If you’ve ever asked yourself, Abraham Lincoln, what is with that guy? This is the book for you.

The answer to that question is both simple and complex. It’s complex because all people are complex, and the political landscape that Lincoln navigated–although lacking 24 hour news cycles, talking heads, and loudmouthed pundits–was nevertheless a treacherous and multi-faceted one. Team of Rivals is in large part Doris Kearns Goodwin’s attempt to illustrate just exactly how it was that he navigated those treacherous waters: gaining the presidency, winning the loyalty of the newly formed Republican party and love of the people despite his lack of education and political clout, bringing the country through the Civil War, passing one of the most influential pieces of legislation in history, and ultimately, ending with his assassination, and the Abraham Lincoln-shaped hole left in the world.

I say it is also simple because if DKG is to be believed (and I do believe her), Lincoln accomplished these things the same way he did everything in his life: by being a kindhearted, rational man with a good head for common sense on his shoulders, and a willingness to really listen and understand both his rivals and his allies. Early on in the book, DKG chronicles Lincoln’s tendency towards ‘melancholy,’ which she concludes was largely brought on by his extreme empathy. He brought a balance to everything he did that is probably most exemplified by his decision to bring his political rivals into his cabinet, and make them his chief advisors, a decision for which he was criticized, even by those same cabinet members.

The book is as much about those rivals as it is about Lincoln. William H. Seward, the most heavily favored candidate for president in 1860. Salmon P. Chase, a noted abolitionist, and a man simultaneously riddled with insecurities and absolutely rabid about his desire for the presidency, to the point where he believes himself destined for it, even though he has no talent for judging the climate of a situation. Edward Bates, the elderly statesman, who ran for president and then joined Lincoln’s cabinet despite a fierce desire to remain at home with his family. And Edwin M. Stanton, the famous lawyer, who upon first meeting Lincoln thought him incredibly dull and a hopeless rube. These are the men Lincoln surrounded himself with, and it’s notable that with the exception of Chase, who was a first class egomaniac and a total asshole to the end, all of them came to understand what a remarkable man Lincoln was, and to appreciate his unique abilities.

DKG’s writing is remarkably thorough, and by time I finished the book, I felt like I’d been through a master-class of Civil War era politics. Like all good historical writers, she mostly refrains from passing judgment, letting the evidence speak for itself. There were a few parts where I questioned the ‘Team of Rivals’ concept, but mostly only in regards to Chase. Seriously, you guys, that dude was really smart and he’s basically the reason we have paper money and everything, and he almost single-handedly helped fund the war effort, but . . . ASSHOLE. He never once acknowledged Lincoln’s aptitude for the presidency, believing until the end that HE should have been president, even going so far as to sow disloyalty in the cabinet leading up to the 1864 election (which he again was surprised at not being a top candidate, showing his total inability to understand why people disliked him). Of course, these actions cost him his place in the cabinet, even if he never understood why (he also never understood why his actions were so harmful). I mean, this is a guy who REGULARLY threatened to resign as a negotiation tactic with Lincoln, because he had the emotional maturity of an eight year old. But I will not say any more about Chase other than to emphasize that I really wish DKG would have clarified a little more why exactly he was such an essential piece of the team, because honestly, I think he was more trouble than he was worth. Lincoln, bless his heart, probably would have disagreed with me. He defended Chase’s integrity to the end, even giving him the Chief Justice position over several other less controversial candidates, because he truly believed Chase was the right man for the job, despite the backstabbing and manipulating he very well knew about.

Besides the big stuff, Team of Rivals was also chock full of tiny little details that were by turns amusing and disturbing. I will never get over Mary Lincoln and her shopping addiction, or how Lincoln’s secretaries called her ‘The Hellcat’ (they called Lincoln ‘The Ancient’). VP Andrew Johnson was totally wasted at the 1865 inauguaration, to the point of forgetting cabinet members’ names during his speech, and pointing to them instead. Almost all of the cabinet members took drastic paycuts to be in the cabinet, to the point where a couple risked financial ruin. And of course, the little tidbits about Lincoln himself. How awkward he was with the ladies, how much he loved to read (he carried a book with him everywhere), how he told stories constantly as a way to communicate . . . so many tidbits.

