Seward, William H.

Seward, William H. (1801–1872), secretary of state during the Civil War.An 1820 graduate of Union College, Seward became a lawyer in Auburn, New York, and was active in the Anti‐Masonic Party. He subsequently led the Whig Party in the state. Elected governor in 1838, he entered the U.S. Senate in 1849 and established himself as a promoter of America's mission in the world and a leading opponent of slavery. In 1850, he appealed to a “higher law than the Constitution” in condemning slavery, and in 1858, by then a Republican, spoke of an “irrepressible conflict” between freedom and slavery.

After losing the party's 1860 presidential nomination to Abraham Lincoln, Seward was offered the State Department as a consolation prize. He accepted only in the false hope of thereby becoming president in all but name. Initially, he proposed going to war with France and Spain in order to reunite the country and avert the Civil War. But his subsequent achievements were considerable.

He worked successfully to keep the European powers out of the Civil War, smoothed relations with Great Britain after the Trent Affair, ended French intervention in Mexico through persuasion and the moving of American troops to the Rio Grande in 1866, and laid the groundwork for the so‐called Alabama claims for damages done by Confederate commerce raiders. He purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867 and annexed Midway in the same year, concluded a treaty with Great Britain for the suppression of the African slave trade, and opened diplomatic relations with the black republics of Haiti and Liberia. In his eight years in office, he negotiated more treaties with foreign nations than had all his predecessors combined.

With his vision of an American commercial hegemony that would spread democracy throughout the world, Seward was clearly ahead of his time. Such proposals as acquiring Hawaii, the Dominican Republic, and the Danish West Indies came to nothing at the time, as did plans for an isthmian canal and a worldwide telegraphic communications network. But they clearly foreshadowed the shape of things to come.
[See also Civil War: Domestic Course.]

Bibliography

Glyndon Van Deusen , William Henry Seward, 1967.
Norman B. Ferris , Desperate Diplomacy: William H. Seward's Foreign Policy, 1861, 1976.

Manfred Jonas