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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.
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
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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.
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