Seward’s letters to his first and best friend, Thurlow Weed, are an invaluable source for his biographer.  The letters survive, in the original, in the files at the University of Rochester.  I reviewed hundreds of the Seward-Weed letters myself; many others were reviewed and “transcribed” by my great research assistant Kristi Martin; others were printed…

One of the difficulties of writing about Seward is that so much of the story is provided by the “diary” of his colleague Navy Secretary Gideon Welles.  Seward and Welles served for exactly the same eight-year period in the cabinet, from March 1861 through March 1869.  They never liked one another:  Welles viewed Seward as…

I spent the past two days doing research at Yale for the Seward book.  Why, you might wonder, am I doing research when the book is in page proofs?  The short answer is to convert two “secondary cites” into “primary cites.” In one place in the draft, I had cited to a book about Millard…