I suspect I am now in love with Lincoln.

The book convincingly places him in the context of his peers and rivals for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination, then shows how he cannily and selflessly coaxed masterful performances out of each of these men as cabinet members during the civil war.

Once Goodwin gets to Lincoln's presidency, the book becomes more disciplined, treating major battles and even Booth's assassination conspiracy as peripheral. Rather, she focuses on Lincoln's steadfast leadership, his evolving positions on emancipation and reconstruction, and his singular combination of humor, empathy, melancholy, self-confidence and humbleness that sustained him during the war.

After reading the book, it is hard to conceive that such a great and good man ever lived, much less was elected to the presidency.

“There was little to lead one to suppose that Abraham Lincoln, nervously rambling the streets of Springfield that May morning [during the Republican National Convention], who scarcely had a national reputation, certainly nothing to equal any of the other three [rivals], who had served but a single term in Congress, twice lost bids for the Senate, and had no administrative experience whatsoever, would become the greatest historical figure of the nineteenth century…”
-tDoris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

As with many of history’s iconic figures, there is no shortage of books about Abraham Lincoln. If you want to read about him, the trouble is not finding a book, but in finding the right one to suit your needs. There is hardly an aspect of the sixteenth president’s fifty-six years on earth that has not been mined for literary purposes. If you want to read about Lincoln and race, there’s a book for that. If you want to read about Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief, there’s a book for that. If you want to read about Lincoln’s sexuality, his mental health, his marriage, his law practice, or his vampire hunting abilities, there are books on those topics as well.

With such a dauntingly extensive bibliography, Team of Rivals stands out from the rest for two reasons.

First, it finds a fresh angle to approach a man who is as recognizable as Jesus, and whose biographies could fill an entire library.

Second, it is written by Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of the best popular historians of our time.

Goodwin’s innovation is to place Lincoln slightly off center, and to focus instead on his cabinet, the titular “team of rivals.” In a way, this is a multiple biography covering Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase, Attorney General Edward Bates, and Secretary of State William H. Seward.

The book starts with the Republican National Convention of 1860, where Lincoln faced off with Chase, Bates, and Seward (the odds-on favorite). This section was excellent, and highlights Goodwin’s gift for giving form to the ghosts of the past. Expertly and efficiently, Goodwin weaves these disparate and fascinating individuals together, highlighting their similarities and their differences, their strengths and weaknesses. For instance, she introduces Lincoln's Treasury Secretary:

Salmon Portland Chase, in contrast to the ever buoyant Seward, possessed a restless soul incapable of finding satisfaction in his considerable achievements. He was forever brooding on a station in life not yet reached, recording at each turning point in his life regret at not capitalizing on the opportunities given to him.

Later, Goodwin presents the beautifully-bearded Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s second Secretary of War (because he was not a Republican, much less a Republican nominee in 1860, he is not one of Goodwin’s featured stars; still he gets his share of time on stage):

Six years younger than Chase, Stanton was a brilliant young lawyer from Steubenville, Ohio. He had been active in Democratic politics from his earliest days. A short, stout man, with thick brows and intense black eyes hidden behind steel-rimmed glasses, Stanton had grown up in a Quaker family dedicated to abolition. He later told the story that “when he was a boy his father had – like the father of Hannibal against Rome – made him swear eternal hostility to slavery.”

Stanton originally thought Lincoln an incompetent rube. Lincoln didn't take this personally, and replaced the actually-incompetent Simon Cameron with Stanton after the first year of the war. The two developed an incredible working relationship, and upon Lincoln's death, it was the distraught Stanton told the world he uttered the immortal phrase: “Now he belongs to the Ages.” (Strikingly, no one around Lincoln's death bed remembers Stanton saying this. Maybe he just thought it, and wished he'd said it).

After giving us a quadruple bio of Lincoln, Seward, Chase and Bates – the rivals for the Republican nomination – Goodwin takes us through the Civil War. Her focus is not on the ins-and-outs of the various battles, which have been well covered in several thousand books; rather, she views everything through the prism of Lincoln's cabinet. This is a wonderfully structured, propulsive story, showing a keen-eye for meaningful details, and imbued with humanity. Someone who's never read a book on Lincoln or the Civil War will follow along just nicely, while even those who are quite familiar with the tale will enjoy how amazingly it is told.

When Team of Rivals was first published, it added a new phrase to the American lexicon. Goodwin’s thesis here is that Lincoln’s cabinet oft-incongruent cabinet was a good thing. Though it detracts absolutely nothing from this book’s value, I’m not sure she completely sells the argument.

