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Lincoln as Great Conciliator

By BILL DURYEA
Published October 16, 2005

TEAM OF RIVALS:

The Political Genius

of Abraham Lincoln

By Doris Kearns Goodwin

Simon and Schuster, $35, 928 pp

Reviewed by BILL DURYEA

Abraham Lincoln's nomination for president at the Republican National Convention in 1860 was remarkable enough. He bested three other candidates with large national reputations - and larger egos - none of whom felt they had lost to the better man.

What Lincoln did after he won the election that fall, however, was more remarkable still: He made his three rivals - William Seward, Salmon Chase and Edward Bates - key members of his Cabinet. He did not consider friends and significant contributors. He could have packed the Cabinet with former Whigs, who made up the majority of the Republican Party and accounted for two-thirds of his total votes, but he did not.

Think of it. At a moment when the nation was polarized over the issue of slavery - with abolitionists in the North, secessionists in the South and compromisers from Missouri to Maryland making and breaking deals of convenience - Lincoln's first act in office, a decision made before sunset the day after his election, was to bring as many voices as possible from that raging debate with him to the White House.

By no means was this achieved by simply asking the men for their cooperation. While they had individually campaigned for Lincoln, putting party ahead of personal interests, Seward, Chase and Bates were deeply antagonistic toward each other. Seward, who would become secretary of state, and Chase, who would serve as treasury secretary, very nearly refused to serve together.

"In the end, Lincoln had unerringly read the character of Chase and slyly called Seward's bluff," writes Doris Kearns Goodwin in her meticulous new history, her first since 2002, when allegations were made that she plagiarized portions of her book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.

"Through all the countervailing pressures, he had achieved the Cabinet he wanted from the outset - a mixture of former Whigs and Democrats, a combination of conciliators and hard-liners. He would be the head of his own administration, the master of the most unusual Cabinet in the history of the country."

"While it was possible that his team of rivals would devour one another," Goodwin writes, "Lincoln determined that "he must risk the dangers of faction to overcome the dangers of rebellion.' "

James Madison, who wrote Federalist No. 10, knew the only cure for "the mischiefs of faction," especially in a large republic, was not to suppress them but paradoxically to encourage them. Bring the antagonistic voices together and they will naturally moderate and countervail each other, Madison argued. Lincoln studied this well, it appears, and moreover he had the courage to enact it, something his predecessor James Buchanan dared not do.

Joseph Medill of the Chicago Tribune asked Lincoln why he had chosen a Cabinet composed of enemies and and opponents, Goodwin writes.

"Lincoln's answer was simple, straightforward and shrewd. "We needed the strongest men of the party in the Cabinet. We needed to hold our own people together. I had looked the party over and concluded that these were the very strongest men. Then I had no right to deprive the country of their services.' "

It says something about our jaundiced view of modern politics that this episode seems so impossibly idealistic, as if it were a script for a movie rather than a brilliant and deftly executed maneuver of consensus-building that helped save the nation even as it was ripping itself apart.

But as Goodwin argues so convincingly, Lincoln's uncommon gifts for reading people and for persuading them make him the Republican president with the greatest claim to the title "uniter, not a divider."

Peerless as he was at intuiting motives, Lincoln was not omniscient. In the case of Gen. George McClellan, the famously haughty and procrastinating commander of the Union Army, Lincoln at first seemed not to be his usual decisive self. For months he permitted McClellan to delay attacking, giving the Confederates time to strengthen their forces.

At one point Lincoln's Cabinet joined forces to argue for McClellan's ouster. Lincoln was anguished by their opposition, but he stuck with McClellan just long enough for the general to win the Battle of Antietam, a much-needed morale boost for the North, and the perfect opportunity for Lincoln to unveil his Emancipation Proclamation. A month later he sacked McClellan. Maybe he was pretty decisive after all.

Perhaps it is unfair to hold any president who followed Lincoln to the standard set by the self-tutored "rail-splitter"-turned-lawyer from Illinois. Who can match his plain-spokenness, the elegance of his reasoning, his modesty and his grandeur?

But precedent is much in vogue these days, which makes Team of Rivals such a well-timed book. In nearly 800 pages (not including 120 pages of footnotes; is this a rebuke of her critics? one wonders), Goodwin vividly evokes Lincoln's struggles to avoid war, his resolve to fight hard once war became inevitable, and his unflagging effort to hold fast the fragile union.

- Bill Duryea is the Times national editor.

Doris Kearns Goodwin will appear at the Times Festival of Reading on Oct. 29 at USF St. Petersburg. She will discuss her book from 3-3:45 p.m. at the Campus Activities Center.

[Last modified October 14, 2005, 12:38:03]