Chapter 52

THE FORMATION OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

1854-5

The winter of 1855 became a turning-point in the career of William H. Seward. The voice of the anti-slavery Whigs proclaimed him the only man fitted by position, ability, and character to succeed himself in the United States Senate. To them he possessed all the necessary qualities for leadership. In his hands they believed the banner of opposition to the extension of slavery would be kept at the front and every other cause subordinated to it. This feeling was generously shared by the press of New York. "The repeal of the Missouri Compromise," said Henry J. Raymond in the _Times_, "has developed a popular sentiment in the North which will probably elect Governor Seward to the Presidency in 1856 by the largest vote from the free States ever cast for any candidate."[453] Even the Democratic _Evening Post_ admitted that "Seward is in the ascendancy in this State."[454]

[Footnote 453: New York _Times_, June 1, 1854.]

[Footnote 454: New York _Evening Post_, May 23, 1854.]

The Legislature was overwhelmingly Whig. Nearly three-fourths of the Assembly and two-thirds of the Senate had been elected as Whigs. Although Seward did not make a speech or appear publicly in the campaign of 1854, he had been active in seeing that members were chosen who would vote for him. But, notwithstanding the Whigs controlled the Legislature, many of them belonged to the Know-Nothings, whose noisy opposition soon filled the air with rumours of their intention to defeat Seward. The secrecy that veiled the doings of the order now concealed the strength of their numbers; but, as Seward's course had been sufficient to array its entire membership against him, there was little doubt of the attitude of all its representatives. Though he had not violently denounced them as Douglas did at Philadelphia, men of otherwise liberal opinions were angry because he seemed deliberately to support views opposed to their most cherished principles. His recommendation, while governor, to divide the public money with Catholic schools was recalled with bitter comment. The more recent efforts of Bishop Hughes, an ardent friend of the Senator, to exclude the Bible from the public schools, added to the feeling; while the coming of a papal nuncio to adjust a controversy in regard to church property between a bishop and a Catholic congregation in Buffalo which had the law of the State on its side, greatly increased the bitterness. Thus the old controversy was torn open, hostility increasing so rapidly that Thurlow Weed declared "there is very much peril about the senator question."

The plan of the Know-Nothings was to prevent an election in the Senate and then block a joint session of the two houses. This scheme had succeeded in defeating Ambrose Spencer in 1825 and Nathaniel P. Tallmadge in 1845, and there was no apparent reason why similar methods might not be invoked in 1855, unless the manifest inability of Seward's adversaries to unite upon some one opponent gave his supporters the upper hand. Millard Fillmore, Ira Harris, and Washington Hunt had their friends; but an anti-slavery Know-Nothing could not support Fillmore or Hunt, and a Silver-Gray Whig did not take kindly to Harris. This was the cornerstone of Greeley's confidence. Besides, the more bitter the criticism of Seward's record, the more inclined were certain senators of the Democratic party, who did not sympathise with the Know-Nothing aversion to foreigners, to support the Auburn statesman.[455] There was no hope for Seymour, or Dix, or Preston King, and some of their friends in the Senate who admired the anti-slavery views of Seward could stop the play of the Know-Nothings.

[Footnote 455: "There is about as much infidelity among Whigs at Albany as was expected; perhaps a little more. But there is also a counteracting agency in the other party, it is said, which promises to be an equilibrium."--F.W. Seward, _Life of W.H. Seward_, Vol. 2, p. 243.]

