On the night of April 14, 1865, an armed intruder climbed the stairs of a house on Lafayette Square, directly across from the White House. The attack is remembered in history books as the night Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre. But less than a block away, a second assassination attempt was unfolding against Secretary of State William Henry Seward. The man in the bed survived.
The two women who loved him most did not. In the spring of 1860, Seward was the presumed Republican nominee for president. He had been governor of New York and a U. S.
senator for 11 years. On May 18, 1860, friends in Auburn, New York, placed a brass cannon outside his home, ready to fire when the telegram arrived from Chicago. The first two rounds of voting went to Seward. The third round produced a four-word message: Lincoln nominated on the third ballot.
Abraham Lincoln, a lawyer from Illinois who had served a single congressional term and lost a Senate race two years earlier, had beaten him. Seward accepted the loss. When told the news, he reportedly told friends that Lincoln would be elected and possessed qualities that would make him a good president. Many historians believe Seward lost because he was considered too outspoken.
A decade earlier, he had told the Senate that there was a higher law than the Constitution when opposing the spread of slavery. In 1858, he called the conflict over slavery an irrepressible conflict. Such words made him popular with antislavery voters but worried party leaders looking for a safer choice. Seward was born in 1801 in Orange County, New York.
He came to Auburn as a young lawyer and married Frances Miller, a judge’s daughter. The house they lived in belonged to her father. To understand the man who lived there, one needs to look back to an 1846 courtroom in the same town. A young Black man named William Freeman, recently released from the state prison, broke into a home near Auburn and killed four members of the Van Nest family.
Public anger ran high. Seward was the only lawyer willing to defend him. He argued Freeman was insane and could not be hanged for something his mind did not control. He told a jury of Freeman’s neighbors that the accused man, whatever he had done, was still a brother, blessed and accepted by a common father.
Freeman was convicted, but Seward won a reversal on appeal. No second trial was held, and Freeman died in prison. During that same defense, Seward imagined his own grave. He told the jury that one day, when anger had faded, a stranger might pass through and place a modest stone above him, inscribed with the words: “He was faithful.
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The woman he returned to at home was often more resolute than he was. Frances Seward did not follow her husband into Washington’s social life. When he went to the Senate, she stayed in Auburn, reading, raising their children, and writing long letters with firm views on slavery. The Auburn home is remembered as a station on the Underground Railroad.
In one surviving letter, she told him about a man named William Johnson seeking help to buy his daughter’s freedom. She said she had given him something and believed Seward would give him more. Their daughter, also named Frances, was born in 1844 and called Fanny. In 1858, at age 13, she began keeping a diary.
Over the next eight years she filled six volumes, recording what she saw, read, and feared. Lincoln won the election in November 1860. Before he took the oath, seven Southern states seceded. In December, Lincoln offered Seward the most important cabinet position: Secretary of State.
Seward hesitated for weeks, then accepted. The man who was supposed to be president agreed to serve the man who had beaten him. In January 1861, Seward spoke in the Senate about compromise and what the North could offer to preserve the Union. In Auburn, Frances disagreed.
On January 19, she wrote to him, bluntly saying that compromises based on the idea that preserving the Union mattered more than the freedom of nearly 4 million people could not be right. She told one of the most powerful men in America he was wrong. He kept the letter. It survives today in the family papers at the University of Rochester.
On March 4, 1861, Lincoln took the oath on the steps of the unfinished Capitol. Fanny, then 16, wrote in her diary that Lincoln had been inaugurated without serious disturbance, and expressed relief that the feared catastrophe had not occurred. She had been afraid for two men that winter: her father and Lincoln. Within days, Seward became Secretary of State.
He took a house on Lafayette Square directly facing the White House. His son Frederick came as assistant secretary of state. Fanny came too. Many in Washington expected Seward, not Lincoln, to run the new government.
He was older and better known. Less than a month into the administration, Seward put that expectation on paper. On April 1, 1861, he sent Lincoln a memorandum called “Some Thoughts for the President’s Consideration. ” He argued the government lacked a policy and proposed a bold, even reckless one, including provoking disputes with European powers to rally the country.
