THAT SAME DECEMBER OF 1859, Senator William Seward arrived back in the United States spoiling for a fight. A fateful political season was beginning. He had been away for almost eight months, but now he was the man of the hour. Even his political rivals, those who thought his positions too radical to win, thought he would certainly be chosen the Republican candidate for the presidency at the party’s national convention in Chicago in May 1860.
Seward’s political momentum had been growing in the North, he had become the “black Republican” symbol of all that was hated by the South. The previous fall, in October 1858, he had given a speech in Rochester, New York, that effectively, albeit informally, launched his candidacy for the nation’s top office and also sounded like a thinly veiled declaration of war. As the crowd greeted him with intense applause, he spread his slightly bowed legs and thrust his hands deeply into his pockets, almost like a gunslinger. He looked around at the audience. “Are you in earnest?” he asked. People didn’t know how to react. They fell silent for a moment. “Are you in earnest?” Seward demanded again. And the crowd erupted in applause. Now he had them.
The United States had been built on “two radically different political systems; the one resting on the basis of servile or slave labor, the other on the basis of voluntary labor of freemen,” Seward said. There should be no mistaking the fact that this was “an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become entirely either a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.” The showdown between North and South was very near at hand. Seward was vague about the means that would decide the conflict, and he could be conciliatory about short-term measures to keep the peace, but those details were the fine print. The headlines as people understood them declared that the death match was coming. Seward had summed that up in a phrase, “irrepressible conflict,” and there was no question which side he was on.
Then, in May 1859, seven months after the Rochester speech and a year before the national convention, Seward left on a grand tour across the Atlantic.
The band played “Hail to the Chief” as hundreds of supporters joined the senator from New York aboard the steamer Josephine for the ride across the harbor to the ocean liner Ariel. A brass cannon fired a salute; men waved their hats and handkerchiefs. “The sky is bright, the sun is auspicious, all the indications promise a pleasant and prosperous voyage,” Seward told the crowd of friends and dignitaries gathered around him. Another boat full of supporters, this one from Brooklyn, pulled alongside, and Seward gave them a fabulously disingenuous speech: “I had hoped, as I had thought, that I could pass out of the country in silence, to suck strength, health, vigor, and knowledge in foreign lands, unattended, unnoticed, if not unknown.” Seward told them that he believed “the great questions of justice and humanity before the American people are destined to be decided, and that they may be safely left to your hand, even if the instructor”—that is, Seward—“never returns.” The New York crowd, of course, went wild.
London, when Seward arrived, was a bit more reserved. The reputation that preceded him, which he did little to dispel, was of a party hack who, to win votes, liked to rattle a saber—especially in the direction of the United Kingdom. Although Europe’s dignitaries received Seward on the assumption he was likely to be the next president of the United States, he was such a divisive figure that many wondered how many states would remain in the Union over which he might preside.
Seward’s friend Lord Napier had prepared the way for him with introductions to all the major players in Britain. State etiquette prevented Queen Victoria from receiving Seward at court, so she arranged a private meeting. Lord Palmerston and Lord Russell were busy just then forging the centrist alliance that would retake the government in the name of their new Liberal Party. Still, they made time for Seward: Palmerston entertained him at his home in Picadilly; Russell invited him to his country estate, Pembroke Lodge. Seward was thoroughly pleased, but he did recognize that, in some respects, he was out of place. “I would not be an aristocrat here—I could not be a plebeian,” he said.
His time in England, largely because of his Yankee bluster and obliviousness to British sensibilities, was one long series of misunderstandings. Even taking into account the way British views of Seward changed over the next few years, coloring memories of his visit, he seems to have spread ill will among people who might have been expected to support him. He traveled to the Lake District to pay homage to Harriet Martineau, a woman whose understanding of the United States and commitment to social reform were well known on both sides of the Atlantic. But when he told her he had supported the violent diatribes in the United States against the Royal Navy’s Africa Squadron stopping slavers that flew the American flag, because “the more noise there is about war, the less probable war becomes,” she not only found the argument unconvincing, but was “aghast.”
This bellicosity toward Britain was something Seward put on and took off in America like the caricatured masks of a frown and a smile in Greek drama. One year he was talking about the inevitability of Canada breaking away from the Crown to join the United States; the next, after traveling north of the border, he decided that Canada would be a great independent nation in its own right. And this notion that talking about war would stop a war—especially with the United Kingdom—was something neither the British aristocrats nor the plebes cared to indulge. Palmerston, looking back on his encounters with Seward in London, called him a “vaporing, blustering, ignorant man” whose sheer egotism could make him a threat.
The Seward voyage of discovery did not end with his two months in Britain. It went on for almost six months more. One reason was that Seward’s political advisors were afraid he’d destroy his chances for the presidency if he were rolling around Washington and New York like a loose cannon on a fragile ship. “All of our discreet friends unite in sending me out of the country to spend the recess of Congress,” he wrote to his associate George Patterson the month before he boarded the Ariel, and Patterson, a seasoned New York politician, agreed. “You had better be absent a few months,” he wrote back. “Everything looks well now for 1860, and as no mistake will be made next winter, I feel as if the thing waspretty much finished.”
Another reason for the trip was Seward’s inclination to wanderlust. He had an omnivorous appetite for experience. He had been to Europe as a young man in the 1830s; he would go back as an old man on an around-the-world voyage in the 1870s. And there was the question of Harpers Ferry. Many of Seward’s critics, especially in the South, believed he had timed his absence so as not to be implicated in John Brown’s activities. (Although Seward and Jefferson Davis were personal friends, Davis and Senator James Mason of Virginia grilled him about Brown and about Hugh Forbes not long after he got back from his travels. But they never were able to build a case against him.)
For the apostle of “irrepressible conflict,” one of the most important reasons for this long sojourn in Europe and the Middle East in 1859 was anticipation of the crisis he might have to address as president. The United States was very possibly on the eve of Armageddon: the first war fought with the horrifying firepower of the full-blown Industrial Revolution. This would be a struggle vitally dependent on decisions made, goods bought, arms shipped, and bonds sold across the Atlantic. Economic power would be hugely important, and alternative supplies of cotton—from Egypt, for instance—might make up the difference if Southern cotton were cut off. So, clumsy as Seward was when he met with prime ministers, pashas, the pope, and an emperor, he hoped to explore likely alliances and alternative markets. “I came to Europe in 1859,” he said later, “to study the strength and disposition of the nations with whom we had important questions, and in a possible contingency, might have critical ones.”
But there were many times in the months and years to come when the calculations he made based on that study took the United States and Britain toward war, with Her Majesty’s consul in South Carolina right in the middle of the crisis.