Thus the contest grew fiercer. It was the chief topic in Albany. All debate ended in its discussion. When, at last, DeWitt C. Littlejohn, vacating the speaker's chair, took the floor for the distinguished New Yorker, the excitement reached its climax. The speaker's bold and fearless defence met a storm of personal denunciation that broke from the ranks of the Know-Nothings; but his speech minimised their opposition and inspired Seward's forces to work out a magnificent victory. "Our friends are in good spirits and reasonably confident," wrote Seward. "Our adversaries are not confident, and are out of temper."[456] Finally, on February 1, the caucus met. Five Whig senators and twenty assemblymen, representing the bulk of the opposition, were absent; but of the eighty present, seventy-four voted for Seward. This stifled the hope of the Silver-Gray Know-Nothings. Indeed, several of Seward's opponents now fell into line, giving him eighteen out of thirty-one votes in the Senate and sixty-nine out of one hundred and twenty-six in the Assembly. The five dissenting Whig senators voted for Fillmore, Ullman, Ogden Hoffman, Preston King, and George R. Babcock of Buffalo. Of the nineteen opposing Whig votes in the Assembly, Washington Hunt received nine and Fillmore four. When the two houses compared the vote in joint session, Henry J. Raymond, the lieutenant-governor, announced with evident emotion to a sympathetic audience which densely packed the Assembly chamber, that "William H. Seward was duly elected as a senator of the United States for six years from the fourth of March, 1855."

[Footnote 456: F.W. Seward, _Life of W.H. Seward_, Vol. 2, p. 243.]

Seward did not visit Albany or Auburn during the contest. A patent suit kept him busy in New York City until the middle of January, after which he returned to his place in the Senate. He professed to "have the least possible anxiety about it," writing Weed early in December that "I would not have you suffer one moment's pain on the ground that I am not likely to be content and satisfied with whatever may happen;"[457] yet a letter written five months afterward, on his fifty-fifth birthday, gives a glimpse of what defeat would have meant to him. "How happy I am," he says, "that age and competence bring no serious and permanent disappointment to sour and disgust me with country or mankind."[458] To Weed he shows a heart laden with gratitude. "I snatch a minute," he writes, "to express not so much my deep and deepened gratitude to you, as my amazement at the magnitude and complexity of the dangers through which you have conducted our shattered bark, and the sagacity and skill with which you have saved us from so imminent a wreck."[459] But Seward was not more amazed at the dangers he had escaped than at the great number of congratulations now pouring in from opponents. "Was ever anything more curious," he writes his wife, "than the fact that this result is scarcely more satisfactory to my truest friends, than, as it seems, to so many lifelong opponents? We have nothing but salutations and congratulations here. How strange the mutations of politics."[460]

[Footnote 457: F.W. Seward, _Life of W.H. Seward_, Vol. 2, p. 243.]

[Footnote 458: _Ibid._, p. 251.]

[Footnote 459: _Ibid._, p. 245.]

[Footnote 460: _Ibid._, p. 246.]

After Seward's re-election the Kansas troubles began attracting attention. Governor Reeder fixed March 30, 1855, for the election of a territorial legislature, and just before it occurred five thousand Missourians, "with guns upon their shoulders, revolvers stuffing their belts, bowie-knives protruding from their boot-tops, and generous rations of whiskey in their wagons,"[461] marched into the territory to superintend the voting. This army intimidated such of the election judges as were not already pro-slavery men; and of six thousand votes, three-fourths of them were cast by the Missourians in the interest of slavery. The Northern press recorded the fraud. If further evidence were needed, Governor Reeder's speech, published in the New York _Times_ of May 1, in which he declared that the fierce violence and wild outrages reported by the newspapers were in no wise exaggerated, set all controversy at rest. Instantly the North was in a ferment. The predominant sentiment demanded that Kansas should be free, and the excitement aroused by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was quickly rekindled when the South approved the murderous methods intended to make it a slave State. A journal published in the pro-slavery interest threatened "to lynch and hang, tar and feather, and drown every white-livered Abolitionist who dares to pollute our soil," and secret societies, organised for the purpose of keeping out Northern immigrants, resolved "that we recognise the institution of slavery as already existing in this territory, and advise slave-holders to introduce their property as early as possible."

[Footnote 461: Spring's _Kansas_, p. 44; see also, Sara Robinson, _Kansas_, p. 27.]

