This Day in Republican History 10/25/05

October 25, 1858 U.S. Senator William Seward (R-NY) describes Democratic Party as “inextricably committed to the designs of the slaveholders”; as President Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, helped draft Emancipation Proclamation (1) William Seward, speech, Rochester, New York (25th October, 1858) The slave system is one of constant danger, distrust, suspicion, and watchfulness. It debases those whose toil alone can produce wealth and resources for defense to the lowest degree of which human nature is capable, to guard against mutiny and insurrection, and this wastes energies which otherwise might be employed in national development and aggrandizement. In states where the slave system prevails, the masters directly or indirectly secure all political power and constitute a ruling aristocracy. In states where the free-labor system prevails, universal suffrage necessarily obtains and the state inevitably becomes sooner or later a republic or democracy. The two systems are at once perceived to be incongruous - they are incompatible. They never have permanently existed together in one country, and they never can. Hitherto, the two systems have existed in different states, but side by side within the American Union. This has happened because the Union is a confederation of states. But in another aspect the United States constitute only one nation. Increase of population which is filling the states out to their very borders, together with a new and extended network of railroads and other avenues, and an internal commerce which daily becomes more intimate, is rapidly bringing the states into a higher and more perfect social unity of consolidation. Thus, these antagonistic systems are continually coming into closer contact, and collision results. The Democratic Party derived its strength originally from its adoption of the principles of equal and exact justice to all men. So long as it practised this principle faithfully, it was invulnerable. It became vulnerable when it renounced the principle, and since that time it has maintained itself not by virtue of its own strength, or even of its traditional merits, but because there as yet had appeared in the political field no other party that had the conscience and the courage to take up, and avow, and practice the life-inspiring principle which the Democratic Party surrendered. At last, the Republican Party had appeared. It avows now, as the Republican Party of 1800 did, in one word, its faith and its works, "Equal and exact justice to all men." The secret of its assured success lies in that very characteristic, which in the mouth of scoffers constitutes its great and lasting imbecility and reproach. It lies in the fact that it is a party of one idea; but that idea is a noble one - an idea that fills and expands all generous souls - the idea of equality - the equality of all men before human tribunals and human laws, as they are equal before the divine tribunal and divine laws. Democrats hated Seward for his well-known opposition to slavery. In April, 1864, he made a speech where he argued that peace negotiations would be based on the principal "that slavery will be abolished and all slaves must be made unconditionally free" He therefore became a target of the conspiracy organized by John Wilkes Booth. On 14th April, 1865, while recovering from a serious injury as a result of a carriage accident, Seward was stabbed in the throat by Lewis Powell. Doctors feared that Seward would die but he made amazing recovery from his serious wounds and returned to his post as Secretary of State under President Andrew Johnson.