William H. Seward

New York antislavery senator whose higher law doctrine made him the leading northern voice of the 1850s.

Overview

Seward governed New York, then served in the Senate from 1849 to 1861. He opposed the Compromise of 1850 as violating a higher law than the Constitution, denounced the Kansas-Nebraska Act, warned of an irrepressible conflict between slave and free labor, and resisted the fugitive slave laws, at times funding defense of those arrested under them. Though seen as too radical for the 1860 nomination, he became Lincoln's and later Johnson's Secretary of State, buying Alaska in 1867, and survived an assassination attack in 1865.