He suggested that whoever pursued the policy, it had to be done without interruption, either by the president or a member of the cabinet. Lincoln replied the same day, courteously reviewing the memorandum point by point. He closed with a single sentence that settled the matter: “If this must be done, I must do it. ” He did not dismiss Seward or humiliate him.
He kept him. Eleven days later, Confederate forces opened fire on Fort Sumter. The war had begun, and there was no longer any doubt who was in charge. Something changed in the older man.
Seward later wrote to Frances that Lincoln’s nobility was almost beyond human capacity. The two became an unlikely pair. Seward was short, sharp-featured, cigar-smoking, fond of fine dinners and long conversations. Lincoln was tall, plain, and often melancholy.
According to many accounts, Lincoln crossed the square to Seward’s house in the evenings just to talk. Over the next four years, rivals became friends. During the war, Seward’s job was to keep Britain and France from entering the conflict on the Confederate side. In the fall of 1861, a Union captain stopped a British mail ship and detained Confederate envoys on board.
Britain was furious, and war talk spread. Seward helped find a way to release the men without conceding that the United States was wrong. The crisis passed. Neither Britain nor France entered the war.
In the summer of 1862, Lincoln read his cabinet a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. Seward urged him to wait for a Union victory so the measure would not seem desperate. Lincoln waited. On January 1, 1863, the proclamation was issued.
Beneath Lincoln’s name was a second signature: William H. Seward, Secretary of State. The families’ lives intertwined. On February 12, 1863, Fanny met Robert Lincoln, the president’s eldest son, and noted in her diary that she found him pleasant and witty.
Lincoln and Seward were not distant figures to her; they were people she knew. In the spring of 1865, the war was ending. Richmond fell in early April, and the Confederate government fled. On April 5, 1865, Seward went for a carriage ride.
The horses bolted. He was thrown or jumped from the carriage and struck the street. The list of injuries was severe: a serious concussion, a broken right arm above the elbow, and a jaw broken on both sides. He was 63 years old.
Seward had no upper teeth, so the usual method of wiring a broken jaw was impossible. A New York dentist named Thomas Gunning, who had devised his own method, was expected to arrive in Washington on Sunday, April 16. Until then, the jaw had to wait. They carried Seward to his house on Lafayette Square and put him in a third-floor bedroom.
He could barely speak. Fanny, then 20, sat with her father every day. Frederick, his wife, and his brother Augustus, a soldier, were there. Frances Seward came from Auburn.
A soldier named George Robinson was assigned to help nurse the patient. On Sunday, April 9, Lincoln returned to Washington. He had been in Richmond, where freed men and women crowded around him in the streets of the fallen Confederate capital. The first thing he did was cross Lafayette Square to Seward’s house.
He climbed to the third-floor sickroom. According to Frederick Seward’s later account, his father spoke first, whispering, “You have returned from Richmond. ” “Yes,” Lincoln said, “and I think we are near the end at last. ” Lincoln then lay down on the bed, propped on one elbow, and recounted his visit to Richmond in a mood the painter Francis Carpenter later described as boyish.
Fanny was in the room and recorded the scene in her diary. That same day, far to the south, Robert E. Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox Court House. Neither man in that room knew it yet.
The war they had fought together for four years was over. The next days were the happiest Washington had known in four years. On the night of April 11, Lincoln spoke to a crowd from a White House window. It was the last speech of his life.
In the third-floor room across the square, Seward lay waiting to have his jaw wired. Frederick Seward later summarized the moment in five words: they had seen each other for the last time. Friday, April 14, 1865, was Good Friday. Shortly after ten o’clock, a tall, well-dressed stranger appeared at the door of the Seward house.
The family doctor, Tullio Verdi, had left Seward comfortable about an hour earlier. Fanny sat near the bed reading a book of old legends, and the soldier-nurse George Robinson was in the room with her. The man at the door told a servant he had brought medicine from the doctor and insisted on delivering it personally. Frederick Seward met him upstairs and told him his father could not be disturbed.
