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the new party’s chief spokesman the moment he joined its ranks. Seward, Henry Adams wrote, “would inspire a cow with statesmanship if she understood our language.” The young Republican leader Carl Schurz later recalled that he and his friends idealized Seward and considered him the “leader of the political anti-slavery movement. From him we received the battle-cry in the turmoil of the contest, for he was one of those spirits who sometimes will go ahead of public opinion instead of tamely following its footprints.”
    In a time when words, communicated directly and then repeated in newspapers, were the primary means of communication between a political leader and the public, Seward’s ability to “compress into a single sentence, a single word, the whole issue of a controversy” would irrevocably, and often dangerously, create a political identity. Over the years, his ringing phrases, calling upon a “higher law” than the Constitution that commanded men to freedom, or the assertion that the collision between the North and South was “an irrepressible conflict,” became, as the young Schurz noted, “the inscriptions on our banners, the pass-words of our combatants.” But those same phrases had also alarmed Republican moderates, especially in the West. It was rhetoric, more than substance, that had stamped Seward as a radical—for his actual positions in 1860 were not far from the center of the Republican Party.
    Whenever Seward delivered a major speech in the Senate, the galleries were full, for audiences were invariably transfixed not only by the power of his arguments but by his exuberant personality and, not least, the striking peculiarity of his appearance. Forgoing the simpler style of men’s clothing that prevailed in the 1850s, Seward preferred pantaloons and a long-tailed frock coat, the tip of a handkerchief poking out its back pocket. This jaunty touch figured in his oratorical style, which included dramatic pauses for him to dip into his snuff box and blow his enormous nose into the outsize yellow silk handkerchief that matched his yellow pantaloons. Such flamboyance and celebrity almost lent an aura of inevitability to his nomination.
    If Seward remained serene as the hours passed to afternoon, secure in the belief that he was about to realize the goal toward which he had bent his formidable powers for so many years, the chief reason for his tranquillity lay in the knowledge that his campaign at the convention was in the hands of the most powerful political boss in the country: Thurlow Weed. Dictator of New York State for nearly half a century, the handsome, white-haired Weed was Seward’s closest friend and ally. “Men might love and respect [him], might hate and despise him,” Weed’s biographer Glyndon Van Deusen wrote, “but no one who took any interest in the politics and government of the country could ignore him.” Over the years, it was Weed who managed every one of Seward’s successful campaigns—for the state senate, the governorship, and the senatorship of New York—guarding his career at every step along the way “as a hen does its chicks.”
    They made an exceptional team. Seward was more visionary, more idealistic, better equipped to arouse the emotions of a crowd; Weed was more practical, more realistic, more skilled in winning elections and getting things done. While Seward conceived party platforms and articulated broad principles, Weed built the party organization, dispensed patronage, rewarded loyalists, punished defectors, developed poll lists, and carried voters to the polls, spreading the influence of the boss over the entire state. So closely did people identify the two men that they spoke of Seward-Weed as a single political person: “Seward is Weed and Weed is Seward.”
    Thurlow Weed certainly understood that Seward would face a host of problems at the convention. There were many delegates who considered the New Yorker too radical; others disdained him as an