It took me three months to read this book, via audiobook. It was worth it. This is the kind of history I wish I would have read in high school, not that sanitized dumbed-down crap. The kind that takes history out of the realm of story, and gives it flesh and blood. The kind that makes me feel enough to cry for ten minutes while driving, to the point where I had to stop and park to gather my bearings. The kind of history that makes you feel the joy, and the wasted potential. The thing that makes me most sad–besides Lincoln’s death, obviously, is that with that idiot Andrew Johnson running things, the chance of a productive Reconstruction period (full of Lincoln’s trademark common sense and empathy, even for the South) went to almost nothing. How much different things could be even today if Lincoln had been the one to shepherd the reunification of our country, we’ll never know. But I like to think it would have mattered. That one man can be that influential, just by being kind and sympathetic from a place of power. It’s the reason Lincoln is so mythologized. He’s easy to mythologize. Hell, this is my favorite t-shirt, and I wear it with pride:



Fittingly, DKG ends her book with this quote, that I feel sums up things nicely.

“Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country – bigger than all the Presidents together.”

It’s a good book, is what I’m saying.

[4.5 stars]

When it seems that more and more books are being written with an ever narrowing focus - a battle, a speech, "A Day in the Life ..." - it's a pleasure to pick up an old fashioned well researched and well written history that one can sink his or her teeth into.

Team of Rivals is just such a book. Although per se there is nothing "startling" or "new" in this biography, the author's perspective/premise - examining Lincoln's growth, evolution, his success(es) and failures in conjunction with the members of his Cabinet - does yield a fascinating look into the multi-faceted character/mind of Abraham Lincoln and proves that 140+ years after his untimely death there is still much to learn from this man. Because of this, Team of Rivals is a welcome and worthy addition to the ever growing catalog of Lincoln history.

The only caveat I have in recommending this book would be to a reader who wanted to start here in understanding this complicated time in U.S. history. The amount of information and the number of topics covered might be overwhelming. (Starting with other Lincoln bios by Guelzo or Donald; Battle Cry of Freedom by McPherson on the US Civil War would provide background and are excellent books in their own right.)

One of my favorite history books. What really made it enjoyable for me is DKG’s writing quality. There is something about her writing style that I really enjoyed. It just felt really easy to read, with a great narrative flow. She also seems to have a gift for being as crisp and concise as possible.

I’m glad I read this book and had the chance to learn more about Lincoln.

I just finished a book about Hoover, who came to Presidency with one of the most impressive resumes you could imagine. Lincoln came to the office with one of the thinnest resumes. Why was he so successful? With this book, you get a sense for his unique qualities that made this possible.

Some of the things I learned about Lincoln were not surprising but were nice to have confirmed. He really was honest, principled, and courageous. Perhaps his signature quality that made him unique was his ability to set his ego aside. There are many examples of him taking the blame, or refusing the impulse to embarrass an opponent, or a willingness to hire talented people who have been critical of him in the past. I know it is a cliché to say “it’s amazing what you can accomplish when you don’t care about who gets credit”, but Lincoln’s story made me think there is a lot of truth to this.

One of the things I didn’t know was how deft of a politician he was. His skills as a storyteller enabled him to persuade and inspire people. Through the years he built long-term relationships to build up his influence. He was also skilled at political chess games, always seeming to be a couple steps ahead of his opponents. I think this ties back to his ability to set his ego aside and analyze situations with ruthless objectivity. But his political skills didn’t get in the way of his integrity, as he didn’t use them to just increase his popularity – he used them to accomplish political goals that he thought was in everyone’s interest.

