Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln [Paperback]

I bought "Team of Rivals" because I was curious to see what sort of book got a recommendation from the new US President, and because I'm interested in American history. I didn't expect it to be as good as it is. I very rarely give five stars to things on Amazon - only to items that I think are perfect or exemplary in some way. "Team of Rivals" is popular history, but of the best kind: scrupulously researched, packed with anecdote and detail, and intelligently structured. It's up there with James McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom" as one of the essential works about the American Civil War for the general reader.

Goodwin's argument is that Lincoln was not just a humanitarian, a great statesman and the man who saved the Union, but also a political genius. She makes a good case. This is essentially a group biography of Lincoln's cabinet, and what Goodwin shows very well is Lincoln's remarkable capacity to take a bunch of powerful men with big egos, almost all of whom came from socially superior backgrounds to his own, and have them all jockeying for his approval within months of his election. Lincoln's political genius seems to have been fuelled by both his hard-won self-confidence and his extraordinary absence of personal malice. When, as a tyro politician, he would be defeated, he would go out of his way to be friendly to the victor. As a President, he was continually harried by the political ambitions of his vain and self-righteous Treasury Secretary, the implausibly named Salmon P. Chase. Lincoln's friends marvelled that the President tolerated Chase's all-too-obvious desire to be president himself, but Lincoln put up with Chase on the grounds that Chase was a fine Treasury Secretary and didn't have a cat in hell's chance of ever being elected to the White House. In this, as in so many things, Lincoln was right.

He had timing; he knew when to reply to letters that were designed to put him on the spot in such a way that the tables were turned on the sender. He managed the incredible feat of steering America through a hideous civil war. He liked a good joke (he had an apparently inexhaustible fund of stories, including some remarkably salty ones that I won't repeat here) and even his enemies were forced to admit that he knew how to hire good people. In retrospect, it's not difficult to see what Barack Obama sees in this book. Now you too can impress your friends with the intimate knowledge of the marital difficulties of Salmon Chase's daughter.

A fine, epic book. It has whetted my appetite for Lincolniana. Now I want to save up enough money for Michael Burlingame's monumental two-volume Lincoln biography. In the meantime, I unreservedly recommend this moving and stirring book. If Goodwin hero-worships Lincoln, it's only because most people who knew him did the same thing. And if Lincoln - with all his faults - wasn't some sort of hero, then the term surely has little meaning.

Of all the American Presidents, I admire Abraham Lincoln the most because he stalwartly endured so much: rebellious states, incompetent Federal generals, a fractious Republican Party, near-treasonous Democrats, a financially irresponsible and mentally unstable wife, and the death of a son. Finishing this thick work, my esteem for him is in no way diminished.

TEAM OF RIVALS by Doris Kearns Goodwin is, above all, a political biography of Lincoln as he rose through the ranks from country lawyer to Illinois state legislator to U.S. Congressman to presidential candidate to Chief Executive. As the Republican nominee for President in 1860, he beat out several formidable rivals for the nomination, including Salmon Chase, William Seward, and Edward Bates. Once elected, Lincoln was wily enough to keep his former (and potentially future) adversaries within immediate sight by cajoling them into his Cabinet - Chase at Treasury, Seward at State, and Bates as Attorney General. Thus, TEAM OF RIVALS is necessarily a political biography of each of these three men and, to a lesser degree, also one for each of the other prominent members of the Cabinet - Montgomery Blair as Postmaster General, Edwin Stanton as War Secretary (succeeding Simon Cameron), and Gideon Wells as Navy Secretary. The remarkable teamwork the Cabinet displayed to steer the Union through the darkest days of the Civil War is its, and Lincoln's, great achievement.

In her memoir of growing up, WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR, Goodwin is charmingly engaging. At 754 pages with two extensive photographic sections, TEAM OF RIVALS is hardly that but erudite, detailed, and lucid. The author's treatment of her subject is obviously admiring. At no point does Goodwin's narrative slime Abe's reputation with any perception which one normally ascribes to the currently incumbent band of dubious, self-serving, vacillating, and morally compromised public parasites whatever their party affiliation. Perhaps Lincoln was truly a wise and steadfastly principled man, or Goodwin just chose not to notice any blemishes. Or perhaps time itself serves as an airbrush.

It took me almost four months to gnaw my way through this lengthy volume; it's not a book I couldn't put down. For that reason, I'm knocking off a star, though I freely admit that this is more a deficiency related to my attention span than anything else. Others, not wearied by too much of a good thing, will justifiably award 5 stars.

The massive scholarship of this work is clearly evident in the 754 pages of highly readable narrative history. I was reminded of Robert K. Massie's histories of the European powers around the Great war; lots of characters, finely drawn, which give a real sense of the human side of great events. The key unique piece of this book is the interplay of the principal characters; the team of rivals, who form Lincoln's cabinet. Along with them, Doris Kearns gives fair due to the women in their lives, who are clearly all women of substance and ability; with perhaps the exception of Lincoln's wife, Mary, who often appears spiteful and small-minded.

As a political narrative, it has real merit; but I have a couple of reservations which perhaps challenge the scholarship. Firstly, there is very little analysis of the military side of the Civil War. At one level this is fine, as this is a political history, and there are enough great military histories of the Civil War. At another, it is a weakness. The war was Lincoln's foremost challenge; he was elected just before the it started and was killed as it ended. Beyond descriptions of his very human actions with individual troops; visits to the front and decisions around commuting sentences, the war plays an oddly distant, unconnected, almost exogenous role.

It leads to my second and wider discomfort. Every action in Lincoln's career is interpreted as a masterly and courageous move; even if it involves inaction. In three areas this seems to be a little too sympathetic.

First would be Lincoln's vacillation in not firing General Maclellan. There is no discussion of whether this should have been done earlier, and yet Maclellan wasted a vast army which could have challenged Robert E. Lee's Army of Virginia much more and earlier than it did.

Second would be the Abolition of Slavery. In other histories I have read, it is suggested that the slavery decision was at least partly driven by the need to head off British and French recognition of the Confederacy. There is no mention of this here. Instead, it is part of Lincoln's flawless political pacing towards his ends, in this case in the teeth of opposition from lesser beings.

Third would be his willingness to tolerate dissent and on occasion outright betrayal from those around him. The key case is Salmon Chase, who actively plots against the President in search of the 1864 nomination. The rationale is that Lincoln is above such personal trivia and focused purely on maximising the human talent deployed against the issues of the day.

I ma not sure there is a single instance where Doris Kearns cites a material mistake being made by Abe Lincoln. I am afraid somewhere early on, I stopped buying this utter faith in Lincoln's courage and prescience and started interpreting his actions in my own way as I read the rest of the book. The narrative can be interpreted differently, with Lincoln as a man who sometimes did feel doubt and did feel challenged in facing up to others. I found it more believable to see Lincoln as the 'rail-splitter' from Illinois seeking to face up to men with more social standing and education, as well as the most turbulent and violent period in America's history. I fail to see why the memory of a truly great President is marred by the idea that he was not flawless, that the almost Christ-like omniscience he displays in Doris Kearns' vision is just too perfect to be true.

Surely how much more satisfying that he is a man with weaknesses and imperfections, like the rest of humanity? Surely there is only courage when there is fear? I realise Lincoln is an almost mythical figure in US history, but the point of books like this is that they show the real human being, not the myth.

So all in all, a fine read, but keep your critical faculties close by.