William Seward

William Seward (1801-????) was Secretary of State to President Abraham Lincoln. In 1860, he had challenged Lincoln for the Republican Party nomination and made no secret of the fact that the thought he would be a fitter President than Lincoln.

In 1882, Butler was one of several prominent Republican leaders to attend a convention called by Lincoln in Chicago. He resisted Lincoln's proposal to replace hostility toward the Confederate States with workers' rights as the central plank of the party's platform. The rejection of this proposal led to Lincoln's defection to the Socialist Party and the end of the Republican Party as an effective force in American politics.