Doris Kearns Goodwin has written a compelling collective biography of an unlikely political quartet in which Abraham Lincoln had to earn the right to sing lead. We have become accustomed to recent biographies of leaders of the American Revolution—Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton—where a wide-angle lens always keeps in view others of “the Founding Brothers.” By contrast, the lens for many biographies of Abraham Lincoln has often been narrowly focused, so that the contributions of other leaders of the Second American Revolution are barely in view.
Goodwin originally contemplated writing an account of Abraham and Mary Lincoln in the White House as a sequel to her Pulitzer Prize-winning No Ordinary Time, the story of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Early on she abandoned that double story for what she believed was the more fascinating story of an odd political quartet. The result is an absorbing biography because it is not just about Lincoln but about a talented collection of men and women who find, to their surprise, that Lincoln is the person who binds them together. In Goodwin’s narrative we meet Lincoln afresh as a leader whose “extraordinary array of personal qualities … enabled him to form friendships with men who had formerly opposed him.” Goodwin’s portrait of Lincoln’s political genius allows us to appreciate his “astoundingly magnanimous soul.”
She begins with a dramatic, detailed account of “four men waiting.” William H. Seward, who had served as governor and senator from New York; Salmon P. Chase, who had filled the same offices in Ohio; Edward Bates, former congressman and judge from Missouri; and Abraham Lincoln waited in their hometowns to hear who would be the nominee of the Republican convention meeting in Chicago. When Lincoln was finally nominated on the third ballot, the other three leaders were stunned. Each believed he was better qualified by education, experience, and political savvy than the relatively unknown Lincoln.
Lincoln, on the very night he was elected, decided to invite these chief rivals to be members of his cabinet. Why? Lincoln told Joseph Medill, editor of the Chicago Tribune, “We needed the strongest men of the party in the Cabinet. I had no right to deprive the country of their services.” Goodwin steps behind the public personas to describe the private aspirations and fears of these “strongest men.”
And women. For what further sets her biography apart is Goodwin’s introduction of a quartet of remarkable women to match her male leads. She tells the stories of Mary Todd Lincoln, Fanny Seward, Kate Chase, and Julia Bates, showing their social and political acumen at a time when women were expected to remain within the private sphere of home and family, and her judicious use of letters and diaries gives immediacy to her narrative.
When Lincoln convened his cabinet in March, 1861, the cabinet secretaries were chafing over their subordinate roles; the president, they were convinced, was simply not up to the job. And yet, as Goodwin paints with sure brushstrokes, we follow each of their stories to the point where they come to appreciate Lincoln’s political genius.
Goodwin’s major interest, next to Lincoln, is Seward, who led on the first two ballots at the Republican convention in 1860. Lincoln appointed him as Secretary of State, and he was not shy about speaking his mind. By the end of Lincoln’s first month in office, the president was confronted everywhere by the question: did he have a policy? In frustration, Seward drafted a letter to Lincoln on April 1st that was no April Fool’s joke.
“We are at the end of a month’s administration and yet without a policy either domestic or foreign,” Seward wrote, adding that “further delay to adopt and prosecute our policies for both domestic and foreign affairs would not only bring scandal on the Administration, but danger upon the country.”
What was the solution? “Either the President must do it himself, and be all the while active in it; or Devolve it on some member of his Cabinet.” Guess who Seward was nominating?
Lincoln wrote out a reply to Seward that very day, responding point-by-point. In conclusion, Lincoln said simply, “if this must be done, I must do it.”
This frank exchange, rather than widening the distance between the two men, brought them together. Lincoln valued Seward’s intellect, abilities, and humor. Seward came to appreciate this gaunt Westerner who had deprived him of the highest prize of his life. Toward the end of June, in a letter to Frances, Seward told his wife, “The President is the best of us.”
Secretary of the Treasury Salmon B. Chase emerges as the most egotistical and exasperating of Lincoln’s rivals. But this allows Goodwin ample opportunity to speak of Lincoln’s political genius in soothing Chase’s wounded pride. Lincoln had to contend not only with the erstwhile governor’s continuing machinations as he jockeyed for the Republican nomination in 1864 but also with Chase’s feuds with Seward and Secretary of War Simon Cameron. In the end Lincoln appointed Chase to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. When Lincoln was reminded of Chase’s intrigues against him, he replied, “Now, I know meaner things about Governor Chase than any of those men can tell me,” but “we have stood together in time of trial, and I should despise myself if I allowed personal differences to affect my judgment of his fitness for the office.”
