|
HarpWeek Commentary: Editor George William Curtis had supported fellow-New
Yorker and antislavery advocate William H. Seward for the Republican Presidential
nomination in 1860. Yet in the eyes of Curtis, Sewards strong support of
Johnsons position on Reconstruction was an indelible stain on the Secretary of
States record. |
|
MR. SEWARD
Among the memorable events
of this political season is the retirement of Mr. Seward from the public scene upon which
for so long a time he has been so conspicuous an actor. On the last day of his official
life the clerks in the Department of State addressed him a letter, expressing their regard
and admiration, and in his reply Mr. Seward said:
"Gentlemen, it would be as idle as it would be
presumptuous for us to undertake to fix a standard for the popular appreciation of our own
services. That will be the task of history, which delights in contemplating studiously the
vicissitudes of nations; and that task can only be performed when we shall have ceased to
be. Let us, therefore, be content for the present with claiming for ourselves and
conceding to each other the humble pretension that whatever may be the errors which
history may at any time detect, these errors have been in all cases errors of judgment,
and not of motive or purpose."
This is what every man would fain have
said in his own case, and what indeed may so often be truly said, of the most calamitous
errors that have ever been committed.
Doubtless it is impossible in the present
heats of party difference properly to estimate Mr. Sewards character and career. And
yet it is significant and suggestive that those whose faith in him twenty years ago was
deepest and strongest have long been wholly alienated, and those who, in the full flush of
young enthusiasm, regarded him as men only once regard a political chief, have long since
looked upon him in amazement and sorrow. The history of these times must answer the
question why it was that a statesman who, in 1860, was the acknowledged leader of a great
and victorious party which then came into power, in 1869, when that party was more firmly
fixed in popular confidence than ever, while during the intervening time its policy,
founded upon its original principles, had constantly prevailed, was wholly without the
sympathy or respect of the party or of any other.
It is not the case of Edmund Burke, for
when he parted with his old associates he became at once the acknowledged chief and superb
advocate of the great anti-revolutionary party of Europe. Besides, as Coleridge wisely
says, and as Mr. Morley has recently admirably shown, Burkes principles were always
the same, however the practical inferences from them at various times may have differed.
Will it, then, be urged by the future historian that Mr. Sewards principles always
remained the same, and that he separated from his party only upon the question of method
or of policy? Is his political sagacity to be vindicated by placing him with Mr. Dixon and
Mr. Doolittle and Mr. Andrew Johnson? Is posterity to be taught that the man who said at
Rochester that there was an irrepressible conflict between liberty and slavery, and who
should have known what his words politically implied, seriously believed, when slavery had
been abolished by civil war leaving millions of freedmen among subdued rebel masters, that
justice and honor and peace demanded that every right and every chance of those freedmen
should be left to the mercy of those masters: Will history represent this as the principle
of Mr. Seward or only as his policy?
To a contemporary it seems as if the sad
and severe Clio must depict Mr. Seward as a man who had become the representative of a
cause in which he had no moral convictions. His sagacity and his humanity seem to have
shown him that the conditions of this country were fatally hostile to slavery, and that a
political party founded, like the Democratic, upon the necessities of slavery, and
directed by great slave lords, must presently fall before the combined conscience and
industry of free laborers. But it was the view of a shrewd politician rather than of a
statesman or a moralist. This also explains his familiar intimacy with Mr. Weed; and it is
certainly doubtful whether either of these gentlemen saw that the moral element was the
real strength of their party. Mr. Seward was both an optimist and a doctrinaire, but he
lacked the moral earnestness and conviction that could alone explain the actual situation.
He honestly thought, doubtless, that the slave lords of the Democracy would fight the
battle out under the forms of law, and tranquilly submit to inevitable destruction. Had
Mr. Seward, as the representative of enlarging liberty, been as vitally in earnest as
David and Mason and the rest were, as the representatives of increasing slavery, he would
not have talked airily about a settlement in sixty days, nor have written to our ministers
abroad that they were not to suffer the question of slavery to be mentioned in discussions
of the rebellion. The champion of liberty in America, when it was taken by the throat by
Slavery, repelled the sympathy of every European friend it had.
The same want of moral conviction or of
that quality which is indispensable to a statesman, the perception of the strict relation
between morality and the public welfare, drew Mr. Seward into the support of the most
stupid, arbitrary, and unjust policy of Andrew Johnson. Other motives may have influenced
his action, motives that no one who has ever been a friend of Mr. Sewards will
suggest. And, indeed, in the complexity of motives of human conduct the honorable and the
unworthy are strangely mingled. It is enough for us to find a satisfactory explanation of
a career at once illustrious and lamentable without involving personal honor.
The future student of our history who
follows this political life of forty years, will not forget amidst his grief and
consternation at the close, that he who cheered by telegraph the ribald slanders of a
furious President upon spotless and honorable citizens - who declared that the man who
said he didnt care whether slavery was voted up or down, would live in grateful
remembrance with Abraham Lincoln, and who exultingly prophesied in his own State the
defeat by forty thousand majority of those whom he had politically taught, and who had
helped to save the country to liberty and mankind - was the same man who had bravely
proclaimed the higher law - who had exposed in calm and terrible detail the ghastly
despotism of slavery - and who, crossing the frontier, had planted before the very citadel
of slavery upon its own domain the standard of equal liberty. Had Mr. Seward been what the
young men of fifteen and twenty years ago believed him to be, his fame would have been as
sweet and sure as any in our history.
Articles Related to the Remainder of Johnson's Term
and Life:
The Democratic
Convention (Give me another Horse) (cartoon)
July 25, 1868, page 480
All Quiet on the Potomac (cartoon)
October 31, 1868, page 695
Andrew Johnson
March 13, 1869, page 162
The Political Death of the Bogus Caesar (cartoon)
March 13, 1869, page 164
A. J. Returns to his First Love (cartoon)
March 6, 1869, page 160
"Farewell, A Long Farewell, To All My
Greatness!" (cartoon)
March 13, 1869, page 176
Preparing To Go Out (cartoon)
March 13, 1869, page 171
Home At Last (cartoon)
April 24, 1869, page 267
Notes
November 6, 1869, page 707
"Poor Andy" (cartoon)
November 20, 1869, page 752
Mr. Seward
March 20, 1869, page 178
The Whirligig Of Time (cartoon)
February 20, 1875, page 164
Death of Andrew Johnson
August 14, 1875, page 655
The Late Andrew Johnson (illus)
August 14, 1875, page 665
|
|