As the year went on matters got worse. The territorial legislature, elected by admitted and wholesale fraud, unseated all free-state members whose election was contested, and proceeded to pass laws upholding and fortifying slavery. It declared it a felony, punishable by two years' imprisonment, to write or maintain that persons have not the right to hold slaves in the territory; it disqualified all anti-slavery men from sitting as jurors; it made one's presence in the territory sufficient qualification to vote; and it punished with death any one who assisted in the escape of fugitive slaves. When Reeder vetoed these acts the Legislature passed them over his head and demanded the Governor's removal. To add to the popular feeling, already deeply inflamed, President Pierce met this demand with affirmative action.

In the midst of this political excitement, the Hards met in convention at Syracuse on August 23, 1855. That party had been sorely punished in the preceding election; but it had in no way changed its attitude toward opponents. It refused to invite the Softs to participate; it denounced the national administration, and it condemned the Know-Nothings. Daniel E. Sickles, then thirty-four years old, who was destined to play a conspicuous part when the country was in difficulty and the Government in danger, sought to broaden and liberalise its work; but the convention sullenly outvoted him. It approved the Nebraska Act, refused to listen to appeals in behalf of freedom in Kansas, and rebuked all efforts to restore the Missouri Compromise. Only upon the liquor question did it modify its former declarations. The Hards had started off in 1854 in favour of prohibition. But during the campaign, Bronson changed his position, or, as Greeley put it, "he first inclined to water, then to rum and water, and finally he came out all rum." To keep in accord with their leader's latest change, the delegates now declared the prohibitory law unconstitutional and demanded its repeal. This law, passed on April 9, 1855, and entitled "An Act for the prevention of intemperance, pauperism, and crime," permitted the sale of liquors for mechanical, chemical, and medicinal uses; but prohibited the traffic for other purposes. Its regulations, providing for search, prosecutions, and the destruction of forfeited liquors, were the very strongest, and its enforcement gave rise to much litigation. Among other things it denied trial by jury. In May, 1856, the Court of Appeals declared it unconstitutional. But while it lasted it gave the politicians much concern. The Democrats disapproved and other parties avoided it.

On August 29, the Softs met in convention. The Barnburners, who had vainly extended the olive branch to the Hards, now faced an array of anti-slavery delegates that would not condone the Kansas outrages. They would disapprove prohibition, commend Marcy's admirable foreign policy, and praise the President's management of the exchequer; but they would not countenance border ruffianism, encourage slavery propagandists in Kansas, or submit to the extension of slavery in the free territories. It was a stormy convention. For three days the contest raged; but when final action was taken, although the platform did not in terms censure Pierce's administration, it condemned the Kansas outrages which the President had approved by the removal of Governor Reeder, and disapproved the extension of slavery into free territories. Among the candidates nominated were Samuel J. Tilden for attorney-general, and Samuel L. Selden of Rochester for judge of the Court of Appeals. Selden, who had been a district judge since 1847, was also nominated by the Hards.

The Kansas disclosures had the effect of drawing into closer communion the various shades of anti-slavery opinion in New York. Early in the summer, the question was earnestly considered of enlisting all men opposed to the aggressions of slavery under the banner of the Republican party, a political organisation formed, as has been stated, at Jackson, Michigan, on July 6, 1854. Horace Greeley had suggested the name "Republican" as an unobjectionable one for the new party; and, within a week after its adoption at Jackson, it became the name of the Free-soilers who marshalled in Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois, Vermont, and Massachusetts. The anti-Nebraska convention of New York, which reassembled in Auburn on the 27th of September, 1854, also adopted the name, calling its executive committee "the Republican state committee." It was not a new name in the Empire State. Voters in middle life had all been Republicans in their early years; and long after the formation of the National Republicans in 1828, and of the Whig party in 1834, the designation had been used with approval by the Regency. In 1846, Silas Wright spoke of belonging to "the Republican party;" and, in 1848, Horace Greeley suggested "Taylor Republicans" as a substitute for Whigs. But for twenty years the name had practically fallen into disuse, and old questions associated with it had died out of popular memory.

