A Major Historian’s Fresh Look at Lincoln

When he was a young man on the make, Abraham Lincoln confided in his best friend, Joshua Speed, that he feared he would someday die “having done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.” Some twenty years later, in the wake of his executive order emancipating over three million black slaves, Lincoln reflected that if his “name ever goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.” As America approaches the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln continues to hold an unrivaled position as the nation’s most beloved and revered president.

The historian David Donald once noted our curious tendency to square every public action with what we presume Abraham Lincoln might have done or might have sanctioned. This need to “get right with Lincoln” pervades American political culture even to this day, and it feeds an ongoing fascination with Lincoln’s dramatic life story.

With so much already in print, historians are hard-pressed to say much that is new about our sixteenth president. Still, they try and often succeed. Doris Kearns Goodwin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of books on Lyndon Johnson and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, has written a sweeping survey of Lincoln and his Cabinet that contributes a great deal to our understanding of Lincoln’s character and political dexterity.

Over 800 pages long, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln is exhaustive in detail and shares many of the strengths of Goodwin’s earlier works. A master storyteller, she uses the intertwined lives of Lincoln and his key cabinet members—Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of State William Henry Seward, Attorney General Edward Bates, and War Secretary Edwin M. Stanton—to weave a compelling narrative of wartime Washington.

Readers who enjoyed Kearns’s Roosevelt book, No Ordinary Time, will delight in following an earlier generation of Washington elites through a maze of parlor intrigues, lavish state dinners, and backroom meetings. All the elements of a Goodwin book are there: a street map showing where the homes and offices of various Cabinet members were located; a floor plan of the White House, indicating who worked where and who slept in which room; descriptions of clothing, art, and landscapes that all but transport the reader to another time.

Drawing on an extensive array of manuscript collections, works published during Lincoln’s time, and secondary sources, Goodwin opens at the 1860 Republican convention in Chicago, which saw Lincoln, Chase, Seward, and Bates locked in a fierce competition for their party’s Presidential nod. She then moves back in time, tracing the careers and lives of each man, culminating by the middle of the book with the great war that would test their personal and political strength.

In a cast of equals, some players are more equal than others. Central to the story are Salmon Chase, the deeply pious, austere Ohioan whose righteous belief in black equality was outstripped only by his tremendous sense of self-importance and destructive penchant for (often unsuccessful) political machinations, and William Henry Seward, the master politician from New York who served his state as governor and in the U.S. Senate, earned a reputation in the 1850s as the nation’s leading opponent of slavery, and, after narrowly losing the Republican nomination to Lincoln, became the President’s most trusted adviser.

From the start, both men thought they could outmaneuver their boss and either serve as his puppet-master or steal the 1864 nomination away from him. Seward learned early on that his political skills were no match for Lincoln’s, and he quickly jettisoned his own ambitions for the good of the administration. Chase, who proved an able treasury secretary, particularly in the dark days of 1861 and 1862, when the government was badly starved for capital, never quite grasped how unlikable he was and how likable and astute Lincoln was. Chase proved a constant nuisance to the President, who finally, in mid-1864, appointed him Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, thereby removing him to the third branch and bringing a modicum of tranquillity to the cabinet.

Goodwin also does a fine job of salvaging the reputation of Mary Todd Lincoln, whose enemies left a lasting impression of a mentally unstable shrew. Team of Rivals does not whitewash the First Lady, but it paints a more complicated picture. We learn that Mary paid many visits to wounded soldiers but refused to let the press cover her hospital trips. We also learn that she was an ardent opponent of slavery and was deeply troubled by popular rumors that she was a Southern sympathizer.

If any theme pervades Team of Rivals, it is loss. All of the key personages suffered the death of a sibling, spouse, or child. Disease was rampant in the nineteenth century, and medicine was primitive. Chase was a three-time widower; Lincoln lost two sons. Goodwin dwells extensively on the deep sense of bereavement each man experienced and notes the irony that Lincoln, who was squeamish at the sight of blood, and Stanton, of Quaker background and deeply ambivalent about the morality of war, presided over a struggle that saw more than 600,000 Americans killed in less than five years.

What she does not speculate on, but might have, is the new meaning that death assumed in nineteenth-century America. Lincoln and his cabinet members belonged to a rising urban middle class that self-consciously reared smaller families and fostered more emotional relationships between children and parents, and between husbands and wives. Yet if spouses and their brood were closer than ever, medical science remained incapable of sparing people from early graves. We are left to wonder whether the families of Union and Confederate dead suffered greater mental anguish than their ancestors of the Revolutionary War era. Team of Rivals does not speculate on this possibility.

Which leads to a much larger point. Though Goodwin has written a fine, well-researched book, she is stronger on narrative than on analysis. Two questions, in particular, loom large in her story but go unanswered.

First, she masterfully recounts the political wars of the 1850s, which saw a majority of Northern voters come to oppose the extension of slavery into the new Western territories, and a majority of Southern voters oppose any deal that would bar them from taking slave property to those same territories. But why? She acknowledges that most Northerners bore African-Americans no sympathy, but her book never explains the process by which they came to oppose the extension of the “peculiar institution.” Likewise, most white Southerners were not slaveowners, so why should they care one whit about slavery?

Here is where the author might have leaned on the work of scholars like Eric Foner and James McPherson, who have painstakingly shown that by 1860 many Northerners came to believe that slavery corroded the economic, social, and cultural infrastructure of the South, while most Southerners came to believe that the North’s “free labor” system created a society where economic and political inequality were rife and where avarice trumped community spirit. To white voters in each section, whether slavery did or did not extend into the territories was a question of national destiny. The West, after all, represented the future of America. At stake was what kind of country America would be fifty years hence. One could thus care a great deal about slavery without caring much about slaves.

Second, Goodwin’s focus on high politics obscures an important development in Civil War historiography. Scholars like Ira Berlin have shown that the Lincoln administration and Congress came to embrace emancipation as a war measure not because they wanted to but because they had to. Hundreds of thousands of slaves were fleeing to Union lines, blocking transport routes, crowding army camps, and generally making a logistical nuisance of themselves. Which is to say that, in some respect, the slaves emancipated themselves. Their freedom was a fait accompli when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. All that was left was for the government to develop a coherent policy for dealing with them. Because Goodwin’s story is about elite white actors, it loses this thread entirely.

None of this is meant to detract from the full force of Goodwin’s book or the importance of high political history. It seems almost silly to fault an author for what she did not write about, when her monumental, 800-page work is filled with so many admirable contributions to the existing literature.

Ultimately, Team of Rivals will appeal more to the general reader than to professional academics. But historians, too, will find much to enjoy in it, and Lincoln, whose greatest fear in the world was that his life would go unremarked, can rest well in peace.

—Joshua Zeitz is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine and author of Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, to be published in April 2006.