Let us not forget that the South had shown itself blind to its own interests when, as soon as reconstructed by Andrew Johnson, it had, state by state, adopted laws virtually enslaving the black man again. But for this fatuity, there would probably have been no such feeling of vindictiveness at the North as soon developed there; certainly there would have been no excuse for such severity as was afterwards exhibited. So it is true in a sense that the South has itself to blame for the horrors of the reconstruction period, and for the suspicion with which its good faith toward the negro was for many years regarded. Sumner was not a vindictive man, and in his last years, incurred a vote of censure from his own State for offering a bill to remove the names of battles of the Civil War from the Army Register and from the regimental colors of the United States. He practically died in harness in 1874. Looking back at him, one sees how much larger he looms than Stevens; one cannot but admire his courage and honesty of purpose; his public life was a continual struggle for the right, as he saw it, and, remembering that, his faults need not trouble us. When Sumner arrived in the Senate, he found William H. Seward, of New York, already there. Seward, who had been admitted to the bar in 1822, at the age of twenty-one, was carried into the New York legislature by the anti-Masonic wave of 1830. Eight years later, he was the Whig governor of the state, and in 1849 was sent to the Senate. There he soon rivetted attention by his rebuke of Webster for condoning the Fugitive Slave Law, and caught the reins of party leadership as they fell from Webster's hands. It was then that he made his famous statement that the war against slavery was waged under a "higher law than the Constitution," and that the fall of slavery was inevitable. In 1856, when the newly-formed anti-slavery party, known as the Republican, met to name a national ticket, Seward was the logical candidate, but refused to allow his name to be considered, and the choice fell upon that brilliant adventurer, John C. Fremont. Fremont was, of course, defeated, and Seward continued to be the leader of Republican thought, and the chief originator of Republican doctrine. Indeed, he was, in a sense, the Republican party, so that, four years later, he seemed not only the logical but the inevitable choice of the party for President. His most formidable opponent was Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, who had been carefully working for the nomination, and who was blessed with the shrewdest of campaign managers. Seward led on the first ballot, and would have won but for the expert trading already referred to in the story of Lincoln's nomination.