This Day in GOP History (Seward Switch Solidifies New Party)

Oct. 12, 1855—Even as Southern slaveowners and Northern nativists hoped he would be defeated in his re-election bid, Senator William H. Seward of New York threw his lot in with a new political coalition formed from the wreckage of the Whig Party and the alienation of Democrats who wanted to keep slavery out of the new U.S. territories west of the Mississippi.

The following month, victories for Seward and the abolitionist Salmon P. Chase in the Ohio Governor’s race signaled a formidable new political force in the North, if not yet the nation.

Officially, the Republican Party had only formed the year before in Ripon, Ill. But now, growing unrest over race, immigration and religion created conditions that made it possible for major politicians like Seward and Chase to view it as a feasible vehicle for their electoral ambitions.

Anger, tumult, even violence, were breaking out all across America in 1855, fed by native-born whites who felt more and more marginalized. If this sounds eerily similar to what is happening today--well, it was.

In the North, Midwest and West, the lower class feared the loss of jobs and/or income as a result of free slave labor. In the South, slave-owning aristocrats saw a threat of encirclement and decreased political power in the admission of new free states to the Union—and a delegitimization of their “peculiar institution” in bans on their rights to bring slaves into the new territories and to pursue escaped slaves into the North.

With the greatest difficulty, Congress had, with the Compromise of 1850, narrowly avoided unleashing secession over admitting to the Union new territories gained in the Mexican War. Recognizing that Congress could no longer resolve the issue on its own, Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas proposed a cure worse than the disease: the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which left the decision of banning slavery to voters in these territories. 

The result: in Kansas, a pitched battle between pro- and anti-slavery forces, with the former group engaging in enough voter intimidation to produce a fraudulently elected legislature.

At the same time, nativist sentiment directed against German and Irish immigrants—particularly virulent toward Roman Catholics—became concentrated in the American (or “Know-Nothing”) Party. At the start of 1855, the Know-Nothings had 10,000 lodges and about 1,000,000 members. Governors from the party took office in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, and additional gains were made across New England that spring.

A significant number of these also voted in New York State, where they considered what to do about Seward. His support in 1839 as New York Governor for equal educational funding for all state children, including in Catholic-run parochial schools, had left many biding their time, weighing whether to terminate his career.

With all of these ideological, ethnic and religious divisions, the two-party system that held steady through the Age of Jackson—the Democrats and Whigs—had splintered. The issue that unified the Republicans—keeping slavery out of the territories—made several ambitious Whigs curious about the new organization but, until the fall of 1855, unsure about its potential. One, former Congressman Abraham Lincoln, contemplating a return to politics after tending to his law practice for six years, wrote longtime friend Joshua Speed, “I think I am a Whig but others say there are no Whigs and I’m an abolitionist. I do no more than oppose extension of slavery.”

It was in this uncertain environment that Seward looked for political daylight in the fall of 1855. In September, he followed a maneuver suggested by his mentor, Albany political boss Thurlow Weed. As narrated by Doris Kearns Goodwin in Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2009):           

“Two state conventions, one Whig, one Republican, were convened in Syracuse in late September 1855. When Seward was asked by a friend which to attend, he replied that it didn’t matter. Delegates would enter through two doors, but exit through one. The Whig delegates assembled first and adopted a strong antislavery platform. Then, led by Weed, they marched into the adjoining hall, where the Republicans greeted them with thunderous applause.  From the remnants of dissolving parties, a new Republican Party had been born in the state of New York.”

By mid-October, Seward was ready to formally announce his new affiliation and explain the reason for his move, in a speech in Albany. The “privileged class” of slaveowners, he avowed, represented only “one-fifteenth part of the American people,” and could be countered at the ballot box. All that was wanting, he believed, was “organization.” But which one?

Not the Know-Nothing Party, he warned, because of “its false and prevaricating rituals, its unlawful and in Christian oaths, its clandestine councils and its dark conspiracies, its mobs and its murders.” Not the Democrats, who either actively pursued pro-slavery policies or weakly abetted a Presidential administration that would not stop them. Not the Whigs, who because of the slavery issue were no longer the “united and consolidated” party they had been even in the 1852 Presidential election.

That left the Republicans, with their “new, sound and liberal platform,” with principles broad enough to be supported by “true Whigs” and “true Democrats.”

Seward’s move was greeted ecstatically by his anti-slavery colleagues in Congress, including in a letter from Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts:

“I have devoured your speech with admiration & delight. The latter half I read aloud to the Longfellows who enjoyed it with me. It is very finely thought and composed. I am so happy that you and I are at last on the same platform and in the same political pew. I feel stronger.”

