Justice to Mr. Seward

The London Illustrated News devotes a column and more of its broad pages to criticism of the diplomatic correspondence of our Secretary of State, and strange thing among the London journals praises with earnestness and warmth the remarkable ability it displays.  It is in fact a eulogy rather than a criticism of Mr. Seward, and though the writer falls into a few biographical errors the appreciation is highly intelligent and flattering.  He says:

“The most remarkable character whom the recent turn of events in the United States has brought into the foreground is undoubtedly Wm. H. Seward.  President Lincoln’s star waxes pale beside that of the brilliant New Yorker.  The American cataclysm, though it has produced no great general able to educe order from the universal wreck of things, has at least brought forth a Minister of Foreign Affairs worthy of the occasion.  Earl Russell has recognized in a signal manner the ability of the man with whom he has already broken several lances, and exchanged as many vows of amity by republishing and laying before Parliament the entire Congressional public document containing the correspondence between Mr. Seward and the representatives of the Federal Government in all parts of the world.  We venture to believe that no candid mind can turn from the perusal of this voluminous correspondence without acknowledging that it is a lasting monument of Mr. Seward’s industry and genius.  With what a dexterous and happy art he expatiates on the same theme to each ambassador, and without once suggesting to the reader the idea of a repetition!  How prodigally he scatters the gems of political philosophy, quaint apothegms, felicitous appeals to the nobler sentiments of our nature dashed here and there (but very rarely) with a tings of resentment and menace!  Let us imagine Edmund Burk or William Gladstone at the Foreign Office privilege to disregard the fetters which tradition routine, and the proprieties and conventionalities of office impose upon our Ministers of Foreign Affairs, further privileged to open a new account in the national ledger with each foreign nation, dependency and colony, the position, would be analogous to that of Mr. Seward in 1861, and the literary result in the line of essay, disquisition and rhetoric would probably be far from dissimilar.  The American Secretary seems to have thought the official style of British diplomats and his immediate predecessors in office too hard and dry to suit his purposes, and to have hit on a medium between that and a florid sententiousness which characterizes the choicest effusions of the Chanceries of the Celestial Empire.”

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, May 31, 1862, p. 2