After full conferences between the Whig and Republican state committees, calls were issued for two state conventions to meet at Syracuse on September 26. This meant an opportunity for the formal union of all anti-slavery voters. Of the two hundred and fifty-six delegates allotted to the Republican convention, over two hundred assembled, with Reuben E. Fenton as their presiding officer. Fenton, then thirty-six years old, was serving his first term in Congress. He was a man of marked intellectual vigour, unquestioned courage, and quiet courtesy, whose ability to control men was to give him, within a few years, something of the influence possessed by Thurlow Weed as a managing politician, with this difference, perhaps, that Fenton trusted more to the prevalence of ideas for which he stood. He kept step with progress. His reason for being a Barnburner, unlike that of John A. Dix,[462] grew out of an intense hatred of slavery, and after the historic break in 1847, he never again, with full-heartedness, co-operated with the Democratic party. Fenton studied law, and, for a time, practised at the bar, but if the dream and highest ambition of his youth were success in the profession, his natural love for trade and politics quickly gained the ascendant. It is doubtful if he would have become a leading lawyer even in his own vicinage, for he showed little real capacity for public speaking. Indeed, he was rather a dull talker. The _Globe_, during his ten years in Congress, rarely reveals him as doing more than making or briefly sustaining a motion, and, although these frequently occurred at the most exciting moments of partisan discussion, showing that he was carefully watching, if not fearlessly directing affairs, it is evident that for the hard blows in debate he relied as much as Weed did upon the readiness of other speakers.

[Footnote 462: "He never became unduly excited about slavery. He had no sympathy for the religious or sentimental side of abolitionism, nor was he moved by the words of the philanthropists, preachers, or poets by whom the agitation was set ablaze and persistently fanned. He probably regarded it as an evil of less magnitude than several others that threatened the country."--Morgan Dix, _Memoirs of John A. Dix_, Vol. 1, p. 338.]

The Whigs, who had represented only a meagre minority of the voters of the State since the Know-Nothing defection, now responded to the call with a full quota of delegates, and elected John A. King president. King was nearly double the age of Fenton. He had been a lieutenant of cavalry in the War of 1812 and an opponent of DeWitt Clinton in the early twenties. The two men presented a broad contrast, yet King represented the traditions of the past along the same lines that Fenton represented the hopes of the future. One looked his full age, the other appeared younger than he was, but both were serious. Whatever their aspirations, they existed without rivalry or ill-feeling, the desire for the success of their principles alone animating leaders and followers.

Each convention organised separately, and, after adopting platforms and dividing their tickets equally between men of Whig and Democratic antecedents, conference committees of sixteen were appointed, which reported that the two bodies should appoint committees of sixteen on resolutions and of thirty-two on nominations. These committees having quickly agreed to what had already been done, the Whigs marched in a body to the hall of the Republican convention, the delegates rising and greeting them with cheers and shouts of welcome as they took the seats reserved for them in the centre of the room.

The occasion was one of profound rejoicing. The great coalition which was to stand so strong and to work such wonders during the next half-century doubtless had a period of feebleness in the first months of its existence; but never in its history has it had stronger or more influential men in its ranks, or abler and more determined leaders to direct its course. Horace Greeley reported its platform, demanding that Congress expressly prohibit slavery in the territories, and condemning the doctrines and methods of the Know-Nothings; John A. King, Edwin D. Morgan, and Reuben E. Fenton, destined to lead it to victory as its candidate for governor, sat upon the stage; Henry J. Raymond occupied a delegate's seat; and, back of the scenes, stood the great manager, Thurlow Weed, who had conferred with the Free-soil leaders, and anticipated and arranged every detail. Present in spirit, though absent in body, was William H. Seward, who, within a few weeks, put himself squarely at the head of the new organisation in a speech that was read by more than half a million voters.

