constitutional conventions of 1860 and 1869, a majority again defeated black enfranchisement by requiring a property value. In each case black inferiority became a talking point, and delegates overwhelmingly voted against black enfranchisement even with the state’s minuscule black population. New York voted against the Fifteenth Amendment, too. As ever, Northerners feared a black migration north.
The New York Times, a staunch supporter of Lincoln, advocated the reform of slavery rather than abolition. “We have admitted,” the Times argued on January 22, 1861, “the impossibility and the folly of immediate abolition of Slavery, [and] pointed out the ruin certain to flow from the sudden release of four millions of ignorant slaves from the dependence and control of masters. . . .” The great need of the South was a modification and amelioration of her system of slavery, which would keep blacks in the region’s cotton fields.
As white immigrants poured into New York during the eighteenth century, skilled black laborers were displaced and relegated to menial positions. Free blacks were left with jobs that whites did not want. Some blacks remained as sailors, but most became domestics in private homes, hotels, and boarding houses or worked as chimney sweeps, washerwomen, and “tubmen” (cleaners of privies). The gritty job of crawling down a chimney to remove soot was performed by black children between the ages of four and ten. These jobs, rather than stepping-stones to advancement, were forced steps backward.
Examples of race-based economic conflict illustrate the fragility of the blacks’ status. The historian Edgar McManus cited the former slave Austin Stewart’s 1857 description of their wretched plight:
Everywhere Negroes were shunned,