William Seward

In John Quincy Adams (the James Traub biography), Seward appears as a close-up observer of the aged ex-president during Adams’s late congressional years. Traub quotes Seward’s portrait of Adams as “sober, almost to gloom or sorrow,” dressed simply in an olive frock coat and wearing “a fine layer of learned dust” — “just called from the labor of his closet.” Seward’s account is used to convey both Adams’s scholarly reclusiveness and his enduring force: Seward noted that Adams only occasionally “rose into a temporary earnestness,” yet still judged him “the best president since Washington,” and recalled being inspired by “the old man’s slow-burning fire” — “His vigor and his resolution astonished me.”

Context: William H. Seward (1801–1872) was a New York governor and senator, a leading antislavery Whig and later Republican, and Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, best known for purchasing Alaska. As a younger man he was an admirer of the elder Adams.

Where this appears

• John Quincy Adams — Seward is quoted as an eyewitness whose portrait captures Adams’s scholarly, dust-covered gravity and his “slow-burning fire” in old age.