After the enthusiasm had subsided the two chairmen, John A. King and Reuben E. Fenton, standing side by side, called the joint convention to order. This was the signal for more cheering. One delegate declared that not being quite sure which convention he ought to attend, he had applied to Seward, who wrote him it didn't make any difference. "You will go in by two doors, but you will all come out through one." Then everything went by acclamation. Speaker Littlejohn of the Assembly moved that the two conventions ratify the platforms passed by each convention; Elbridge G. Spaulding moved that the presidents of the two conventions appoint a state central committee; and John A. King moved that the names of the candidates, at the head of whom was Preston King for secretary of state, be given to the people of the State as the "Republican Ticket." Only when an effort was made to procure the indorsement of liquor prohibition did the convention show its teeth. The invitation, it was argued, included all men who were disposed to unite in resisting the aggressions and the diffusion of slavery, and a majority, by a ringing vote, declared it bad faith to insist upon a matter for which the convention was not called and upon which it was not unanimous.

The Know-Nothing state convention met at Auburn on September 26. It was no longer a secret society. The terrors surrounding its mysterious machinery had vanished with the exposure of its secrets and the exploiting of its methods. It was now holding open political conventions and adopting political platforms under the title of the American party; and, as in other political organisations, the slavery question provoked hot controversies and led to serious breaks in its ranks. At its national council, held at Philadelphia in the preceding June, the New York delegation, controlled by the Silver-Gray faction which forced Daniel Ullman's nomination for governor in 1854, had joined the Southern delegates in carrying a pro-slavery resolution abandoning further efforts to restore the Missouri Compromise. In this action the anti-slavery members of other Northern States, led with great ability and courage by Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, refused to acquiesce, preferring to abandon the Order rather than sacrifice their principles. The contest in New York was renewed at the state council, held at Binghamton on August 28; and, after a bitter session, a majority resolved that slavery should derive no extension from the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The convention at Auburn now took similar ground. It was not a great victory for the anti-slavery wing of the party; but it disproved the assurances of their delegates that the Americans of New York would uphold the pro-slavery action at Philadelphia, while the fervent heat of the conflict melted the zeal of thousands of anti-Nebraska Know-Nothings, who soon found their way into the Republican party.

But the main body of the Americans, crushed as were its hopes of national unity, was still powerful. It put a ticket into the field, headed by Joel T. Headley for secretary of state, and greatly strengthened by George F. Comstock of Syracuse for judge of the Court of Appeals. Headley was a popular and prolific writer. He had been educated for the ministry at Union College and Auburn Theological Seminary, but his pen paid better than the pulpit, and he soon settled down into a writer of melodramatic biography, of which _Napoleon and His Marshals_ attained, perhaps, the greatest popularity. Possibly little interest now clings to his books, which ordinarily rest on the high shelf with Abbott's _History of Napoleon_; but, in their day, it was far pleasanter to read the entertaining and dramatic pages of Headley, with their impassioned, stirring pictures of war and heroism, than the tame, tedious biographies that then filled the libraries. Headley's _History of the War of 1812_ immediately preceded his entrance to the Assembly in 1854, where his cleverness attracted the attention of his party and led to his selection for secretary of state. George F. Comstock, now in his forty-first year, had already won an enviable reputation at the Onondaga bar. Like Headley he was a graduate of Union College. In 1847, Governor Young had appointed him the first reporter for the Court of Appeals, and five years later President Fillmore made him solicitor of the Treasury Department. He belonged to the Hards, but he sympathised with the tenets of the young American party.

There were other parties in the field. The Free Democracy met in convention on August 7, and the Liberty party, assembling at Utica on September 12, nominated Frederick Douglass of Monroe, then a young coloured man of thirty-eight, for secretary of state, and Lewis Tappan of New York for comptroller. Douglass' life had been full of romance. Neither his white father nor coloured mother appears to have had any idea of the prodigy they brought into the world; but it is certain his Maryland master discovered in the little slave boy the great talents that a hard life in Baltimore could not suppress. Douglass secretly began teaching himself to read and write before he was ten years of age, and three years after his escape from slavery at the age of twenty-one, he completely captured an audience at an anti-slavery convention in Nantucket by his brilliant speaking. This gave him employment as an agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, and four years later brought him crowded audiences, in England, Scotland, and Ireland.

