William Winston Seaton, of the "National Intelligencer." a Biographical Sketch. With Passing Notices of His Associates and Friends

Boston : James R. Osgood & Co.

THIS sketch of Mr. Seaton’s life is also a record of political and social life in Washington for the fifty years that preceded the veteran journalist’s death in 1865 ; and in this respect is even more entertaining than as the story of a man whose fine character, quite as much as any intellectual performance, secured him national repute and the friendship of all the best and greatest men of his time. The book is eminently worthy to he read now on this account if no other ; for in our present haste to be rich and powerful, and our practical worship of smartness, we seem to be forgetting that character—-integrity, dignity, courtesy, loyalty, truth, and whatever else goes to make up a gentleman — is more desirable than most kinds of success. It will be wholesome, we say, for young men to turn from the newspapers full of Colonel Fisk to the history of a man who spent a long life in political journalism, and died leaving a memory as stainless as Washington’s. Mr. Seaton was not a great man ; in some things he has been proved by events a very mistaken man ; but all the more was he to be admired for the balance that enabled him to hold his opinions with firmness and without violence. This virtue inspired such confidence that what he said had far greater weight than the expressions of more positively gifted, but less judicious men, and made the National Intelligencer a synonyme for moderation, honesty, and decency. It was a quality of the heart as well as of the head ; it was goodness as well as wisdom ; and goodness, ; after all, is a desirable thing, even in a political editor.

An exceedingly interesting part of this biography is the introductory account of the Gales family, in England, and their persecutions there as the friends of freedom and progress, and the supposed friends of revolution, — for it was in the time of the first French Republic. They were a race of printers, and by publishing liberal political works they made themselves trouble from •which they were at last obliged to fly, taking refuge at first in Germany, and coming a little later to America. William Winston Seaton, a rising young Virginia journalist, with the usual Virginian qualification of gentle descent, married one of the daughters of this admirable family in 1809, and with one of the sons he formed in 1812 that business relation which for half a century made the names of Gales and Seaton inseparable. Seaton had already been connected with his wife’s father in the publication of a Federalist paper at Raleigh ; but the two young men began their editorial career together in the conduct of the National Intelligencer at Washington, where the government had recently perched upon such dryfooting as it could find in the original swamp. The mother of Mrs. Seaton was a woman of unusual literary culture, and of so much executive faculty that, for a while after the exile of her husband from England, she conducted his affairs in such a manner as to command the admiration of his persecutors; and Mrs. Seaton inherited all that was delightful in her talent. After the daughter’s removal to the capital, she wrote to her mother letters which are full of grace and spirit, and from which her own daughter in this sketch gives abundant extracts. They form, indeed, the great charm of the book, and bring before ns with easy fidelity the life of the past. They tell us of the Madison administration, and that Mrs. Madison, at one of her select parties (“Washington Irving, the author of Knickerbocker and Salmagundi,” was present among others), wears “ a crimson cap that almost hides her forehead, but which becomes her extremely, and reminds one of a crown, from its brilliant appearance, contrasted with the white satin folds and her jet-black curls,” and converses so well “on books, men, and manners,” that Mrs. Seaton thinks she has never spent a more agreeable half-hour than that which she passed in talk with the President’s lady. Shortly after she goes to a naval ball, described fully in her lively way, when the place was decorated by two British flags just taken by American sailors. Later she writes of the fears felt of a British attack on Washington. Her husband and brother join a volunteer force for the common defence, and “ there are only two pressmen left in the office, and one of them ill this evening, so that the paper will be published with great difficulty”; next year the city is taken, and the Intelligencer office sacked by the enemy, whom the editor has already met at Bladensburg. In spite of the war and public calamities, the fashionable ladies of 1814 rouged “ with an unsparing hand ” ; and at one of Mrs. Madison’s receptions their paint “assimilating with their pearl-powder dust and perspiration made them altogether unlovely to soul and to eye,” as the ladies of our day may be glad to learn in their own defence. The winter of 1815, following the victory of New Orleans, was “ extremely gay,” but society was at first in doubt whether ladies should visit Mrs. Jackson, though they finally did so, of course. “I have seen a good deal of General Jackson...... He is not striking in appearance ; his features are hard-favored (as our Carolinians say), his complexion sallow, and his person small. Mrs. Jackson is a totally uninformed woman in mind and manners, but extremely civil in her way.” In 1818 come the Calhouns, whom Mrs. Seaton finds charming. “Mr. Calhoun is a profound statesman and elegant scholar, you know by public report ; but his manners in a private circle are endearing as well as captivating.” The next year Mrs. Seaton encloses to her mother “a letter from J. Q. Adams to the President of the United States on the question of etiquette,” which she believes “will display the character of the man who may be our future President in stronger light than all the public papers he has written, and proves him to be more of a bookworm and abstracted student than a man of the world ” ; though it seems to us that a bookworm would hardly have troubled himself, as Mr. Adams did, to argue elaborately that Congressmen and their wives should pay the first visit to officers of the Cabinet and their wives, and thus to fix the present usage, — if it is the present usage. We have accounts presently of the painful excitement following the duel between McCarty and Mason, in which the latter was killed. “ On Sunday last,” writes Mrs. Seaton in 1820, “I went to the Capitol, and listened with great interest to one of the purest strains of eloquence that ever issued from the pulpit in my hearing,—a young man named Everett, an Unitarian from Boston, of rare talents and profound learning, Professor of Greek and Hebrew at Cambridge. ” Then there are allusions to the fatal duel between Commodores Barron and Decatur, — “the murder of Decatur ” ; and we are told that John Randolph “is chock full of fight ever since the late duel, and endeavors to provoke a quarrel with everybody he meets.” There is much gossip about the foreign ministers and their wives, Lady Bogot (who confessed to a friend that she had to stick pins into herself to keep from going to sleep at the dull Washington balls) being the favorite. “ The English are half a century before us in style,” writes Mrs. Seaton, after a ball at Mr. Canning’s. “ Handsome pictures, books, and all sorts of elegant litter, distinguish his rooms, the mansion being decorated with peculiar taste and propriety.” In 1823 the Seatons visited Boston, and called upon ex-President John Adams, at Quincy. “ We found him sitting to the famous Stuart for his portrait, to be completed on his eighty-ninth birthday. Mr. [John Quincy] Adams led me to him and said a few words aside, when I was quite affected by his rising from the sofa and affectionately kissing my cheek, bidding me welcome to Quincy.”

Two years later John Quincy Adams has been elected President, and Mrs. Seaton, writing from Washington, says: “The city is thronged with strangers, and Yankees swarm like the locusts of Egypt in our houses, our beds, and our kneading-troughs.”

We run lightly and desultorily through these letters, in which so many events of the past are reflected, and by no means do the writer justice in our extracts. After the election of Jackson and the beginning of the reign of office-seeking, the complexion of Washington society was greatly changed. It lost its old stateliness and decorum, and gained nothing in ease. From that time it almost ceases to be noticed in Mrs. Seaton’s letters, though the interest of the book is fully sustained in other matters.

It is not difficult to perceive that the work has been written in sympathy with an obsolete order of things ; but this order was not altogether bad, and the sympathy is never offensive, save where John Brown is spoken of as “a great criminal.” Mr. Seaton freed his slaves, and was a devout believer in the colonization scheme. Of course he was no friend to the common antislavery movement, but neither was he the friend of the Southern extremists. He was of those who believed in temporizing and compromising. Whether slavery could have been temporized and compromised out of existence, it is now somewhat late to inquire ; but the fact, whatever it is, does not affect the repute of such a man for sincere patriotism and an enlightened sense of nationality.