Word: sewards
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...Staff writer Zachary M. Seward can be reached at seward@fas.harvard.edu...
...Staff writer Zachary M. Seward can be reached at seward@fas.harvard.edu...
When discerning observers noticed that his words had power, they often assumed that someone else must have written them. His Secretary of State, William H. Seward, was a noted orator and wordsmith who was thought to have had a hand in Lincoln's first Inaugural. That was in fact true, but few of Seward's suggested changes were stylistic improvements, and we know from the manuscript that his chief contribution--a more conciliatory ending--was brilliantly rewritten by Lincoln. The Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, was sometimes thought to be responsible for Lincoln's best work, and occasionally...
...contrast, his three chief rivals for the Republican nomination were household names in Republican circles. William Henry Seward had been a celebrated Senator from New York for more than a decade and Governor of his state for two terms before he went to Washington. Ohio's Salmon P. Chase, too, had been both Senator and Governor, and had played a central role in the formation of the Republican Party. Edward Bates was a widely respected elder statesman from Missouri, a former Congressman whose opinions on national matters were still widely sought. All three men, knowing they were better educated, more...
Lincoln's Secretary, John Hay, described the mental torture of waiting for an hour with Secretary of State Seward and Lincoln in George McClellan's house for the general to return from a wedding. When McClellan finally did come back, he simply passed the room in which the President was sitting; another half an hour went by before a servant informed Lincoln that McClellan had gone to bed. Young John Hay was enraged. "I wish here to record what I consider a portent of evil to come," he wrote in his diary as he recounted the story of what...