Lincoln was incredibly ambitious. He had a desire to be someone important, to make a contribution to the great events that were unfolding. He also had a desire to be admired and respected, but he didn’t just want to be admired and respected for its own sake – he wanted to be worthy of it. It was nice to read about how ambition could be directed towards positive ends, and not necessarily be corrupting.

I listened to the audiobook, and Suzanne Toren did a great job with the reading. The way great narrators are able to bring a book to life is an underappreciated skill. I do much of my reading through audiobooks these days, and I appreciate their work.

Hundreds of books have been written about Abraham Lincoln, the prairie lawyer from Springfield, more than have been written about any other American. This fact alone makes it legitimate to question why we need another. In her book Team of Rivals, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has written an insightful analysis of Lincoln and the leading members of his cabinet.

Goodwin sets the stage by first taking us to the nominating convention, giving us a portrait of Lincoln and his rivals—William Seward of NY, Ohio Gov. Salmon P. Chase, and Edward Bates of Missouri. Within weeks of his election, Lincoln faced the dissolution of the Union. In this crisis, Lincoln made the strategic decision to appoint all three of his rivals to his cabinet, although they mostly had rather low regard for Lincoln’s abilities. However, Lincoln's determination, his ability to rise above personal slights, and his talent for getting along with men of clashing ideologies and personalities inspired these men to overcome their petty rivalries—all except Salmon Chase, whose dislike for Lincoln never changed.

Team of Rivals is an absorbing psychological study, a great biography of the four rivals, and a history of the civil war as viewed from the White House. Her analysis of the Lincoln presidency provides great insight into his extraordinary leadership qualities.

An elegantly crafted epic that is as gripping of a read as a novel: history can be eminently entertaining. I heard Goodwin interviewed on Radio West and she describes researching this book for 10 years. She utilizes a richness of primary sources to give the reader the opportunity to know well not just Lincoln but the many who surrounded him.

I dreaded reaching the last pages of this book--there was only one way for it to end. The death of Lincoln, although foreshadowed, comes as abruptly in this account as I am sure it did for those there. And, having become intimately acquainted with those close to Lincoln, the evoked emotion is not only at the death of great leader just when the country most relied on his magnanimity to repair and reconstruct a war-torn land, but for those whose grief was inconsolable at that time.

Goodwin finds just the right balance in supporting her thesis and giving us reason to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses that each of his key cabinet members brought to Lincoln's Administration. Plenty of great details about Lincoln's day-to-day concerns and tactics.

This is a wonderful nuanced book that resonates mightily with and informs what is going on today. Read it if you want to understand any kind of historical basis for what is now happening in the U.S. Read it if you love the minutia of history—every conversation ever recorded during the Lincoln period, every permutation and convolution of the Civil War, the complex emotional motivations behind the factions (a lot of people fought more for preservation of the union than out of any conviction about slavery)—or if you feel as if you need to learn U.S. history. This book has garnered enormous public attention as well as an award-winning movie based on it, so I am not going to write more commentary on what is in it. Instead, here are some opinions about the very important content that is missing.

At more than 900 pages, the book was so heavy, I broke down and bought a wretched Kindle version so that I could read without straining my tendons. But still, it was too short. Why?

In all the discussion about the virulent disagreement about the morality of slavery—whether it was constitutional for man to enslave man, whether the ever-expanding U.S. territories should be allowed to have legal slavery, whether people who had spent “blood and treasure” to settle the South and whose economy depended on slavery had any right to this abominable practice even though they had outlawed the slave trade as piracy—in all this, there was a complete absence of concern for, let alone awareness of, the existence of Native Americans who were being systematically killed and herded off their land in order for white people to create settlements, territories, and eventually states that would argue about the morality of person abuse and economy vs. morality and eventually erupt into civil war.

