Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man by Walter Stahr (review)

Folks who see the Steven Spielberg film Lincoln will surely come away believing, with biographer Walter Stahr, that Secretary of State William Henry Seward was President Abraham Lincoln’s “indispensable man,” at least in the last few months of the war when Seward and Lincoln were pressing for Congress’s passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. Theatergoers may find that David Strathairn’s Seward exhibits considerably more of what Stahr calls the historical Seward’s characteristic “intelligence” and “diligence,” however, and less of his famous “eloquence, sociability, likability,” and his ability to keep “his sense of humor and hope through the darkest days” (34, 547). In Strathairn’s portrayal, Seward is relentlessly stern, forceful, and crafty, a career politician with no visible charm or charisma. But he is certainly Lincoln’s preeminent cabinet member: Strathairn’s time on screen with Daniel Day-Lewis’s impressive Lincoln far outstrips the time the celluloid president spends with any of his other cabinet members, including Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, portrayed in all his famous crabbiness by Bruce McGill.

Similarly, it is Walter Stahr’s premise in his new biography that Seward was uniquely “indispensable” to Lincoln throughout the years they worked together—that Seward was “the indispensable man of the Lincoln administration”—which leads me to my first quibble with the book (546; emphasis mine). Namely, I was troubled by Stahr’s determination to persuade readers of Seward’s absolute primacy in contexts where he might easily have acknowledged the many crucial contributions of others without diminishing Seward’s. Even before the war begins, for example, Stahr insists that “Seward was the central figure in the drama of the so-called secession winter,” a statement that provoked me immediately to wonder how much more important or influential Seward possibly could have been in those early months of 1861—when he had no official position in the federal government—than, say, President James Buchanan or Buchanan’s cabinet members, including Secretary of War Joseph Holt (3). Though Stahr modifies this particular claim later—“Seward may not have saved the Union during the secession winter . . . [but] he made essential contributions to keeping the peace and maintaining the Union through inauguration day”—such nuancing is rare. More common are declarations like “The destiny of the nation would indeed often rest” in Seward’s hands and “It is hard to name a single northern civilian other than Lincoln who contributed more than Seward” to “ensur[ing] that the Union emerged from the Civil War as one nation” (251, 16, 547). It would not detract in any way from Seward’s exertions on behalf of the North’s victory in the Civil War to address and even celebrate the similarly vast exertions of others in the crisis, such as Stanton, the victorious army’s civilian leader, or Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, who oversaw the all-important “war on the waters.”¹ Readers need not be urged to imagine a solitary Seward holding the whole future of the nation in his two hands to recognize that he was a dedicated public servant throughout his life and a vital member of Lincoln’s administration.

My second quibble with Seward is related to the first, in that a number of Stahr’s glowing assertions about Seward’s accomplishments seem strangely contrived and poorly supported, as if Stahr is trying (again, unnecessarily and perhaps counterproductively) to persuade not only readers but also himself of Seward’s greatness. Even before Seward becomes Lincoln’s secretary of state, for example, Stahr offers a confusing evaluation of his service as governor of New York between 1839 and 1842. “In many ways,” he writes, “Seward’s four years as governor were not successful,” and yet, he adds, “in other ways Seward was a great governor” (85). To the question of whether Seward was a “successful senator” in the dozen years before he joined the Lincoln administration, Stahr responds, “If one looks only at his legislative record, it was...