"Seward's Folly," Dagger John, and school choice

I've been reading, and enjoying a lot, Terry Golway's book "Machine Made:  Tammany Hall and the Creation of American Politics."  The early chapters are all about trans-Atlantic anti-Catholicism and the efforts of folks like Dagger John Hughes and Daniel O'Connell to fight it.  My more politically left-leaning Catholic friends would love all the broadsides against individualism and "laissez faire" capitalism and those who are more conservative might chuckle over all the clear-eyed presentations of public-employee cronyism and moralistic progressivism.    Either way, it's a really good read (and helps explain why Irish Catholics in America vote the (politically) think the way they do).  

But, for me, the real nugget -- I cannot believe I didn't know this -- was learning that William Seward (who would later, so wisely and presciently, secure for the United States my home state, the Great Land, of Alaska) was a very early supporter of public funding for poor children to attend parochial schools and of respecting their parents' wishes to have options besides standardizing, ideologically aggressive "public" education.   And so it goes . . .