decided genius. He came upon
the stage in the closing days of "The Era of Good Feeling," under
President Monroe, when parties were again dividing upon the issues that
have mainly obtained throughout the constitutional era. He approved the
principles of Hamilton, although his boyish training had been in the
Jeffersonian school. Enunciating his views with precision and felicity
of diction, his voice and pen were in constant request, and he rapidly
rose to distinction until, in 1834, he was the acknowledged leader in
the State of the Whig party and its candidate for governor.

Meanwhile he had supported De Witt Clinton, the champion of internal
improvements, and in 1824 drafted, for the Republican Convention of his
county a trenchant address, detailing the history and criticising the
aims of the "Albany Regency," which inspired the hostility to that
famous clique that compassed its overthrow fourteen years later. Among
his notable utterances of this period were an address on Grecian
independence, at Auburn, in 1827; a Fourth-of-July oration, at Syracuse,
in 1831, in which Calhoun's dogma of secession was denounced, and an
eulogy on La Fayette, at Auburn, in 1834. In 1828 he presided over the
Young Men's Convention, at Utica, in behalf of the renomination of
President Adams, and declined a congressional nomination. In 1830 he was
elected by the Anti-Masons to the State Senate, and was re-elected in
1832. He had a prominent and an influential part in the deliberations of
that body, although its youngest member, and in the political minority,
whose addresses to the people he wrote at the close of each session. His
most notable speeches were those for the common-school and canal
systems, the abolition of imprisonment for debt, the amelioration of
prison discipline, and the reform of the militia law, and against
corporate monopolies, increasing judicial salaries, Governor Marcy's
loan law, and the removal of the deposits by President Jackson. The
Senate was then a constituent portion of the Court of Errors, the
tribunal of last resort, and Seward delivered many opinions which
materially enhanced his legal reputation. In one instance he carried,
with substantial unanimity, the court with him, against the views of the
presiding judge, the eminent Chancellor Walworth. In 1833 he made a
rapid tour of Europe, embodying his reflections in letters to the Albany
_Evening Journal_, then edited by Thurlow Weed, between whom and Seward
th