Lewis Powell: The conspirator who was "different."

[Linda Anderson]

(08-15-2014 02:32 PM)L Verge Wrote:  Hadn't Seward said something earlier in the war, however, about assassination not being in the American nature of politics?

Here is what Seward wrote in 1862 to John Bigelow, the American counsel in Paris.

"Assassination is not an American practice or habit, and one so vicious and so desperate cannot be engrafted into our political system. This conviction of mine has steadily gained strength since the Civil War began. Every day's experience confirms it. The President, during the heated season, occupies a country house near the Soldiers' Home, two or three miles from the city. He goes to and...from that place on horseback, night and morning, unguarded. I go there unattended at all hours, by daylight and moonlight, by starlight and without any light."

However, Seward changed his tune a year later according to his friend Henry Raymond, co-founder and editor of the NYT.

"Mr. SEWARD talks freely of the assassination and of all its circumstances and antecedents. I do not think he was in the least surprised at it. Indeed, he has more than once within the last two years told me in conversation that we should never emerge from this great war without political assassinations. They might be attempted in the hope of aiding the rebellion, or for the purpose of revenging its defeat; but they were morally certain to come. For his own part, I know that he had made his personal arrangements with a view to the possibility of such a close of his own career. He was never insensible of the extent to which the great body of the slaveholding oligarchy held him responsible for the political and moral changes which prompted the rebellion."

New York Times, May 12, 1865