BOOK REPORT: TEAM OF RIVALS. THE POLITICAL GENIUS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Penguin Books, 2006)

Oldie but goldie, if 2006 may be seen as “oldie,” Goodwin’s book won the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, the New-York Historical Society’s Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

A 1510 pages book, Team of Rivals has an Introduction, two parts (Part 1: The Rivals – 11 chapters, and Part 2: Master among Men – 15 chapters), and an Epilogue, besides “About the Author,” “Dedication,” “Maps and Diagrams,” etc, all building a very vivid book, which starts from Lincoln’s and his team’s childhood and ends with his assassination and how his former team continues until their death, many years later. The book shows both Lincoln the man, with feelings, anxieties, and with a wife and kids, and Lincoln the politician, Lincoln the president. A Lincoln who spends weeks writing his speeches, which are extremely well documented but also in a very plain language and with a practical logic. He keeps asking his audience to believe in the Declaration of Independence and he does not want to punish the South even in his final moments, when the North has clearly won the war. A war which he truly and deeply hated, but which he absolutely had to win.

All his mates and rivals are both politicians and human beings, with their families there, with letters, and dialogues, and parties, with joy, and sorrow, all of it making that age alive for the reader.

It shows how complicated politics can be, and how a true leader can actually handle a team of his former counter-candidates to the US presidency – William H. Seward (his would-be best friend), Salmon P. Chase (an abolitionist but a very negative character actually), and Edward Bates, all of whom he considered the most powerful men in America, and from different political backgrounds. To these add the rich and influential Kentucky Blairs, Franck and Montgomery. The differences between pro-slavery Democrats and anti-slavery Republicans (the Party founded in 1854 by Chase) are also well explored in this book.

It also shows that Lincoln did not start as an abolitionist, but as a moderate Whig-future Republican willing to stop the extension of slavery in the West, not to abolish slavery in the South, then free all black slaves if possible, but with compensating their former owners financially, and for sending the free blacks back to their native land, Africa. This last idea changed after meeting famous African American abolitionist and former slave, Frederick Douglass, at the White House, towards the end of the Civil War. Their meeting convinced Lincoln to approve of blacks’ enrollment in the Union Army and equal pay for equal work-fight.

He did not believe in the equality between the two races, or this was what he wanted his public to hear, especially in Illinois, where there was a “special law making it a criminal offense to bring into the boundaries of Illinois ‘a person having in him one-fourth negro blood, whether free or slave’” and where blacks and mulattoes were barred “from entering the state to take up residence” (p. 320).

As the book explains:

“ ‘My first impulse,’ Lincoln had said before, ‘would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia—to their own native land.’ Lincoln had long supported the same implausible plan endorsed by Edward Bates and Henry Clay, the notion of compensating slaveowners and returning freed slaves to their homeland. Without such a program, ‘colonizers’ argued, Southern whites would never accept the idea of emancipation. Still, Lincoln took note of the staggering administrative and economic difficulties. More than 3 million blacks lived in the South, representing 35 percent of the entire Southern population. The overwhelming majority had no desire to go to Africa, and only a few spokesmen, not including Lincoln, advocated forced deportation. They were here to stay.

‘What then?’ Lincoln asked. ‘Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition?’ But once freed, could they be made ‘politically and socially, our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not. Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question… A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded.’ Lincoln understood that the greatest challenge for a leader in a democratic society is to educate public opinion. ‘With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed,’ he said. ‘Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions’ “ (pp. 322-323).

I will end this report with Lincoln’s words about Blacks and emancipation, words which triggered his assassination by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth:

“He felt the right of suffrage should be extended to blacks—to those who were literate and those ‘who serve our cause as soldiers.’ On the other hand, the new Louisiana constitution contained a number of remarkable provisions. It emancipated all the slaves within the state and provided ‘the benefit of public schools equally to black and white.’ The state legislature, which had already revealed its good intentions by ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment, was empowered specifically ‘to confer the elective franchise upon the colored man.’ Were they to cast out the hard work already achieved, Lincoln asked rhetorically, or trust that this was the start of a process that would eventually produce ‘a complete success’? (pp. 1085-1086).