As I read through Goodwin’s flowing prose, I longed to go back in time and personally demand of Lincoln: “What about the Natives? Are you concerned about man killing man (women and children)? Are they not people also? What about our Declaration of Independence’s only reference to them as ‘savages'? Is that how you feel? What about George Washington’s famous letter of 1790 stating 'the Government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.'? You ethically opposed the Mexican American war, insisting that we had attacked peaceful Mexican settlements and thereby stole land. You are a wise and deeply good man who has known firsthand suffering and degradation and who consistently subsumed your substantial ambition and ego impulses, choosing what was just and most likely to result in the greater good. Tell me your thoughts.”

Here is a map of the inhabited American continent that is never in the history books:
See it full-size here

. . . native peoples are central to the nation’s history. As late as 1750—some 150 years after Britain established Jamestown and fully 250 years after Europeans first set foot in the continent—they constituted a majority of the population in North America, a fact not adequately reflected in textbooks. Even a century later, in 1850, they still retained formal possession of much of the western half of the continent.
—Claudio Saunt, associate director of the Institute of Native American Studies at the University of Georgia. From his book West of the Revolution (2014) [excerpted in the link]

Native Americans participated on both sides of the Civil War and, according to Wikipedia, “Historians claim they were hardest hit of all who participated in the War.”

I am ashamed that I didn’t know about this distortion of history until about sixteen years ago when I worked for a magazine that was involved with indigenous communities and issues. Until we are willing to look at the whole truth of our past and ongoing history, until it too is included in tomes about our Civil War, until it is fully acknowledged when somebody writes about spending “blood and treasure” to create new American settlements, we are doomed to repeat it by demonizing, ignoring, and/or erasing “inconvenient populations.”

That said, Team of Rivals stunningly makes you appreciate our country and our history, makes the past come alive and feel quite present, makes you cry with joy at the passage of the antislavery Thirteen Amendment and sob at Lincoln’s death. (A million times I’ve looked at this statue of a Union soldier from New York in Central Park, but after reading this book, I see him!)
n  n
My wanting more truth is a testament to the healthy hunger for truth aroused by this book. I want truth about our hypocrisies through heartfelt stories that are hard to hear, but whose fullness makes us all feel what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” as well as our culpability. If white people can feel both these extremes, perhaps somewhere in the middle we can know we are all the same, that we are sorry, and that we will now commit to acknowledge and therefore be able to correct our present and past wrongs. If we can admit the wrongs of our ancestors, we will do better, slaying delusions of righteous superiority with the light of exposure.

Explaining Lincoln’s worldwide legacy and the love he evoked in people, Goodwin quotes Tolstoy’s conclusion that “Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country—bigger than all the presidents together.” So I can’t help thinking he would agree with me and encourage the greatest truths we can tolerate.

***
10/12/17 Addendum:
Russell Brand posted this video, a postcard to America, where he makes the same point I make in this review about the importance of acknowledging our true history--we are a country founded via genocide (to acquire the land) and slavery (to enable our economy). It's not pretty. But if we can acknowledge this for the part it plays in the picture with all the magnificent things we have produced, including Lincoln, maybe we will stop having what we deny erupt from its inborn craving to be seen and reaction to the pressure of being denied.

This is a great civil war book with a definite theme. It’s common in Doris Kearns-Goodwin books for her to discuss leadership. In fact her most recent book is called Leadership: In Turbulent Times. Her past subjects have included Lyndon Johnson (Vietnam and the Great Society); Franklin Delano Roosevelt (WWII); and in this book Lincoln (the Civil War and reconstruction). Team of Rivals is meant to demonstrate Lincoln’s great ability to bring widely different and sometimes antagonistic politicians together at a time of great need.

I particularly enjoyed and was surprised by her ability to make these figures deeply human after all these years, especially Lincoln. I’d read a biography of Seward not long ago and although I trust the book’s basic facts, Kearns-Goodwin showed so much more in this book in which he is only one of the characters. To me this suggests there is always more to learn with a really talented writer.

