Book Review:Team of Rivals –the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

By Doris Kearns Goodwin “has anybody seen my old friend Abraham? Can you tell me where he’s gone? He freed a lot of people but it seems the good die young I just looked around and he was gone” - Abraham, Martin and John (Marvin Gaye) For once the words ‘magisterial’, ‘monumental’ and ‘magnificent’ does justice to a book. Famously praised by Barack Obama as a remarkable study in leadership it tells the story of how the ‘prairie lawyer’ Abraham Lincoln rose from obscurity in the backwoods of Kentucky to win the Presidency of the United States in a time of great crisis and the catastrophe of the Civil War to emerge as one of the greatest leaders the world has ever known. Doris Kearns Goodwin tells the extraordinary story of Lincoln with warmth, humour, penetrating insight and great humanity – many of the same qualities she shows to be found in her subject. The device she uses to tell it is by way of a group biography of the men who were Lincoln’s rivals in the race to win the nomination of their party for the office of President of the United States– the newly formed Republican Party – and how it came to pass that a man born in poverty in a log cabin prevailed over men of wealth, position and prominence in the political race but then forged those very same men into a team to help him save the Union. Men such as William H Seward, senator and governor of New York, whose disappointment turned to impassioned respect for the extraordinary man whom he served with distinction as Secretary of State; Salmon P Chase, governor of Ohio and man of family tragedy; Judge Edward Bates prominent lawyer. No less fascinating, and central to the tale, is the role of the wives and daughters of these men and their encouragement of and dependence on their educated, enlightened womenfolk in both private and public life. Kearns plunges the reader into the world of mid-19 century America with verve and skill painting a picture of an expanding continent just discovering what would become known, and debated aver after, as its ‘manifest destiny’. What is heart-warming and encouraging about this saga is that despite the enormous suffering both personal, public and on an epic scale the central heart of the story is one of a man with extraordinary gifts – of friendship, forgiveness, empathy and the ability to illuminate these through anecdote and illustrative vignettes – using them to the betterment of those around him with unparalleled generosity. Lincoln even found time in the midst of the Civil War to sign the enabling act of the world’s first degree college for deaf and blind people that became Gallaudet University and has ever since had the sitting President as patron. Although a tragic age – the Civil War cost more American lives than all the other wars combined – it is also heroic and this account brings it to vivid life and should inspire all that, in the words of Lincoln himself, appeals to the “better angels of our nature”.