Home › Government & Politics › Political Leaders & Statecraft

Thurlow Weed

1797–1882 · 85 years

The man who made Seward, and could not make him president

Portrait of Thurlow Weed — Mathew Benjamin Brady — 1855 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Joel Weed hauled freight from the Hudson docks at Catskill until bad debts put him in debtors' prison. His eldest son worked a blacksmith's bellows at eight for six cents a day, ran errands at a tavern, and spent much of his boyhood as a cabin boy on the sloops that worked the river. He got about a year of formal schooling and walked miles to borrow books from neighbors. At 12 he talked his way into a printing apprenticeship at a short-lived Onondaga paper, which was how nearly every American political operator of that century began. In 1830 he founded the Albany Evening Journal and ran it for 33 years, the leading Whig and then Republican paper in the state.

Weed built three parties in 30 years. He organized the Anti-Masonic Party out of public fury over the vanished Freemason William Morgan, folded it into the Whigs by 1834, and joined the Republicans when the Whigs broke up. The method was concrete. He decided who got the customs posts and state printing, planted stories in his own paper and the dozens that copied it, counted the legislature before a bill was filed, and told candidates when to keep quiet. He made William H. Seward governor in 1838, senator in 1849, and the presumed Republican nominee for president in 1860.

Seward reached Chicago in May 1860 as the clear favorite and Weed came as his manager, carrying money and a delegate count. The count was the problem. Thirty years of patronage, railroad charters and Albany lobbying had built Weed a reputation for corruption that traveled with the man he had made, and Seward's antislavery record unsettled the former Democrats the party needed in the lower North. Lincoln's managers worked exactly that gap, offering a candidate nobody in the room had a grievance against. Lincoln took the nomination on the third ballot. Historians still divide over how much was Weed's reputation and how much the ordinary arithmetic of a convention that had to have Pennsylvania and Indiana. Weed went home, then went to work for Lincoln, who made Seward Secretary of State.

In 1861 Lincoln sent him abroad without a title. Weed helped the consul John Bigelow cool the Trent crisis in Paris, then toured England and France with Archbishop John Hughes arguing against recognition of the Confederacy. He thought the Emancipation Proclamation went too far too fast, gave up the Evening Journal in January 1863 rather than fight the Radical Republicans in print, and backed Andrew Johnson on Reconstruction. Blind and unsteady at the end, he died in New York City on November 22, 1882. Boss Tweed had died in jail four years earlier, and the word boss had hardened around him. Weed traded in the same currency, but his machine also believed things.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Thurlow Weed's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Anti-Masonic Party other
He organized it out of the William Morgan affair and turned it into the main opposition to Jackson in the North 1828
Albany Evening Journal other
Founded and edited for 33 years — the largest political newspaper in the country by the 1840s 1830
Weed, Parsons and Company other
Albany book publishing house founded with his son James and John D. Parsons 1843
New York Consolidation Act other
He pushed it through Albany to create the New York Central Railroad — a favor to Erastus Corning, a Democrat who opposed him 1853
Autobiography of Thurlow Weed other
Begun in the 1840s and published by his daughter Harriet the year after he died 1883

Life in brief

with age at each point

1810 aged ~13 Apprenticed at 12 to a new Onondaga paper, the Lynx His father talked the publisher into taking on a second apprentice. Cutting wood and preparing ink balls came first.
April 26, 1818 aged 20 Marries Catherine Ostrander of Cooperstown She had quietly arranged his bail and his lawyer after his arrest in 1814. The jury acquitted him without leaving their seats.
1825 aged ~28 Takes a seat in the New York State Assembly and meets William H. Seward The alliance ran for the rest of their working lives.
1830 aged ~33 Starts the Albany Evening Journal Editor, chief reporter, proofreader and political strategist, all at once.
1838 aged ~41 Manages Seward into the governorship of New York Contemporaries gave Weed most of the credit for the win.
May 18, 1860 aged 62 Seward loses the Republican nomination to Lincoln at Chicago Weed had come as his manager. Lincoln took it on the third ballot.
1861 aged ~64 Goes to Europe for Lincoln as an envoy with no official standing Paris during the Trent crisis, then England and France with Archbishop John Hughes, arguing against recognition of the Confederacy.
January 27, 1863 aged 65 Announces his retirement from printing and publishing He had broken with the Radical Republicans over the war and Reconstruction and would not fight them in his own paper.
November 22, 1882 aged 85 Dies in New York City after months of blindness and vertigo Buried at Albany Rural Cemetery.