Goodwin moves beyond the three central rivals for the Republican nomination to also include treatments of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy; Edwin Stanton, who succeeded Cameron as Secretary of War; and Montgomery Blair, Postmaster General. The story of Stanton, who had rudely snubbed Lincoln in a famous law case in Cincinnati in 1859, is particularly gripping. Stanton grew to have a deep affection for Lincoln and after his assassination was overcome with grief for weeks.
Goodwin allows Mary Todd Lincoln to break through the usual caricatures and emerge as a complex woman, both intelligent and politically ambitious. Frances Seward, even while staying in their family home in Auburn, New York, encouraged if not pushed her husband to pursue strong antislavery stands in relation to Lincoln and his cabinet rivals. Kate Chase, the beautiful daughter of Salmon P. Chase (whose three wives had died young), was absolutely dedicated to her father’s political career, and like her father, was ambitious to upstage the Lincolns. Julia Bates’ passionate love letters to Edward Bates, and her diary entries, allow us to see Bates in fresh ways.
Goodwin’s narrative gifts, so appreciated in No Ordinary Time, are used to good effect in Team of Rivals. In exquisite detail Goodwin allows us to listen in on the gossip and political deals in backroom meetings, Kate Chase’s parties, and Mary Todd Lincoln’s state dinners. Setting out to “see Lincoln liberated from his familiar frock coat and stovepipe hat,” Goodwin gives us the private Lincoln, the president at ease, engaged in conversation in Seward’s home across the street from the White House, with his feet up in front of the fireplace.
As stirring as is Goodwin’s story of Lincoln’s skills in working with rivals, there is a presence of an absence in her narrative of his presidential years. Lincoln spoke several times during the 12-day pre-inaugural train trip from Springfield to Washington about his belief that he viewed himself, as he told the New Jersey legislature in Trenton, as “an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty.” Yes, Lincoln was an extraordinarily gifted manager of rivals, but at the center of Lincoln’s self-understanding of his leadership as president was his sense that he had been called by God for a special task at a specific moment.
During the Civil War, Lincoln embarked on a religious odyssey. He struggled to come to terms with the will of God in a brief musing he wrote for his eyes only after the Second Battle of Bull Run in 1862: “It may be that God’s will is different from the will of either party.” This reflection was found by his young secretary, John Hay, after Lincoln’s death, and given the title “Meditation on the Divine Will.”
Goodwin tells the story of the historic meeting of the cabinet on September 22, 1862, when Lincoln revealed that he would issue an Emancipation Proclamation. But she does not tell us, in her usually detailed descriptions, that both Chase and Welles, independent of each other, recorded that Lincoln, in Welles’ words, told his cabinet “he had made a vow, a covenant, that if God gave us the victory in the approaching battle, he would consider it an indication of Divine will, and that it was his duty to move forward in the cause of Emancipation.”
When Goodwin comes to the Second Inaugural, she tells us that Lincoln “fused spiritual faith with politics,” but there is so much more to say about the sources of the meaning of what some contemporaries called Lincoln’s “Sermon on the Mount,” a masterful speech that provided the basis of an ethic that could reach out to the rival South in a reconciling spirit.
Two smaller quibbles, oddly related to each other, are worth noting. First, Goodwin repeatedly interrupts her compelling narrative to quote a whole bevy of historians, evidently intended to bolster her argument. Too often the effect is merely to distract the reader. But second, in her more than 200 pages of notes, where—given the example of the best recent biographers of the American Revolutionary leaders—we might rightly expect to find Goodwin in dialogue or debate with other interpreters of Lincoln, Seward, slavery, or emancipation, we get very little substantive give-and-take.
As much as we may admire Lincoln, central to his enduring presence is that he remains elusive and paradoxical. We dare not miss the conflicts and contradictions in his spirit. And in the middle of that paradox is the odyssey of a president who never joined a church but offered the most profound statement we have on religious faith and the American nation only 41 days before his death.
Ronald C. White, Jr., is professor of American Church History at San Francisco Theological Seminary. He is the author of Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural (Simon & Schuster) and The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words (Random House).
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