Team of Rivals

Team of Rival by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Category: History/Biography My grade: B+

I haven't read much about the Civil War. My experience has been that most Civil War books, both fiction and non-fiction, are heavily battle oriented. They're bloody, intense and, with the constant descriptions of battle details, they can, frankly, get kind of boring. Most recently, I tried reading Doctorow's book The March about Sherman and couldn't get past the first 20 or 30 pages.

Goodwin's Team of Rivals has made a good start on changing my level of interest in this period of history. Her focus is on Lincoln and his cabinet - a cabinet whose core members were the people who Lincoln beat out for the 1860 Republican nomination for President. It was a totally unexpected move on Lincoln's part - to bring his rivals in to his administration. (Side note -- this political strategy popped up in fiction again last week on the TV show West Wing when Matt Santos (Jimmy Smits) named his Republican opponent Secretary of State - interesting.). Goodwin spends more time writing about the people and their interaction than she does about the events of the day. As an example, the Gettysburg Address and how it came to be takes almost 10 pages while the Battle of Gettysburg takes less than a page.

With the main focus on Lincoln and his four top cabinet members - Seward at State, Chase at Treasury, Stanton at War and Bates as Attorney General - Goodwin has some terrific characters to work with. The cabinet mixed radical abolitionists with very conservative politicians. Lincoln emerges as the master manager of people and politics. His homespun wasy really hid a brilliant political mind that understood in the miniscule details of getting elected and getting new and potentially radical changes accepted not only by Congress but by the people as well.

Of course, the major issue of the time was slavery. The major surprise of the book to me was the level, at least early in his career, Lincoln avoided the issue of abolition. While he appears to have morally opposed slavery, politically he believed strongly that the Constitution supported the right of the Southern states to continue the institution. He fought the extension of slavery in to new states but, before the Civil War, never proposed abolition in the South. His initial rational for the Emancipation Proclamation was military, not moral. The Proclamation freed the slaves only the rebellious states of the South. His theory was that, by freeing the southern slaves, he would force southern soldiers to perform the "grunt" work being done by the slaves - cooking, packing, hauling - or, in the best scenario, would force many soldiers to return to their homes since they no longer anyone to bring in the crops. Lincoln believed that his constitutional powers to wage war trumped the constitional right to hold slaves! It was only later in the war that the increasingly radicalized Lincoln made complete emancipation (by constitutional ammendment) a condition of the reentry of the southern states in to the Union.

These, to me, are the interesting insights of this period. Goodwin writes in great detail about these kinds of issues. For example, she spends much more time on the politics of changing generals in the Union army than on the battles that were won and lost. She also spends a lot of time telling the fascinating stories of some of the women of the period - Mary Lincoln, Seward's abolitionist wife Frances and Chase's society daughter, Kate.

I really enjoyed this one. It would have gotten an "A" in the new grading system except for a couple of things. First, its a major project coming in at about 800 pages not counting notes and references. Secondly, Goodwin has a habit of giving us way to much detail about the lives of people that never show up in her history again.

Those fairly minor quibbles aside, I recommend this one to all the history buffs out there.