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[Linda Anderson]

(01-17-2015 10:00 PM)Eva Elisabeth Wrote:  Thank you, Linda, for the information. I remember reading Frances was once close to begin an affair with another man.

Trudy, what do you think of the The Governor and His Lady by Earl Conrad? I got it out of the library some time ago but I remember reading that Mr. & Mrs. Seward had an "understanding" about Seward's relationships with other women in Washington while Mrs. Seward was living in Auburn. Maybe they didn't actually talk about it but Frances looked the other way. As I recall, there was no documentation in Conrad's book.

That's true about Frances, Eva. The following is from my post in the George Robinson and his Family thread. The source is Seward: Lincoln's Indispensable Man by Walter Stahr.

"...it is clear from later letters that sometime during this winter [Seward's friend Alfred] Tracy crossed the line between friendly familiarity and inappropriate intimacy with Frances. Exactly what happened cannot be reconstructed-it seems unlikely there was any physical relationship-but one day Frances came to her husband in tears, handed him a set of letters from Tracy, and asked him to decide whether she had acted improperly. Seward burned the letters without reading them, wrapped his wife in his arms, and assured her that he loved and trusted her. For some reason he did not confront Tracy-that would not come for several months-and indeed he continued in the interim to write Tracy friendly letters."

In late 1834 Seward wrote to Frances that "Tracy offered her the 'feelings and love' which Seward should have offered her as her husband..."

Tracy wrote to Seward "regretting that they were no longer as close as they had been when they first met. 'Commend me to your dear wife,' Tracy wrote on December 29, 'for she knows the strength and purity of my love and will not doubt its constancy.'"

Seward wrote back the same day that "he had forgiven Tracy for his offense, but not forgotten it, and that they would part as mere friends, nothing more."