Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
This brilliant multiple biography is centered on Lincoln's mastery of men and how it shaped the most significant presidency in the nation's history.Product Details
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
The life and times of Abraham Lincoln have been analyzed and dissected in countless books. Do we need another Lincoln biography? In Team of Rivals, esteemed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin proves that we do. Though she can't help but cover some familiar territory, her perspective is focused enough to offer fresh insights into Lincoln's leadership style and his deep understanding of human behavior and motivation. Goodwin makes the case for Lincoln's political genius by examining his relationships with three men he selected for his cabinet, all of whom were opponents for the Republican nomination in 1860: William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Edward Bates. These men, all accomplished, nationally known, and presidential, originally disdained Lincoln for his backwoods upbringing and lack of experience, and were shocked and humiliated at losing to this relatively obscure Illinois lawyer. Yet Lincoln not only convinced them to join his administration--Seward as secretary of state, Chase as secretary of the treasury, and Bates as attorney general--he ultimately gained their admiration and respect as well. How he soothed egos, turned rivals into allies, and dealt with many challenges to his leadership, all for the sake of the greater good, is largely what Goodwin's fine book is about. Had he not possessed the wisdom and confidence to select and work with the best people, she argues, he could not have led the nation through one of its darkest periods.
Ten years in the making, this engaging work reveals why "Lincoln's road to success was longer, more tortuous, and far less likely" than the other men, and why, when opportunity beckoned, Lincoln was "the best prepared to answer the call." This multiple biography further provides valuable background and insights into the contributions and talents of Seward, Chase, and Bates. Lincoln may have been "the indispensable ingredient of the Civil War," but these three men were invaluable to Lincoln and they played key roles in keeping the nation intact. --Shawn Carkonen
The Team of Rivals
| Team of Rivals doesn't just tell the story of Abraham Lincoln. It is a multiple biography of the entire team of personal and political competitors that he put together to lead the country through its greatest crisis. Here, Doris Kearns Goodwin profiles five of the key players in her book, four of whom contended for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination and all of whom later worked together in Lincoln's cabinet. |
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| 1. Edwin M. Stanton Stanton treated Lincoln with utter contempt at their initial acquaintance when the two men were involved in a celebrated law case in the summer of 1855. Unimaginable as it might seem after Stanton's demeaning behavior, Lincoln offered him "the most powerful civilian post within his gift"--the post of secretary of war--at their next encounter six years later. On his first day in office as Simon Cameron's replacement, the energetic, hardworking Stanton instituted "an entirely new regime" in the War Department. After nearly a year of disappointment with Cameron, Lincoln had found in Stanton the leader the War Department desperately needed. Lincoln's choice of Stanton revealed his singular ability to transcend personal vendetta, humiliation, or bitterness. As for Stanton, despite his initial contempt for the man he once described as a "long armed Ape," he not only accepted the offer but came to respect and love Lincoln more than any person outside of his immediate family. He was beside himself with grief for weeks after the president's death. 2. Salmon P. Chase 3. Abraham Lincoln 4. William H. Seward 5. Edward Bates |
The Essential Doris Kearns Goodwin
 Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir |  No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II |  Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream |
More New Reading on the Civil War
 Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness by Joshua Wolf Shenk |  Grant and Sherman: The Friendship That Won the Civil War by Charles Bracelen Flood |  The March: A Novel by E.L. Doctorow |
From Publishers Weekly
Pulitzer Prize–winner Goodwin (No Ordinary Time) seeks to illuminate what she interprets as a miraculous event: Lincoln's smooth (and, in her view, rather sudden) transition from underwhelming one-term congressman and prairie lawyer to robust chief executive during a time of crisis. Goodwin marvels at Lincoln's ability to co-opt three better-born, better-educated rivals—each of whom had challenged Lincoln for the 1860 Republican nomination. The three were New York senator William H. Seward, who became secretary of state; Ohio senator Salmon P. Chase, who signed on as secretary of the treasury and later was nominated by Lincoln to be chief justice of the Supreme Court; and Missouri's "distinguished elder statesman" Edward Bates, who served as attorney general. This is the "team of rivals" Goodwin's title refers to.The problem with this interpretation is that the metamorphosis of Lincoln to Machiavellian master of men that Goodwin presupposes did not in fact occur overnight only as he approached the grim reality of his presidency. The press had labeled candidate Lincoln "a fourth-rate lecturer, who cannot speak good grammar." But East Coast railroad executives, who had long employed Lincoln at huge prices to defend their interests as attorney and lobbyist, knew better. Lincoln was a shrewd political operator and insider long before he entered the White House—a fact Goodwin underplays. On another front, Goodwin's spotlighting of the president's three former rivals tends to undercut that Lincoln's most essential Cabinet-level contacts were not with Seward, Chase and Bates, but rather with secretaries of war Simon Cameron and Edwin Stanton, and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles. These criticisms aside, Goodwin supplies capable biographies of the gentlemen on whom she has chosen to focus, and ably highlights the sometimes tangled dynamics of their "team" within the larger assemblage of Lincoln's full war cabinet.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post
The Constitution makes no provision for a president's cabinet. After all, no one in the Constitutional Convention in 1787 ever thought the office of the president would require much more than secretarial help. If there was to be a council of state or an assembly of sage heads in the new republic, the Framers expected that it could be found in the Senate. But the Senate, as George Washington discovered, was too political and fractious a body to play that role. And the men he had invited to serve as his executive secretaries -- Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Henry Knox -- were of such extraordinary abilities that by the end of Washington's first administration, a "cabinet" of advisers and administrators with wide latitude to execute presidential policy was already emerging.