The victories for Seward and Chase went a long way toward answering that concern, and thrust these two politicians into the vacuum left in the last five years by the deaths of the “Great Triumvirate”: Senators Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun. 

They would vie for the GOP Presidential nod in 1860, continuing their jockeying for position and influence in the Cabinet of the surprise nominee of their party that year, Lincoln. All the while, they would cooperate just enough to help bring down the slave power they despised.

Flashback, June 1863: Tubman Spy Work Aids Union Army

Secessionists who discounted the intelligence of their slaves learned firsthand the folly of their contempt during a Union Army raid on rice plantations along the Combahee River in South Carolina. It wasn’t only that Federal army brass lent 150 African-American slaves to the operation, but that they employed the services of an unusually savvy woman—“Underground Railroad” “conductor” Harriet Tubman—to coordinate tips about Confederate defenses. The most crucial of the latter—the location of floating mines in the river—enabled the Union to free 750 slaves in one stroke, a daring attack at the heart of the plantocracy that had helped bring on the war.

The fact that Tubman was even down there, so deep in the heart of the Confederacy, testified, of course, to her daring, but also to a toughness bordering on ruthlessness. She had to be: her very survival, as well as those of family members, depended on not giving in to any physical or mental frailty, hers or others.

No more than five feet tall and slightly built, the teenage female slave, known then as Araminta Ros,s took a blow her body could ill afford to sustain. Blocking the way of her master as he tried to whip a fellow slave, she was hit by a two-pound weight thrown at the other slave. She would continue to be troubled, even while "conducting" the railroad, by what have been interpreted since then as epileptic fits. Her first attempt to escape to freedom from Maryland had ended when her brothers had gotten cold feet and, in sympathy, she had come back with them.

She would not make the same mistake twice, however. Thereafter, if someone she was helping escape had a change of heart, Tubman pulled out a gun to make sure that mind got changed again.

It’s not known how many escapees followed this tenacious woman, but at very least it consisted of relatives, likely around 70, with some estimates running even higher, to a few hundred. What is not in dispute, however, is that she not only returned repeatedly below the Mason-Dixon Line, but that sometimes she went considerably farther than her native Maryland. The perils were enormous, as were the extremes she ran to elude capture: leading groups by dirt roads or lightly trod paths at night, hiding “passengers” in forests or swamps.

When war broke out, Tubman offered her services to the Union Army, in areas under its control near the South Carolina coast. A year later, an escaped slave named Robert Smalls (later a congressman) managed to make a daring escape to freedom by commandeering a rebel boat, CSS Planter, running it past Confederate gun batteries in Charleston Harbor, and surrendering it to Union forces—at a stroke, offering a powerful counterweight to any notion that blacks could not match whites in intelligence and daring.

As astonishing as that deed was, the one in which Tubman was now involved, in the midst of the third year of the war—a period of dismal news for the North so far—was even more breathtaking. She was involved not only in a liberation raid, but also, as noted by Paul Donnelly in a post on the New York Times blog “Opinionator,” “for the first and only time in the Civil War, or for that matter any American conflict before this century, a woman (and a civilian at that) …[would play] a decisive role in planning and carrying out a military operation.”

The raid, carried out on June 1, 1863, required greater coordination skills than Tubman had had to show until this time. A major obstacle was that she did not know Gullah, the language of slaves along the coast. In fact, she knew little more about this group than the best-informed white officers. She had to rely, then, on 10 slaves she had recruited for the operation.

Tubman accompanied the Second South Carolina Regiment, led by Col. James Montgomery. The commander had been suggested to General David Hunter by none other than Tubman herself, who knew Montgomery when he had been associated with John Brown—and, therefore, appreciated his abolitionist zeal (a quality that many Union officers did not possess then). As the Union ships journeyed up the river, many slaves fled at sight of the strange vessels. But before long, Tubman’s network of 10 recruited spies had passed the word that "Lincoln's gun-boats come to set them free," and the slaves began to flock to the shore.

Despite the fact that the raid led to the recruitment of 100 slaves into the Union armed forces, Tubman did not receive any reward from the federal government while the war was raging. Nor, despite her intelligence work, did she receive a pension for her efforts in this direction, partly because the nature of the work lent itself to sparse documentation. In fact, the pension she eventually obtained only came through her second husband, a war veteran himself.

After the war, Tubman lived out the rest of her days in Auburn, N.Y., home to one of her strongest supporters in the federal government, Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William H. Seward. Fifty years after the breathtaking raid she had helped plan, frail and in dire financial straits, she was admitted to a rest home named in her honor, where she died.

 (A woodcut image of Harriet Tubman by an unknown artist, from Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman by Sarah H. Bradford.)