William Henry Seward, Sr. (May 16, 1801 – October 10, 1872) was a Governor of New York, United States Senator, and the United States Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson.
An outspoken opponent of the spread of slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War, he was a dominant figure in the Republican party in its formative years, and was widely regarded as the leading contender for the party's presidential nomination in 1860 – yet his very outspokenness may have cost him the nomination. Despite his loss, he became a loyal member of Lincoln's wartime cabinet, and played a role in preventing foreign intervention early in the war.
On the night of Lincoln's assassination, he survived an attempt on his life in the conspirators' effort to decapitate the Union government. As Johnson's Secretary of State, he engineered the purchase of Alaska from Russia in an act that was ridiculed at the time as "Seward's Folly".
Alaska celebrates the purchase on Seward's Day, the last Monday of March.
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