It was natural that Lincoln should offer him the state portfolio, and Seward accepted it. From first to last, he held true to the President, and the services he rendered the country were second only to those of Lincoln himself. When Lincoln was killed, an attempt was also made to murder Seward, and was very nearly successful--so nearly that for days Seward lingered between life and death. He recovered, however, to resume his place in Johnson's cabinet. Over the new President he had great influence; he had long been an advocate of mercy toward the South, and he did much to persuade the President to the course he followed in restoring the southern states to the Union, without reference to the wishes of Congress. Even John Sherman pronounced the plan "wise and judicious," but Stevens, Sumner, and their powerful coterie in Congress violently opposed it, and Seward came in for his share of the vituperation and bitter accusation which the plan called forth. Johnson's defeat closed his political career, and the last years of his life were spent in travel. The very cause of his downfall marks him as the greatest of the three, for he placed justice above expediency, and not even the attempt upon his life changed his feeling toward the South. Perhaps the wisdom of his judgment was never better exemplified than in his purchase from Russia of the great territory known as Alaska, for the sum of $7,200,000. Alaska was regarded at the time as an icy desert of no economic value, but time has changed that estimate, and the discovery of gold there made it one of the richest of the country's possessions. Outside of Seward, Sumner and Stevens, the most prominent public man of the time was Salmon P. Chase, an Ohioan who had for many years taken an important part in the anti-slavery controversy. Although sent to the Senate in 1849 as a Democrat, he left the party on the nomination of Pierce in 1852, when it stood committed to the support and extension of slavery. Three years later, he was elected governor of Ohio by the Republicans. He was Lincoln's secretary of the treasury, and financed the country during its most trying period in a way that compelled the admiration even of his enemies. He served afterwards as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, dying in 1873. He was another man whose life was embittered by failure to attain the prize of the presidency. Three times he tried for it, in 1860, in 1864, and in 1868, but he never came within measurable distance of it. For he lacked the capacity for making friends, and repelled rather than attracted by a studiously impressive demeanor, a painful decorousness, and an unbending dignity, which was, of course, no true dignity at all, but merely a bad imitation of it. In a word, he lacked the saving sense of humor--the quality which endeared Abraham Lincoln to the whole nation.