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 there was, for fifty years, an intimate and unbroken attachment, unique in political annals.