WILLIAM H. SEWARD

I shall have to depend upon you for taking care of these matters of foreign affairs, of which I know so little, and with which I reckon you are familiar.

Lincoln, like Seward, had developed a cadre of lifelong friends who were willing to do anything in their power to ensure his nomination. But unlike Seward, he had not made enemies or aroused envy along the way.

…the fact of the Convention was the defeat of Seward rather than the nomination of Lincoln.

After your first victory as New York Governor you gave jobs worth $3,000 to $20,000 per year to your friends and compatriots, and I returned to my garret and my crust, and my desperate battle with pecuniary obligations.

Who would be cleared by their committees? Not Washington, who was a rebel. Not Jefferson. who wrote that ... "rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." Not Garrison, who publicly burned the Constitution; or Wendell Phillips ... a philosophical anarchist; nor [William] Seward of the Higher Law.... Not Lincoln ... or Wilson ... or Justice Holmes.

a meddling, officious, incompetent little puppy.

If you can throw the Ohio delegation to Lincoln, Chase can have anything he wants.

Seward must be got out of the cabinet. He is Lincoln's evil genius. He has been President de Facto, and has kept a sponge saturated with chloroform to Uncle Abe's nose.

a triumph of a presumption of availability over pre-eminence in intellect and unrivalled ... success of the ruder qualities of manhood and the more homely attributes of popularity, over the arts of a consummate politician, and the splendor of accomplished statesmanship.

Glorious News. Lincoln and Seward Assassinated! Andy Johnson Inaugurated President.

The slave system is one of constant danger, distrust, suspicion, and watchfulness. It debases those whose toil alone can produce wealth and resources for defense, to the lowest degree of which human nature is capable, to guard against mutiny and insurrection, and thus wastes energies which otherwise might be employed in national development and aggrandizement.

Simultaneously with the establishment of the Constitution, Virginia ceded to the United States her domain, which then extended to the Mississippi, and was even claimed to extend to the Pacific Ocean.

The proposition of an established classification of states as slave states and free states, as insisted on by some, and into northern and southern, as maintained by others, seems to me purely imaginary, and of course the supposed equilibrium of those classes a mere conceit.

Democracies are prone to war, and war consumes them.

Hitherto, this tyranny of slaveholders over non-slaveholding citizens has been mainly confined to slaveholding communities. But Slavery has of late arrogantly claimed to be national. Congress is sanctioning the usurpation, and the Federal Courts and even State Courts are boldly enforcing it. In violation of the Constitution, Congress compels the non-slaveholders in the free States to capture and deliver the fugitive slave. Congress at its last session was on the eve of subverting the original, honored jurisdiction of State Courts over Federal officers

There is not only no free state which would now establish it, but there is no slave state, which, if it had had the free alternative as we now have, would have founded slavery.

I shall be nominated on the next ballot.

Spaniards planted slave States in America; England planted not only slave States, but free ones. Spain planted twice as many as England, and cultivated them with more assiduous and maternal care. The Anglo-American free States are all of them strong and vigorous, and already over-shadow the Continent. Europe regards them with respect and admiration. There is not one Spanish American State that is truly self-subsisting and independent.

Shall I tell you what this collision means? They who think it is accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators, and therefore ephemeral, mistake the case altogether. It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means the United States must and will, sooner or later, become entirely a slave-holding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.

I know and all the world knows, that revolutions never go backwards.