Team of Rivals is ostensibly about the political figures from the North and West that were jockeying for position in what was to become a platform initially based on opposition to the spread of slavery. This issue was eventually to divide the country in two. Politicians Bates, Chase and Seward were the most prominent, experienced and well known. Lincoln in 1859 was a distinct lesser known and generally treated as somewhat of a backwoods clown. To the shock of the forerunners and the country Lincoln prevailed and eventually became president. The worst was expected.

Lincoln brought his “rivals” with him to Washington and through force of personality, political skill and intelligence managed to use their talents and control their frequent jealousies and bad behavior.

Kearns-Goodwin shows Lincoln as a true leader. Among his best qualities were his even-tempered forgiveness, his self-awareness, and empathy, all qualities that the author feels were innate. While others were better educated, had greater wealth, had more sophistication and “better” families, it was Lincoln who was critical at this desperate time. A truly interesting book.

Biographies aren't always boring tomes. Doris Kearns Goodwin does a magnificent job of detailing how Abraham Lincoln, a lesser known and ill-positioned candidate captures the Republican party's nomination, goes on to get elected President, and leads America through the tumult of the Civil War.

While most of us know Lincoln as "honest Abe" and the President who emancipated slaves, Kearns-Goodwin offers a portrait of a man who took many of the men who'd he'd beaten out as the republican nominee into his Presidential Cabinet. His offering them positions of significance in his Administration--positions that had the power to ruin his presidency--seemed, at least initially, to many as the act of a political neophyte or backwater bumpkin. As the Civil War is being prosecuted, readers get to see how strategic Lincoln’s use of man's personal ambitions and commitments to country made them effective members of the Cabinet.

Kearns-Goodwin's narrative offers timely reminders how a nation at war undergoes philosophical and political tensions that will takes years to heal. In reading the book, there were times when the circumstances or politicians involved in the civil war could just as easily have been the circumstances and politicians involved in the war in Iraq.

The book does an admirable job of showing the nuances of the internal conflicts that Lincoln faced abut social and political issues of the times. While he believed slaves should be free, he was slow to adapt that they should be granted suffrage. At the same time he welcomed Frederick Douglass into the White House, argued the merits of equal pay for black and white soldiers, and offered the first African American attorney the opportunity to argue before the Supreme Court.

Great history lesson that was also surprisingly readable.

It's difficult to give a bad review for a book that takes this much of your life to read, but I've read too many Civil War books to give a bad one thumbs up.

“Team of Rivals” is in reality two books, one very good and one shockingly bad. The first book covers the lives of Lincoln, Bates, Chase, Stanton and Seward from birth to 1860. Tales of their rise is rich and detailed full of stories that paint a picture of their varying personalities. Great. The second book, however, is bad. Once the ‘Team’ is assembled and the guns of the Civil War are rattling, Goodwin’s narration falls apart. Anyone with even a vague grasp of the Civil War will be surprised at the author’s lack of knowledge on the subject. The battle of Fredericksburg is covered in one sentence, Chancellorsville in two sentences and Gettysburg in two paragraphs while various balls and festivals hosted by Mary Todd and Kate Chase are covered in 10 page slices. I find it ironic that Goodwin points out how unimportant Lincoln regarded these events, yet she insists on giving us a blow by blow of every decoration and dinner party. Disturbing how much the superficial dominates the book. I began to seriously wonder if the author was aware that the War and Lincoln’s perseverance in the face of it is why he is so admired.

Goodwin should stick to writing about baseball. To write about Lincoln and know so little about the War is not the work of a master historian. Read the fantastic first half but don’t waste your time with anything past 1860.

I finally finished Goodwin's excellent biography of Lincoln and his cabinet. And it did not disappoint. It's beautifully written and captures the personalities and shifting views of each of the cabinet members. I was a fan of Lincoln before this book and now have more respect for the singular figure.

One thing that struck me in this story is how under-rated political moderates are. Lincoln was successful because he was cool-headed and could change his mind. Seems like we should look for those traits in our leaders and it seems that we rarely do. My favorite book on Lincoln's shifting mind is the Fiery Trial by Foner.

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!