Team of Rivals Read Online Free Page A

keep his inkwells, pens, treasured snuff box, and the ashes of the half-dozen or more cigars he smoked every day. “He usually lighted a cigar when he sat down to write,” Fred recalled, “slowly consuming it as his pen ran rapidly over the page, and lighted a fresh one when that was exhausted.”
    Midmorning of the day of the nomination, a large cannon was hauled from the Auburn Armory into the park. “The cannoneers were stationed at their posts,” the local paper reported, “the fire lighted, the ammunition ready, and all waiting for the signal, to make the city and county echo to the joyful news” that was expected to unleash the most spectacular public celebration the city had ever known. People began gathering in front of Seward’s house. As the hours passed, the crowds grew denser, spilling over into all the main streets of Auburn. The revelers were drawn from their homes in anticipation of the grand occasion and by the lovely spring weather, welcome after the severe, snowy winters Auburn endured that often isolated the small towns and cities of the region for days at a time. Visitors had come by horse and carriage from the surrounding villages, from Seneca Falls and Waterloo to the west, from Skaneateles to the east, from Weedsport to the north. Local restaurants had stocked up with food. Banners were being prepared, flags were set to be raised, and in the basement of the chief hotel, hundreds of bottles of champagne stood ready to be uncorked.
    A festive air pervaded Auburn, for the vigorous senator was admired by almost everyone in the region, not only for his political courage, unquestioned integrity, and impressive intellect but even more for his good nature and his genial disposition. A natural politician, Seward was genuinely interested in people, curious about their families and the smallest details of their lives, anxious to help with their problems. As a public man he possessed unusual resilience, enabling him to accept criticism with good-humored serenity.
    Even the Democratic paper, the New York Herald, conceded that probably fewer than a hundred of Auburn’s ten thousand residents would vote against Seward if he received the nomination. “He is beloved by all classes of people, irrespective of partisan predilections,” the Herald observed. “No philanthropic or benevolent movement is suggested without receiving his liberal and thoughtful assistance…. As a landlord he is kind and lenient; as an advisor he is frank and reliable; as a citizen he is enterprising and patriotic; as a champion of what he considers to be right he is dauntless and intrepid.”
    Seward customarily greeted personal friends at the door and was fond of walking them through his tree-lined garden to his white summerhouse. Though he stood only five feet six inches tall, with a slender frame that young Henry Adams likened to that of a scarecrow, he was nonetheless, Adams marveled, a commanding figure, an outsize personality, a “most glorious original” against whom larger men seemed smaller. People were drawn to this vital figure with the large, hawklike nose, bushy eyebrows, enormous ears; his hair, once bright red, had faded now to the color of straw. His step, in contrast to Lincoln’s slow and laborious manner of walking, had a “school-boy elasticity” as he moved from his garden to his house and back again with what one reporter described as a “slashing swagger.”
    Every room of his palatial home contained associations from earlier days, mementos of previous triumphs. The slim Sheraton desk in the hallway had belonged to a member of the First Constitutional Congress in 1789. The fireplace in the parlor had been crafted by the young carpenter Brigham Young, later prophet of the Mormon Church. The large Thomas Cole painting in the drawing room depicting Portage Falls had been presented to Seward in commemoration of his early efforts to extend the canal system in New York State. Every inch of wall space was filled