For example, Attorney General Bates, after his big rollout, nearly disappears from the narrative. Treasury Secretary Chase was a wrong fit from the start, and Lincoln eventually had to appoint him to the Supreme Court to get rid of him. Lincoln also had to sack Secretary of War Simon Cameron, and replace him with a true “rival,” longtime Democrat Edwin Stanton. Rather than a virtuous gathering of old foes, the Cabinet appears rather dysfunctional.

Long before Truman, the buck stopped with Lincoln. Some of his big moments, such as the Emancipation Proclamation, were unilateral decisions, and came as a surprise to his Cabinet. Indeed, the Emancipation Proclamation shows how fraught the “team of rivals” idea can be. It sharply divided the cabinet, with Lincoln receiving advice of varying degrees. Bates and Stanton were for it immediately; Chase and Caleb Smith were against it. Then there was Seward, a smart man who wasn't as smart as Lincoln:

William Henry Seward's mode of intricate analysis produced a characteristically complex reaction to the proclamation. After the others had spoken, he expressed his worry that the proclamation might provoke a racial war in the South so disruptive to cotton that the ruling classes in England and France would intervene to protect their economic interests. As secretary of state, Seward was particularly sensitive to the threat of European intervention. Curiously, despite his greater access to intelligence from abroad, Seward failed to grasp what Lincoln intuitively understood: that once the Union truly committed itself to emancipation, the masses in Europe, who regarded slavery as an evil demanding eradication, would not be easily maneuvered into supporting the South.

I suppose it could be argued that Lincoln wanted a bunch of devil’s advocates to test his own decisions. Still, this was a bickering, troublesome, quarreling lot, and a lot of the advice he received was simply bad. It’s hard to see how the enormous burden on Lincoln’s shoulders was relieved by his closest advisors telling him he was wrong. Thankfully, as the war progressed, he came into a good working partnership with Seward and Stanton. Before that, however, there was quite a bit of lost time.

With all that said, I am not indifferent to the political tightrope that Lincoln had to walk from the beginning. Due to the wildly fragmented nature of the 1860 election – featuring four major candidates – Lincoln did not exactly take office with a strong mandate. Lacking this, and facing the greatest challenge the United States ever faced, he was forced to make bad deals from the start. If you don’t believe me, just look at the roster of the Army of the Potomac, filled with incompetents who happened to have strong constituencies. Lincoln’s cabinet was obviously a concession to this reality, and an attempt to present a solid front. Unlike Goodwin, I just don’t think this was an advantage Lincoln harnessed, but yet another obstacle for him to overcome.

At over 750-pages of text, this is a pretty big volume. Yet it reads short. I blew through Team of Rivals like it was a novel. Though Goodwin is trying to embrace many different lives, she succeeds with grace. I read all kinds of history books, some academic, some popular; some focused on analysis and interpretative theories, others on pure narrative. All types have their value. But if I have to choose, I want a book that connects me to the past in an intimate way. I want to know these people that lived in that strange and distant world that has come and gone. Goodwin does this effortlessly.

At the end of Team of Rivals, Goodwin relates a story told by the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. According to Tolstoy, he was visiting a tribal chief in the Caucuses and regaling the tribe with stories of Alexander, Frederick the Great and Caesar. When Tolstoy stood to leave, the tribal chief stopped him:

“But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock...His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.”

This story sounds like something out of fiction, which is to say, it sounds like it was something Tolstoy invented. Still, I’d like it to be true. Certainly, it is a sentiment I can agree with. When it comes to Lincoln, I’m with that chief: Tell me about that man. I am always on the lookout for another book about the complex, imperfect, monumentally impactful Abraham Lincoln. All the better if it is written by a historian with the consummate skill and artistry of Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Reading this book (or listening on Audible in my case) is a labor of love - it is detailed, intricate and long. But wow, is it incredible. The way DKG weaves together the stories of a ll Lincoln's cabinet members personally and politically and explains their respective roles in American history is astounding. I've never learned so much American history from a single book and enjoyed it along the way.

I have also never respected Abraham Lincoln as much as I do after reading this. He truly was an incredible leader.

To me, this book started out slow. I didn't think I was interested in the backgrounds of Lincoln's "team of rivals". Part way through the book, I realized I was wrong about that. Greatly enjoyed the book, especially since I could see parallels to our current times. I highly recommend reading this!