The President Never Came

Sunday 13 August 2006, on U.S. 20, in Auburn, New York.

This is the home of William H. Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State. Doris Kerns Goodwin write a wonderful account of Seward’s career and service in the Lincoln Administration in her latest book, “Team of Rivals,” which well worth reading. The two men fought each other for the Republican nomination in 1860, and Seward resented Lincoln at first. As the Civil War progressed, they became close allies and friends. When Seward was nearly killed in a carrage accident, not long before Lincoln’s assassination, the president visited Seward regularly, sitting on his bed, and read the day’s war dispatches to the injured Seward.

The evening Lincoln was killed, Seward was also attacked while confined in bed from the accident. He survived the knife attack, but was seriously injured. No one told the fragile man that his chief has been murdered. But when Seward finally was able to look out his window, and saw the flag at half-mast, he said, “It must be that the President is dead, because if he were alive, he would come visit me.”

See http://www.sewardhouse.org/