When the stranger insisted, Frederick identified himself as the assistant secretary of state. The man seemed to turn away and said he would go. He turned back suddenly, drew a revolver, aimed it at Frederick’s head, and pulled the trigger. The gun misfired.
He used it as a club, striking Frederick repeatedly and fracturing his skull. Inside the sickroom, Fanny heard the struggle. The door opened and the intruder burst in. She ran after him and begged him to stop, writing later that she must have said, “Don’t kill him.
” In the dim room, he bent over the bed and drove a knife into the face and neck of the man lying there, about five times. The first blows appeared to miss their target. Robinson threw himself on the attacker. Augustus Seward, awakened by his sister’s screams, ran in.
Both men were wounded. During the struggle, Seward rolled off the far side of the bed, out of reach. The intruder broke free and fled down the stairs, stabbing a State Department messenger named Emerick Hansell in the back on the way out. Five men in the house were bleeding.
Fanny stood at the foot of the bed, thinking it must be a terrible dream. She saw the bed was empty. On the floor she found what she thought was a pile of bed coverings. It was her father.
Her feet slipped in a large pool of blood. She was sure he was dead. He was not. His jaw was broken and his face slashed on both sides, but from the floor he managed to give orders: close the doors, summon the surgeons, place guards around the house.
Fanny, 20 years old, did not know what to do. Robinson told her how to stop the bleeding with cloths and water. Doctors arrived. At some point during the long night, Fanny heard that the president had been shot.
John Wilkes Booth had fired on Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre at nearly the same hour the stranger climbed Seward’s stairs. Lincoln died shortly after seven the next morning. By noon, Andrew Johnson had been sworn in as president. Inside the Seward house, the wounded lay in room after room.
Frederick remained unconscious for days with two skull fractures. Augustus was cut on the forehead and hand. Robinson was stabbed. Hansell had a wound about three inches deep near his spine.
Verdi described Seward’s worst wound as a gash beginning at the cheekbone and curving toward the mouth, about five inches long. It was a terrible wound. But there was good news: no artery had been severed, and the wounds were not fatal. No one in the house told Seward about Lincoln.
For days he lay unaware his friend was dead. According to the Washington journalist Noah Brooks, Seward figured it out himself. Lincoln, he reasoned, would have been the first to visit him if he were alive. He had not come, had not sent to ask about him, and the flag was at half-mast.
That is how William Seward learned his friend was gone. On April 17, three days after the attack, soldiers arrested a young man in Washington. The servant William Bell identified him as the intruder, saying he knew him and that he was the man. His name was Lewis Powell.
He was 20 years old, the same age as the girl who had begged him not to kill her father. Frances Seward, already in fragile health, was the one who watched over the recovery. She visited her son Frederick’s bedside every morning and evening. She was not well herself, complaining that spring of neuralgia and nausea.
To her sister, she wrote that Frederick’s pale, patient face never left her mind. Slowly, the men recovered. Frederick woke. Bone fragments were removed from his skull, and his recovery was slow but steady.
Augustus recovered. Robinson recovered. Hansell survived. The dentist Gunning arrived and constructed a vulcanized rubber splint inside Seward’s mouth to hold the broken bones in place.
Seward grew stronger week by week. The story should have ended there. The house was attacked and everyone in it survived. But Frances did not grow stronger.
The University of Rochester, which holds the family papers, puts it cautiously: the nightmare events undermined the already failing health of Seward’s wife and daughter. Through May and June, Frances weakened. On June 21, 1865, she died at age 59. She was taken home to Auburn to be buried.
Sixty-eight days had passed since the attack. The knife never touched her. Fanny, the girl who stood at the foot of the bed, had only 16 months left. In the summer of 1865, Seward returned to work with knife scars on his face.
The knife had cut the nerves on the right side. He carried the scars for the rest of his life. In July, Lewis Powell was hanged in Washington with three others convicted in the conspiracy. Frederick recovered and returned to work beside his father, serving as assistant secretary until his father left office.
Seward served Andrew Johnson as he had served Lincoln. Through the bitter battles over Reconstruction, he stood by Johnson, and many of his old antislavery friends never forgave him. In 1868, the House impeached Johnson. Seward stayed in office, went to the desk, signed papers, and received ambassadors.
