William H. Seward was a prewar Whig Governor of New York and after conversion to the nascent Republican party, served as Secretary of State 1861-1869. A prewar friend of Jefferson Davis and his wife, both privately considered Seward a man who lacked principle. Postwar, it was Seward as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who warned against trying Davis for treason as he sufficiently understood the Constitution to see it was Lincoln who actually committed the crime by waging war upon States.
Seward and the Freedman
“But Seward viewed the Black Codes as an issue of secondary importance. He was now more concerned with reconciliation between the white majorities, North and South, than he was with the fate of the blacks, for whom the war had already brought freedom. In April 1866 he gave an interview to Charles Eliot Norton and Edward Godkin, publishers of the influential magazine Nation. The fact that Godkin was a critic of President Johnson’s policies may account for some of the testiness of Seward’s remarks, but the secretary’s statements, as set down by Norton, are revealing.
According to Seward, there should be no question about readmitting the South to full representation in Congress; it had as much a right to representation as did the North. He then responded to a question about the blacks:
“The North has nothing to do with the Negro. I have no more concern for them than I have for the Hottentots. They are God’s poor; they always have been and always will be so everywhere . . . the laws of political economy will determine their position and the relations of the two races.”
(William Henry Seward, Lincoln’s Right Hand. John M. Taylor. HarperCollins, 1991, p260)