A Nation Divided

     In 1835 William H. Seward, who would become Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, took his wife and young son on a holiday excursion from their home in upstate New York through Pennsylvania and Virginia. They were impressed with the picturesque countryside as they rode through Pennsylvania, dotted as it is today with neatly kept farmsteads. Virginia was a study in contrast, stately homes interspersed with ragged shacks. Francis Seward later recounted two incidents that would shape their attitudes for the rest of their lives. They encountered a blind elderly Negro woman turning some sort of machine in her yard and stopped to talk. The woman told them she had to do something and given her age and condition that was all she could manage. She had no family. They had all been sold years before. She had never heard from them again. Francis couldn’t get the old woman out of her mind as they continued on but then something even more disturbing happened. As the sun was setting a group of twenty Negro boys came along, ages six to twelve, all tied together and being herded by a tall gaunt white man with a whip. He had purchased them from several different plantations earlier in the day and was taking them to market. The Sewards watched as he shoved the boys into a shed where they laid down and began to whimper themselves to sleep. Francis broke down in tears and asked her husband to take her home.
     Francis told and retold that story through the years. Tales like it, and worse, reinforced a Northern image of the South as an evil place, increasingly viewing the South and Southerners solely through the prism of slavery. Southerners reacted defensively. After all, slavery was as old as civilization. Romans had slaves, so did Greeks. Nobody condemned them. Southerners saw their society as one of grace and gentility. They were proud of the sort of hospitality they had shown the Sewards and in fact Francis was quick to remark on how kindly they had been received. Why all of a sudden were they villains? Only a few years earlier slavery had been not uncommon in the North as well. Who were Yankees to judge?
     William H. Seward became a distinguished Senator. He made a number of famous speeches opposing the extension of slavery to new territories. In 1860 he was the leading candidate for president at the Chicago convention of the brand new anti-slavery Republican Party. But there was sometimes an edge to Seward’s rhetoric that made people think falsely he was an abolitionist, that he favored the immediate abolition of slavery. It wasn’t true. Like Abraham Lincoln, Seward thought the constitution put slavery beyond the reach of the federal government. The Southern States would have to abolish slavery on their own. Also like Lincoln, he thought history was on his side. It would happen, soon. Still the perception was there and enough delegates thought he was too radical. Talk of war was heavy and most delegates wanted to avoid it if at all possible. Seward was unable to carry a majority on the first ballot. The nomination went to a compromise dark horse candidate, Lincoln.
     It wouldn’t matter. Lincoln was no more acceptable to the South than Seward was. I have often argued that the Civil War was about more than slavery and it was but in the end, to say that it wasn’t all about slavery is to put too fine a point on it. Lincoln was right in his acceptance speech. A house divided could not stand.