This did not mean that the president's cabinet acquired any predictable shape. Cabinets have been recruited by wildly different rules, from the purest cronyism (under Andrew Jackson) to the purest impartiality (under John Quincy Adams, who tried to construct a cabinet that included some of his deadliest political opponents). Sometimes cabinet secretaries have been submissive messengers of the president's will; sometimes they have used their independent political power to subvert his policies. Not even the size of the cabinet has remained stable. Washington had a cabinet of four (if we include his attorney general); John Adams added a fifth, the secretary of the navy, in 1798. George W. Bush has 15 cabinet posts, along with four other cabinet-rank executive positions. To date, almost no serious critical literature exists to give it all coherence.
Which means that the task the popular historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has set for herself in writing the history of Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet in Team of Rivals is neither easy nor immediately attractive. But this immense, finely boned book is no dull administrative or bureaucratic history; rather, it is a story of personalities -- a messianic drama, if you will -- in which Lincoln must increase and the others must decrease.
By the time Lincoln became president, cabinet-making had reached the point where cabinet members threatened to overshadow the president who had nominated them. The weak-kneed presidents of the 1850s -- Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan -- were routinely upstaged or subverted by their secretaries of war and state. And Lincoln did not look at first like any great improvement. He had earned a leading place in Republican Party politics in Illinois and snatched some fleeting national attention by challenging the mighty Stephen Douglas for the Senate in 1858 -- and almost winning the Democrat's seat. But Lincoln enjoyed nothing like the stature of New York's William H. Seward, Ohio's Salmon P. Chase (the John McCain of mid-century Republicanism), Pennsylvania's Simon Cameron or Missouri's Edward Bates. Yet obscurity cut both ways: Seward, Chase and the others had spent so long in the political limelight that each had acquired a legion of unforgiving enemies. Lincoln, at least, had offended none, and so the nomination swung to him. But once elected, he had to come to terms with the damaged egos of the party's jilted, and there was no guarantee that they would defer to this little known circuit lawyer from the prairies. Losing the nomination humiliated Seward, and Chase writhed with ambition for the presidency. These were exactly the sort of advisers whom Lincoln, as an executive-branch novice, would have been well advised to keep far away from Washington. Instead, he offered the State Department to Seward, the War Department to Cameron and the Treasury to Chase, knowing that (in the days before the creation of a professional civil service) he was also handing them the keys to the federal patronage system and the opportunity to build rival political empires of their own.
Lincoln did this partly because he had no real choice. He was painfully aware of his outsider status in Washington, and with no close political allies of national stature, he had no one else to whom he could turn to give his administration political ballast. Partly, Lincoln was guided by his long association with the Whig Party. The Whigs split and disintegrated as a national political party in the mid-1850s, and Lincoln had gone over to the new Republican Party in 1856. But his old political habits retained their hold on him, including the lofty Whig assertion that they were above partisanship -- statesmen rather than party hacks, dedicated to promoting national unity rather than special interests. It was entirely consistent with Lincoln's old Whig instincts to create "an administration of all the talents" (to borrow an old parliamentary phrase), even if the people he invited into it could be expected to stab him in the back.
