"Nature and Laws would be in an ill case, if Slavery should find what to say for itself, and Liberty
be mute; and if tyrants should find men to plead for them, and they that can waste and vanquish
tyrants, should not be able to find advocates."
MILTON.

BOSTON

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street
The Riverside Press, Cambridge

1884

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1861,
BY GEO. E. BAKER,

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States in and for the
Northern District of New York.

PREFACE TO VOLUME IV.

THE fourth volume of THE WORKS OF WILLIAM H. SEWARD, is now presented to the public.

The three preceding volumes, beginning with the earliest events of his life, closed with the enactment of the compromises of 1850.

The present volume includes the succeeding and eventful period made memorable by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the struggle of slavery for Kansas, the assault upon a senator in the senate chamber by a slaveholding representative of South Carolina, the organization of the Republican party, its almost successful contest in 1856, and its triumph in the presidential election of 1860, and by the admission of Kansas into the Union a Free State :-a period that may be said to comprise the harvest season of those principles which in previous years Mr. Seward had sown in the public mind, and watched and cultivated with so much consistency and integrity of purpose.

The Memoir begun in the first volume is continued in the following pages, down to the inauguration of a Republican administration. It aims only to give a plain history of the times and events of which Mr. Seward is so important a part. The action of Congress and the movements of political parties during the ten years—especially such as find illustration and comment in his speeches-are quite fully recorded. His interesting tour through the Western states during the last presidential campaign, including all the brief but eloquent