William Henry Seward, the American statesman, was born in Florida, Orange County, N. Y., May 16, 1801, and died at Auburn, in the same State, October 10, 1872. Precocious in his studies, he pursued his preliminary education in his native village, and, at the age of fifteen, entered, as a sophomore, Union College, then under the presidency of Eliphalet Nott, between whom and his pupil a life-long friendship, illustrated by mutual confidence and counsel, was early established. Seward's college course, especially brilliant in rhetoric and the classics, was interrupted in his senior year by a residence of six months, as a teacher, in Georgia, where previous impressions against African slavery were confirmed by observation of its workings. Returning to college, he was graduated with high honors in 1820, the subject of his Commencement oration being "The Integrity of the American Union." He was admitted to the bar at Utica, in October, 1822, and in January, 1823, settled at Auburn as a partner of Judge Elijah Miller, whose daughter he married in October, 1824. Although certain features of the law--its technicalities and uncertainties--were repugnant to him, he was soon in the full tide of professional success, and, in the opening of the circuit courts to equity jurisprudence, found much that was in harmony with his sense of justice. He was also, from the first, interested in politics, for which he had 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.