Rochester[, N.Y.] 23 April 1853.

Hon. W^m H. SEWARD.

My VERY DEAR SIR.

Give me leave to thank you for your encouraging words, and for the valuable
donation of your “Works,”¹Probably a reference to the four-volume collection , edited by George E. Baker and published in New York in 1853. which have just come to hand. I Shall read
every Syllable in these volumes; and, Shall try to master (So far as my
negro intellect is capable) the various Subjects which have there engaged
your attention, thought and Study. I promise this as the best return I can
now make for your great kindness in Sending me the Books.

In looking on these compendious volumes, it Seems almost incredible
that their author is So young.² Seward was fifty-two years of age when his were first published. 16: 615-21.
The labors of three Score years Seem piled
up in these volumes. I thank God, My dear Sir—that you are Still young,
vigorous and Strong, inSpiring hope in the hearts of the poor and the oppressed,
and Striking terror in those of oppressors and tyrants. The great
truths uttered by you in the hearing of the nation, Still ring in the ears of
all who would Shut out the Spirit of God—from the councils of men. My
Dear Sir, as a friend to the Slave with whom I am identified, I put my trust
in you as far as I dare put trust in an arm of flesh. Slaveholders fear you.
I will trust you, Your philosophy is not my philosophy, but you have said
and done that which which removes from me all timidity in addressing
you and the timidity of my people is great.

Allow me to Say one word further. The political parties are much out
of joint. The peace of the Democratic party is, evidently, but a patched up
affair, it is, Simply, a puting new wine into old bottles. ³A paraphrase of parables told by Jesus in both Mark 2:22 and Matt. 9:13. The Whig party
has failed, and fallen to pieces.⁴Weakened by the ambivalence of their 1852 presidential candidate, Winfield Scott, toward the Compromise of 1850, rising support for nativism in politics, and economic trends that diminished the appeal of traditional party programs such as the protective tariff, the Whig party suffered significant losses in voter support in the fall 1852 elections and ultimately succumbed to the sectional political controversy created in 1854 by Stephen Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act. Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York, 1978), 101-81. , my dear Sir, have the organising
power, and have the voice to command and give Shape to the cause of
your country, and to the cause of human Liberty. For my part, I long—to
See the day when it shall be proclaimed, from one end of this Union,
to the other, that is no longer a member of the old Whig
party,⁵Seward and most of his closest New York political allies clung to their Whig identity even after that party began to rapidly disintegrate following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the defection of many other Whigs, including Seward’s intrastate Whig rival Millard Fillmore, to the new nativist political movement nicknamed the Know-Nothings. A coalition of Know-Nothing and Whig legislators rejected Fillmore and reelected Seward to a new term in the U.S. Senate in February 1855. Seward and his followers officially merged themselves with the Republican party at a Syracuse convention in September 1855. Bancroft, Life of William H. Seward, 1:366 -86; Holt, Political Crisis of the 1850s, 159. but is at the head of a great party of freedom, of justice, and truth,
whose business it will be to find out and to in act the Laws of the
Living God. Can a State rest upon Selfishness, upon injustice, cruelty,
oppression, Slavery? No! And the Salvation of this republic can only be
Secured by the utter repudiation of these abominations. Dis[e]ntangle the
Republic from Slavery, and the Republic may live—link its destiny with
the frightful monster, and the bolts of offended Heaven will rain down
on both.