William H. Seward

William Henry Harrison defeats Martin Van Buren in a landslide victory in the U.S. presidential election on November 4, 1840.

President Van Buren's loss is due in part to the poor economic conditions caused by the Panic of 1837.

Van Buren had easily won renomination for a second term at the 1840 Democratic National Convention, but he and his party had faced a difficult election in 1840.

Van Buren's presidency has been a difficult affair, with the U.S. economy mired in a severe downturn, and other divisive issues, such as slavery, western expansion, and tensions with Great Britain, providing opportunities for Van Buren's political opponents—including some of his fellow Democrats—to criticize his actions.

Although Van Buren's renomination was never in doubt, Democratic strategists began to question the wisdom of keeping Richard Mentor Johnson on the ticket.

Even former president Jackson had conceded that Johnson was a liability and insisted on former House Speaker James K. Polk of Tennessee as Van Buren's new running mate.

Van Buren had been reluctant to drop Johnson, who is popular with workers and radicals in the North and added military experience to the ticket, which might, it was thought, prove important against likely Whig nominee William Henry Harrison.

Rather than re-nominating Johnson, the Democratic convention had decided to allow state Democratic Party leaders to select the vice-presidential candidates for their states.

Van Buren had hoped that the Whigs would nominate Clay for president, which would have allowed Van Buren to cast the 1840 campaign as a clash between Van Buren's Independent Treasury system and Henry Clay's support for a national bank.

However, rather than nominating longtime party spokesmen like Clay and Daniel Webster, the 1839 Whig National Convention had nominated Harrison, who had served in various governmental positions during his career and had earned notoriety for his military leadership in the Battle of Tippecanoe and the War of 1812.

Whig leaders like William H. Seward and Thaddeus Stevens believed that Harrison's war record would effectively counter the popular appeals of the Democratic Party.

For vice president, the Whigs had nominated former Senator John Tyler of Virginia.

Clay, although deeply disappointed by his defeat at the convention, had nonetheless thrown his support behind Harrison.

Whigs had presented Harrison as the antithesis of the president, whom they derided as ineffective, corrupt, and effete.

Whigs had also depicted Van Buren as an aristocrat living in high style in the White House, while they used images of Harrison in a log cabin sipping cider to convince voters that he was a man of the people.

They had thrown such jabs as "Van, Van, is a used-up man" and "Martin Van Ruin" and ridiculed him in newspapers and cartoons.

Issues of policy were not absent from the campaign; the Whigs had derided the alleged executive overreaches of Jackson and Van Buren, while also calling for a national bank and higher tariffs.

Democrats had attempted to campaign on the Independent Treasury system, but the onset of deflation had undercut these arguments.

The enthusiasm for "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too," coupled with the country's severe economic crisis, made it impossible for Van Buren to win a second term.

Harrison won by a popular vote of 1,275,612 to 1,130,033, and an electoral vote margin of 234 to 60.

An astonishing eighty percent of eligible voters go to the polls on election day.

Van Buren actually wins more votes than he had in 1836, but the Whig success in attracting new voters more than cancels out Democratic gains.

Additionally, Whigs win majorities for the first time in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Congress and the North enthusiastically hail Charles Wilkes as a hero while the Lincoln administration works quietly to correct the “error”.

To avert armed conflict, Secretary of State William Seward replies on December 26, that Wilkes had erred in failing to bring the Trent into port for adjudication, thus violating America's policy of freedom of the seas.

The Confederate commissioners are released shortly thereafter.

The offer of French Emperor Napoleon III on February 3, 1863, to mediate in the Civil War is rebuffed three days later by Secretary of State William Seward and by a concurring congressional resolution, which calls mediation “foreign intervention.”

Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest and about fifteen hundred of his men capture Fort Pillow in Jackson, Tennessee on April 12, 1864.

The fort contains two hundred and sixty-two African American troops from the Sixth U. S. Colored Heavy and Light Cavalry, and two hundred and ninety-five soldiers from the white Thirteenth Cavalry. (It will afterward be claimed that most of these soldiers had been killed after they surrendered.)

Of the white soldiers, one hundred and sixty-eight are marched to prison camps, but of the black troops, only fifty-eight are taken into custody, with the rest either dead or too badly wounded to walk.

Lincoln condemns the atrocity but refuses to agree to the demands of Secretary of State William Seward, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, that an equal number of Confederate prisoners should be executed in an act of revenge. (After the war, an official investigation will discover evidence that the “Confederates were guilty of atrocities, which included murdering most of the garrison after it surrendered, burying Negro soldiers alive, and setting fire to tents containing Federal wounded” However, Forrest—who in fact had ordered his men to stop firing, placing himself between his men and the Yankees—will never be prosecuted for the offense, and will go on to become the first Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.)

Lincoln is mortally wounded by assassin John Wilkes Booth while attending a play in Ford's Theatre in Washington on April 14, Lincoln.

Doctors attend to the President in the theater then move him to a house across the street.

He goes into a coma upon being laid diagonally on a bed.

On the same day, U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward and his family are attacked in his home by Lewis Powell, one of Booth’s co-conspirators.

President Lincoln and other Republicans had been concerned that the Emancipation Proclamation, which in 1863 had declared the freedom of slaves in ten Confederate states then in rebellion, would be seen as a temporary war measure, since it was solely based on Lincoln's war powers.

The Proclamation had not freed any slaves in the border states nor itself made slavery illegal.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution outlaws slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude ... shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

Passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864 and by the House on January 31, 1865, it had been adopted on December 6, 1865.

On December 18, Secretary of State William H. Seward proclaims it to have been declared ratified by three-quarters of the states.

It is the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments adopted after the American Civil War.

The United States Senate approves the purchase of Alaska from Russia for seven million two hundred thousand dollars on August 1, 1867, at the instigation of U.S. Secretary of State William Seward,.

This purchase is popularly known in the U.S. as "Seward's Folly,", "Seward's Icebox," or "Andrew Johnson's Polar Bear Garden", and is unpopular at the time, though the later discovery of gold and oil will show it to be a worthwhile one.

Financial difficulties in Russia, the desire to keep Alaska out of British hands, and the low profits of trade with Alaskan settlements have all contributed to Russia's willingness to sell its possessions in North America.

The British had been indifferent to the fate of British Columbia until the Alaska Purchase and the new Dominion status (which were almost simultaneous).

London now pays attention, and realizes British Columbia's value as a base for its imperial trade opportunities in the Pacific and the need of the Royal Navy for a station in the region.

Governor Anthony Musgrave proposes an attractive plan for joining Canada, with the Dominion paying off British Columbia's debt and building a new Canadian transcontinental railway that would eliminate the reliance on the American transcontinental.

Meanwhile, the United States is so focused on issues of Reconstruction that few Americans pick up on Secretary of State William Seward's grand dream to expand Manifest Destiny to the Pacific.

Buenaventura Báez negotiates a treaty of annexation with the United States, supported by U.S. Secretary of State William Seward, who hopes to establish a Navy base at Samaná, in 1869.

The proposed treaty of annexation is defeated in the United States Senate through the efforts of abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner in 1870.