At home there was an empty chair. Frances had come to Washington only because he was injured, and she never saw Auburn again. Fanny continued writing in her diary, but she was failing. A family photograph taken in 1866 at Cape May, New Jersey, is one of her last.
In October 1866, Fanny Seward died at age 21. Eighteen months had passed since the night she stood at the foot of her father’s bed and wrote that what she saw must be a terrible dream. Her diary stops. The six volumes cover the last eight years of her life.
In November, she was buried in Auburn, near her mother. Within 18 months, William Seward had lost the two women who held his household together. His sons survived. He survived.
But the two people the knife never touched were in their graves. Five months after burying his daughter, Seward did the thing the world remembers him for. On March 30, 1867, around four in the morning, after nightlong talks with the Russian minister, he signed a treaty to purchase Alaska. The price was $7.
2 million for a territory more than twice the size of Texas, roughly two cents an acre. Critics in Congress and the press mocked the deal as “Seward’s Folly,” “Seward’s Icebox,” and “Johnson’s Polar Bear Garden. ” But the full story is quieter. The University of Rochester found that most letters and newspaper articles in his files from that time strongly supported the purchase.
One admirer wrote that spring that the purchase was destined to have a lasting and positive effect on his reputation. The Senate approved the treaty on April 9, 1867 — exactly two years to the day after Lincoln stretched out on the foot of Seward’s bed. A daughter’s funeral in November, a treaty in March. The dates stand side by side.
Seward left the State Department on March 4, 1869, after eight years. He had served two presidents and outlived one. He did not return home to rest. That summer he sailed north to see Alaska for himself.
In 1870, at about 70, with a scarred face, he set off on a journey around the world, westward across the Pacific and through Asia. He was gone more than a year, received by governments as one of the great statesmen of his era. His account of the trip was later published as a book. In 1871, Congress voted to award a gold medal to George Robinson, the soldier-nurse who had fought the intruder with his bare hands.
In the fall of that year, Seward returned to Auburn, to the house that had belonged to Frances’s father, to the rooms where Fanny grew up, and to a study full of books, papers, and many memories. He had one year left. On October 10, 1872, William Seward died in his study at the age of 71. He was buried in Fort Hill Cemetery on a hill above the city, near Frances and Fanny.
Almost 26 years earlier, in a courtroom in that same town, defending a man the city wanted to hang, he had imagined his own grave. He told the jury that one day, when the anger had passed, a stranger might come and place a modest stone over him with this epitaph: “He was faithful. ”
Frederick Seward lived until 1915. In his last years he wrote a memoir about his father’s life and that night.
Fanny’s diaries are now at the University of Rochester, along with her mother’s letters. There is one more thing to say about the legend of how Seward survived that night. For a century and a half, the story has been told that a steel jaw brace from the carriage accident deflected the blade of the knife. Newspapers repeated it for decades.
It is a good story: a man saved by the very injury that laid him low. In 2025, a team writing in a surgical journal examined the evidence — the wounds, the surgeon’s notes, the testimony. Their conclusion was clear: there is no evidence Seward wore any jaw-fixing device at the time of the assassination attempt. Gunning, the dentist who examined Seward the day after the attack, reported no splints or braces supporting the jaw.
The device that fixed his broken jaw was made two weeks later. What deflected the knife? A newspaper said it plainly in 1865: the blows were partially turned aside by the bedclothes around the secretary’s neck. A dark room, a few missed first blows, a man who rolled off the far side of his bed, and the tightly tucked sheets around a broken jaw no one had yet been able to treat.
Fanny saw it that night without realizing what she was seeing. She ran back into the room and found beside the empty bed what she thought was a pile of bed coverings. It was her father. And it was the bedclothes.
In the Seward House Museum in Auburn, there is a piece of old linen. The museum catalog describes it simply: a piece of a linen sheet showing knife stabs and dried bloodstains. Below that: sheets cut by the assassin’s knife on the night of April 14, 1865. It was from Seward’s bed.
It is small. It is faded. It is easy to pass without noticing.
A piece of old linen, still torn where the knife punctured it.