But Lincoln's selection of a cabinet of rivals was also an expression of a shrewdness that few people could appreciate in 1861. Keeping Seward and Chase within his administration gave him more opportunities to control them and fewer opportunities for them to create political mischief. It also guaranteed that, in any controversy, he could count on Seward and Chase to back-stab each other, allowing him to emerge afterward as the all-powerful settler of disputes. And to improve his chances for command by limiting their ability to roil the political waters, Lincoln added two of his loyalists, Montgomery Blair as postmaster general and Gideon Welles as secretary of the Navy, to serve as his bulldogs if any of the others grew uppity. Seward, Chase or Bates might have uncorked this plan by simply refusing Lincoln's initial proffer of a cabinet post. But the president had correctly guessed that none of them could bring himself to refuse even secondhand prestige. From that moment, Goodwin observes, Lincoln had them in his power, and he never let them go. "He is managing this war, the draft, foreign relations, and planning a reconstruction of the Union, all at once," marveled Lincoln's secretary, John Hay, in 1863. "I never knew with what tyrannous authority he rules the Cabinet, till now. The most important things he decides and there is no cavil."
Team of Rivals tells the story of Lincoln's prudent political management as a highly personal tale, not a political or bureaucratic one. Goodwin's Seward is primarily the wounded but ultimately resilient politico who becomes Lincoln's cheerleader, rather than the manager of a vast network of diplomatic personnel and paperwork. Goodwin's Chase is the envious, holier-than-thou puritan whose passion for recognition and affirmation reduces everyone, including his daughter Kate, to a cipher for his own advancement; the book gives us very little about Chase's superb management of the Treasury. These are not novel interpretations, but the portraits are drawn in spacious detail and with great skill. In this respect, Team of Rivals is a strictly conventional sort of narrative that does not press much beyond the horizons set in 1946 by Burton J. Hendrick's classic Lincoln's War Cabinet. But good narrative in American history is what we lack, and Goodwin's narrative powers are great.
Like Seward and Hay, Goodwin comes to the close of Team of Rivals amazed and delighted to find "that Abraham Lincoln would emerge the undisputed captain of this most unusual cabinet" and thereby "prove to others a most unexpected greatness." Those who had known Lincoln before would have nodded appreciatively. Leonard Swett, who rode the Illinois circuit courts with Lincoln in the old days, once remarked that "beneath a smooth surface of candor and an apparent declaration of all his thoughts and feelings, he exercised the most exalted tact and the wisest discrimination. He handled and moved men remotely as we do pieces upon a chessboard." That "tact" saved the Union. It also mastered his cabinet. Team of Rivals will move readers to wonder whether the former might have been easier than the latter.
Reviewed by Allen C. Guelzo
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Customer Reviews
Don't take yourself too seriously
Whether this book is historically accurate or a wonderful fiction does not matter - it should be read by all politicians and potential leaders. The traits of the reported Lincoln are inspiring. Patient, humorous, humble and wise beyond mere intelligence Lincoln could have read all of the literature on performance management, emotional intelligence and systems management. He embodies the entire characteristic of Deming's "profound knowledge". Lincoln, as described, was not without personal ego, his wish to be well regarded after his passing bears its witness. His story is inspiring, he was serious but did not put himself first or take himself too seriously. A great story that with luck might be repeated in 2009.
A Book for our Times
Read this book if you know anything at all about Abraham Lincoln, or very little! The author has crafted a rich, detailed perspective of a man for all seasons, an American for all times. Our country longs for the depth and breath of his wisdom as much now as during the slice of history in which he lived. Truly, this is nonfiction at its finest! - Barbara Victoria
one of my favorites
Over the past several years, I've been trying to catch up on some of the American history that I should have learned as a youngster. However, in grade-school, these stories never seemed to come to life in the same way that they do while reading them today.
Several reviewers have commented that this book glosses over some of the hard edges and deep divides among Lincoln's team, and that may be true. However, that did not detract from this book for me. I wasn't looking for a deep analysis so-much as I was hoping to just gain a little insight into Lincoln as a man and as president; as I turned the last page of this book, I felt that I had learned a great deal more than I had anticipated, and enjoyed it all the while.
I have to admit to that these old eyes were a little bit more than "misty" while trying to read the closing pages of this book, and the abrupt ending really had me wondering how this story might have ended were not the main character stolen from us so early.
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