the means
employed. He preferred to continue the want of small bills for another
year rather than allow the opposite party to benefit by a repeal of
the obnoxious law; he approved Van Buren's course in the infamous
Fellows-Allen controversy; and, had he been governor in place of John
Jay in 1800, the existing Legislature would undoubtedly have been
reconvened in extra session, and presidential electors chosen
favourable to his own party, as Hamilton wanted. But, at the bottom of
his nature, there was bed-rock principle from which no pressure could
swerve him. He could exclaim with Emerson, "I will say those things
which I have meditated for their own sake and not for the first time
with a view to that occasion." In these words is the secret of his
relation to the Whig party. He asked no office, and he gave only the
ripe fruit of his meditative life. It is not to be supposed that, in
1838, he saw in the young man at Auburn the astute United States
Senator of the fifties; or the still greater secretary of state of the
Civil War; but he had seen enough of Seward to discern the qualities
of mind and heart that lifted him onto heights which extended his
horizon beyond that of most men, enabling him to keep his bearing in
the midst of great excitement, and, finally, in the presence of war
itself. Seward saw fewer things, perhaps, than the more active and
eloquent Granger, but Weed knew that he saw more deeply.[294]

[Footnote 294: "Apart from politics, I liked Seward, though not blind
to his faults. His natural instincts were humane and progressive. He
hated slavery and all its belongings, though a seeming necessity
constrained him to write, in 1838, to this intensely pro-slavery city,
a pro-slavery letter, which was at war with his real, or at least with
his subsequent convictions. Though of Democratic parentage, he had
been an Adams man, an anti-Mason, and was now thoroughly a Whig. The
policy of more extensive and vigorous internal improvement had no more
zealous champion. By nature, genial and averse to pomp, ceremony, and
formality, few public men of his early prime were better calculated to
attract and fascinate young men of his own party, and holding views
accordant on most points with his.... Weed was of coarser mould and
fibre than Seward--tall, robust, dark-featured, shrewd, resolute, and
not over-scrupulous--keen-sighted, though not far-seeing."--Horace
Greeley, _Recollections of a Busy Life_, pp. 311, 312.]

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