"...with the newer, narrower majority in the House of Representatives during the 40th Congress - where Democrats could only lose one vote, due to a majority of 89 to 87 - the choice for Speaker was not in fact Samuel Cox, but rather Samuel S. Marshall of Illinois. Lacking Cox's reputation for oratory, parliamentary acumen and honesty, Marshall was instead chosen solely for his hailing from a Midwestern state dominated by Republicans (indeed it was Lincoln's old home state) and his friendship with a number of moderate Republicans who would be needed to sustain any motions in the House, with the majority so precariously narrow and many members often missing.
Indeed, the 40th Congress can be seen as the last high-water mark for the antebellum party system - like the Whigs before them, the Republicans were teetering on the edge of dissolution despite their substantial Senate majority and comfortable control of many states, for the issue that had brought them together - slavery - was effectively decided. Maryland and Delaware were the last de jure slave states in the Union, after all, and in Delaware fewer than 30% of all blacks were in bondage. "The world has passed Stevens, Sumner and all the others by," Seymour would remark in his diary at the start of the 40th Congress, as new Senators and Representatives were sworn in. Republicans from the Midwest were already bickering with those from the Northeast about the power of the federal government, the size of tariffs, and whether to invest in the army or the navy, and Seymour was content in the fact that goals to aggressively defend the interests of free blacks would not advance far in Congress and would be unpopular moves by Republicans, and there was an unspoken agreement that the Fugitive Slave Act was a dead letter. Besides, with the departure of more than half of the Dred Scott Court during Lincoln's Presidency - either by fleeing South, retirement or death - the judiciary as now composed was not one to aggressively enforce such antebellum laws any longer, which suited Seymour just fine. Never an aggressive supporter of slavery to begin with, his eye was on continued internal improvements throughout the country, including his eagerness to complete the Transcontinental Railroad before reelection.
Would that it were so simple for the 17th President, for the party of Jackson, Van Buren and Polk was also butting against headwinds of its own. The sectional dispute that had defined American politics since Calhoun's Nullification Crisis was over, but with the departure of the South had also departed much of the backbone of the Democratic Party. On economic matters, the Democrats were split as much as the Republicans - Seymour, hailing from the mercantile capital of the Americas, opposed high tariffs, while many of his fellow partisans began to sympathize with them more and more. Though there was no Faultline emerging within the Democratic Party quite as similar as the ones already emerging within the opposition, it still remained the case that much like within the Democrats of New York in the 1850s - the famous Barnburner vs Hunker feud - Seymour's position in favor of banks, hard money, expenditures on improvements and even his relatively moderate position on Rapprochement earned him scores of enemies from Democrats ranging from easy money supporters like his Vice President, George Pendleton, who sought to pay off the national debt with greenbacks still in circulation, to old Copperheads who wanted to aggressively halt the "improvements" that they viewed monied interests in the East as supporting.
No issue would challenge Seymour, however, quite like the United States Navy Act of 1867..."
- Seymour: Profile of a Forgotten President