Frederick Douglass was a favourite everywhere. He had wit and humour, and spoke with the refinement of a cultivated scholar. He did not become a narrow and monotonous agitator. The variety of his intellectual sympathies, controlled by the constancy of a high moral impulse, wholly exempted him from the rashness of a conceited zealot; and, though often brilliant and at times rhetorical, his style was quiet and persuasive, reaching the reason as easily as the emotions. Coming as he did, out of slavery, at a time when the anti-slavery sentiment was beginning to be aggressive and popular in New England and other free States, Douglass seemed to be the Moses of his race as much as Booker T. Washington in these later years. Englishmen raised one hundred and fifty pounds and bought his freedom in 1846. The next year, as a Garrisonian disunionist, he began the publication of a weekly journal in Rochester; but he soon renounced disunionism, maintaining that slavery was illegal and unconstitutional. In the year the Liberty party nominated him for secretary of state, his publishers sold eighteen thousand copies of his autobiography, entitled _My Bondage and My Freedom_.

Before the campaign was far advanced it became evident that the Republican party was not drawing all the anti-slavery elements to which it was thought to be entitled; and, on the 12th of October, Seward made a speech in Albany, answering the question, "Shall we form a new party?" The hall was little more than two-thirds filled, and an absence of joyous enthusiasm characterised the meeting. Earnest men sat with serious faces, thinking of party ties severed and the work of a lifetime apparently snuffed out, with deep forebodings for the future of the new organisation. This was a time to appeal to reason--not to the emotions, and Seward met it squarely with a storehouse of arguments. He sketched the history of slavery's growth as a political power; he explained that slave-holders were a privileged class, getting the better of the North in appropriations and by the tariff. "Protection is denied to your wool," he said, "while it is freely given to their sugar." Then he pointed out how slavery had grasped the territories as each one presented itself for admission into the Union--Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama, almost at the very outset of the national career; then Florida, when acquired from Spain; then as much of the Louisiana Purchase as possible; then Texas and the territory acquired from Mexico--all the while deluding the North with the specious pretence that each successive seizure of free soil was a "compromise" and a final settlement of the slavery question. This opened the way to the matter in hand--how to meet slavery's aggressiveness. "Shall we take the American party?" he asked. "It stifles its voice, and suppresses your own free speech, lest it may be overheard beyond the Potomac. In the slave-holding States it justifies all wrongs committed against you. Shall we unite ourselves to the Democratic party? If so, to which faction? The Hards who are so stern in defending the aggressions, and in rebuking the Administration through whose agency they are committed? or the Softs who protest against the aggressions, while they sustain and invigorate the Administration? What is it but the same party which has led in the commission of all those aggressions, and claims exclusively the political benefits? Shall we report ourselves to the Whig party? Where is it? It was a strong and vigorous party, honourable for energy, noble achievement, and still more noble enterprises. It was moved by panics and fears to emulate the Democratic party in its practised subserviency; and it yielded in spite of your remonstrances, and of mine, and now there is neither Whig party nor Whig south of the Potomac. Let, then, the Whig party pass. It committed a grievous fault, and grievously hath it answered it. Let it march off the field, therefore, with all the honours.... The Republican organisation has laid a new, sound, and liberal platform. Its principles are equal and exact justice; its speech open, decided, and frank. Its banner is untorn in former battles, and unsullied by past errors. That is the party for us."[463]

[Footnote 463: F.W. Seward, _Life of W.H. Seward_, Vol. 2, p. 256. For full speech, see _Seward's Works_, Vol. 4, p. 225.]

When the meeting ended the people went out satisfied. The smallness of the audience had been forgotten in the clear, homely arguments, and in the glow kindled in every heart; nor did they know that the speech spoken in their hearing would be read and pondered by half a million voters within a month. Richard H. Dana pronounced it "the keynote of the new party."[464] But though sown in fruitful soil, insufficient time was to elapse before election for such arguments to root and blossom; and when the votes were counted in November, the Know-Nothings had polled 146,001, the Republicans 135,962, the Softs 90,518, and the Hards 58,394. Samuel L. Selden, the candidate of the Hards and Softs for judge of the Court of Appeals, had 149,702. George F. Comstock was also declared elected, having received 141,094, or nearly 5000 less than Headley for secretary of state. In the Assembly the Republicans numbered 44, the Know-Nothings 39, and the Hards and Softs 45.

