Booknotes: The Sewards of New York

New Arrival:

• The Sewards of New York: A Biography of a Leading American Political Family by Thomas P. Slaughter (Cornell UP, 2025).

This work represents yet another example of a recently uncovered cache of letters affording us the ability to shed new light on already well-documented figures from our Civil War-era past. In this case, it is roughly 4,000 letters that were previously "buried" within William Henry Seward's massive surviving collection of public correspondence (estimated at 350,000 pages!). These recent discoveries, the product of a decade of effort from University of Rochester students and library staff, helped Thomas Slaughter recover "the inner lives of the Seward family, tracing their joys and sorrows as the nation grappled with rapid expansion and deepening divisions on its path to the Civil War."

Of course, a major part of Slaughter's The Sewards of New York: A Biography of a Leading American Political Family is devoted to William Henry Seward. From the description: "William Henry Seward, the family's most prominent member, was a state senator, governor, US senator, and secretary of state. Henry, as his family knew him, was often absent from their Auburn, NY, home, in Albany or Washington, DC, and so remained connected to the family through the long letters numbering in the thousands that they exchanged. These writings reveal Henry as a son, brother, husband, and father, as much as they show him as a politician and statesman."

That said, Slaughter positions another member of the family at the forefront of his narrative. Henry Seward's wife, Frances, "is the hub around which this family story revolves." In a wider sense, the author "explores the extended Auburn family during a half century of profound change in American homes, marriage, and childrearing."

In sum, this study "paints a rich portrait of an extraordinary family that played a key role in nineteenth-century New York and national politics." In getting there, the volume examines four generations of Millers and Sewards from 1817 to 1860. Slaughter presents their story in a way that "takes us behind the curtain of the early Victorian era's private sphere. He, and the Sewards in their own words, portray life as it was lived by the influential and powerful, but also by many who lived more private lives that are now lost to us."