Episode Details

William H. Seward was born in 1801 in rural New York to a slave-owning farmer and was so bookish that he ran away from home to go to school. At 17, after a quarrel with his father over money, he left Union College to teach in Georgia, where he saw slavery at full scale. A broken carriage wheel in Rochester in 1824 introduced him to newspaper publisher Thurlow Weed, who became his political manager. Elected governor of New York in 1838, Seward backed school access for Catholic immigrants and jury trials for accused fugitive slaves. In 1846 he defended William Freeman, a Black man who killed four members of a white family, with an early insanity defense.

Elected to the Senate in 1849, he invoked a higher law than the Constitution in 1850 and spoke of an irrepressible conflict in 1858. The favorite for the 1860 Republican nomination, he lost to Abraham Lincoln, campaigned for him, and became secretary of state. He defused the Trent affair and oversaw early wartime arrests. On April 14, 1865, Lewis Powell stabbed him in bed, and a surgical neck brace from a carriage accident helped save him. He stayed on under Andrew Johnson, bought Alaska in 1867, and died in Auburn in 1872.

• Early in the Lincoln administration he sent a memo offering to take over policy, and Lincoln firmly declined.
• When Seward said Washington gentlemen did not black their own boots, Lincoln asked whose boots he blackened.
• In the Trent affair he argued the captain erred by seizing the envoys instead of bringing the ship before a prize court.
• He reportedly boasted he could ring a little bell and have any citizen arrested.
• The Alaska treaty cost $7.2 million, and his last words to his family were love one another.