[Footnote 464: _Diary of R.H. Dana_, C.F. Adams, _Life of Dana_, Vol. 1, p. 348.]

"The events of the election," wrote Seward, "show that the Silver-Grays have been successful in a new and attractive form, so as to divide a majority of the people in the cities and towns from the great question of the day. That is all. The rural districts still remain substantially sound. A year is necessary to let the cheat wear off."[465] To a friend who was greatly alarmed at the success of the Know-Nothings, he wrote: "There is just so much gas in any ascending balloon. Before the balloon is down, the gas must escape. But the balloon is always sure not only to come down, but to come down _very quick_. The heart of the country is fixed on higher and nobler things. Do not distrust it."[466]

[Footnote 465: F.W. Seward, _Life of W.H. Seward_, Vol. 2, p. 258.]

[Footnote 466: _Ibid._, p. 259.]

After the election, some people held the opinion that the prospect of a united anti-slavery party was not so favourable as it had been at the close of 1854; and men were inclined then, as some historians are now, to criticise Seward for not forcing the formation of the Republican party in New York in 1854 and putting himself at its head by making speeches in New England and the West as well as in New York. "Had Seward sunk the politician in the statesman," says Rhodes; "had he vigorously asserted that every cause must be subordinate to Union under the banner of opposition to the extension of slavery--the close of the year would have seen a triumphant Republican party in every Northern State but California, and Seward its acknowledged leader. It was the tide in Seward's affairs, but he did not take it at the flood."[467]

[Footnote 467: James F. Rhodes, _History of the United States_, Vol. 2, p. 69. See also p. 68. "Seward," says the historian, "had the position, the ability and the character necessary for the leadership of a new party. He was the idol of the anti-slavery Whigs.... Perhaps his sympathies were heartily enlisted in the movement for a new party and he was held back by Thurlow Weed. Perhaps he would have felt less trammelled had not his senatorship been at stake in the fall election. The fact is, however, that the Republican movement in the West and New England received no word of encouragement from him. He did not make a speech, even in the State of New York, during the campaign. His care and attention were engrossed in seeing that members of the Legislature were elected who would vote for him for senator." On July 27, 1854, the New York _Independent_ asked: "Shall we have a new party? The leaders for such a party do not appear. Seward adheres to the Whig party." In the New York _Tribune_ of November 9, Greeley asserted that "the man who should have impelled and guided the general uprising of the free States is W.H. Seward."]

Looking back into the fifties from the viewpoint of the present, this suggestion of the distinguished historian seems plausible. Undoubtedly Thurlow Weed's judgment controlled in 1854, and back of it was thirty years of successful leadership, based upon the sagacity of a statesman as well as the skill of a clever politician. It was inevitable that Weed should be a Republican. He had opposed slavery before he was of age. The annexation of Texas met his strenuous resistance, the Wilmot Proviso had his active approval, and he assailed the fugitive slave law and the Nebraska Act with unsparing bitterness. With a singleness of purpose, not excelled by Seward or Sumner, his heart quickly responded to every movement which should limit, and, if possible, abolish slavery; but, in his wisdom, with Know-Nothings recruiting members from the anti-slavery ranks, and the Whig party confident of success because of a divided Democracy, he did not see his way safely to organise the Republican party in New York in 1854. It is possible his desire to re-elect Seward to the United States Senate may have increased his caution. Seward's re-election was just then a very important factor in the successful coalition of the anti-slavery elements of the Empire State. Besides, Weed knew very well that defeat would put the work of coalition into unfriendly hands, and it might be disastrous if a hostile majority were allowed to deal with it according to their own designs and their own class interests. Nevertheless, his delay in organising and Seward's failure to lead the new party in 1854, left an indelible impression to their injury in the West, if not in New York and New England, "for unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required; and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more."