Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

This, then, is a story of Lincoln’s political genius revealed through his extraordinary array of personal qualities that enabled him to form friendships with men who had previously opposed him; to repair injured feelings that, left untended, might have escalated into permanent hostility; to assume responsibility for the failures of subordinates; to share credit with ease; and to learn from mistakes.

If his appearance seemed somewhat odd, what captivated admirers, another contemporary observed, was “his winning manner, his ready good humor, and his unaffected kindness and gentleness.”

The story is told of Lincoln’s first meeting with Mary at a festive party. Captivated by her lively manner, intelligent face, clear blue eyes, and dimpled smile, Lincoln reportedly said, “I want to dance with you in the worst way.” And, Mary laughingly told her cousin later that night, “he certainly did.”

“Everything,” a journalist observed, “tended to represent the home of a man who has battled hard with the fortunes of life, and whose hard experience had taught him to enjoy whatever of success belongs to him, rather in solid substance than in showy display.”

During his years in Springfield, Lincoln had forged an unusually loyal circle of friends. They had worked with him in the state legislature, helped him in his campaigns for Congress and the Senate, and now, at this very moment, were guiding his efforts at the Chicago convention, “moving heaven & Earth,” they assured him, in an attempt to secure him the nomination. These steadfast companions included David Davis, the Circuit Court judge for the Eighth District, whose three-hundred-pound body was matched by “a big brain and a big heart”; Norman Judd, an attorney for the railroads and chairman of the Illinois Republican state central committee; Leonard Swett, a lawyer from Bloomington who believed he knew Lincoln “as intimately as I have ever known any man in my life”; and Stephen Logan, Lincoln’s law partner for three years in the early forties.

Lincoln was invariably the center of attention. No one could equal his never-ending stream of stories nor his ability to reproduce them with such contagious mirth.

on the evening of February 27, 1860, before a zealous crowd of more than fifteen hundred people, Lincoln delivered what the New York Tribune called “one of the happiest and most convincing political arguments ever made in this City” in defense of Republican principles and the need to confine slavery to the places where it already existed.

Neither Seward nor Chase nor Bates seriously considered Lincoln an obstacle to their great ambition.

No sooner had he completed his studies than he berated himself for squandering the opportunity: “Especially do I regret that I spent so much of my time in reading novels and other light works,” he told a younger student. “They may impart a little brilliancy to the imagination but at length, like an intoxicating draught, they enfeeble and deaden the powers of thought and action.” With dramatic flair, the teenage Chase then added: “My life seems to me to have been wasted.” While Seward joyfully devoured the works of Dickens and Scott, Chase found no room for fiction in his Spartan intellectual life.

Death has pursued me incessantly ever since I was twenty-five…. Sometimes I feel as if I could give up—as if I must give up. And then after all I rise & press on.”

When asked in 1860 by his campaign biographer, John Locke Scripps, to share the details of his early days, he hesitated. “Why Scripps, it is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence… you will find in Gray’s Elegy: ‘The short and simple annals of the poor.’ ”

Lincoln wrote a letter of condolence to Fanny McCullough, a young girl who had lost her father in the Civil War. “It is with deep grief that I learn of the death of your kind and brave Father; and, especially, that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it.”

Though the young Lincoln never left the frontier, would never leave America, he traveled with Byron’s Childe Harold to Spain and Portugal, the Middle East and Italy; accompanied Robert Burns to Edinburgh; and followed the English kings into battle with Shakespeare. As he explored the wonders of literature and the history of the country, the young Lincoln, already conscious of his own power, developed ambitions far beyond the expectations of his family and neighbors. It was through literature that he was able to transcend his surroundings.

What Lincoln lacked in preparation and guidance, he made up for with his daunting concentration, phenomenal memory, acute reasoning faculties, and interpretive penetration.

“The books, and your capacity for understanding them, are just the same in all places…. Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.”

Lincoln himself admitted that he ran “off the track” a little after Ann’s death. He had now lost the three women to whom he was closest—his mother, his sister, and Ann. Reflecting on a visit to his childhood home in Indiana some years later, he wrote a mournful poem.

I hear the loved survivors tell How naught from death could save, Till every sound appears a knell, And every spot a grave.

“Only people who are capable of loving strongly,” Leo Tolstoy wrote, “can also suffer great sorrow; but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heal them.”

Lincoln’s inability to take refuge in the concept of a Christian heaven sets him apart from Chase and Bates.

Seward shared Lincoln’s doubt that any posthumous reunion beckoned.

He asked if Speed might advance him credit until Christmastime, when, if his venture with law worked out, he would pay in full. “If I fail in this,” added Lincoln abjectly, “I do not know that I can ever pay you.”

Some have suggested that there may have been a sexual relationship between Lincoln and Speed. Their intimacy, however, like the relationship between Seward and Berdan and, as we shall see, between Chase and Stanton, is more an index to an era when close male friendships, accompanied by open expressions of affection and passion, were familiar and socially acceptable.

IN THE ONLY COUNTRY founded on the principle that men should and could govern themselves, where self-government dominated every level of human association from the smallest village to the nation’s capital, it was natural that politics should be a consuming, almost universal concern.

An American does not know how to converse, but he discusses; he does not discourse, but he holds forth. He always speaks to you as to an assembly.”

“Who can wonder,” Ralph Waldo Emerson asked, at the lure of politics, “for our ambitious young men, when the highest bribes of society are at the feet of the successful orator? He has his audience at his devotion. All other fames must hush before his.”

“It shames my manhood that I am so attached to you,” Tracy confessed to Seward after several days’ absence from Albany. “It is a foolish fondness from which no good can come.” His friendship with another colleague, Tracy explained, was “just right, it fills my heart exactly, but yours crowds it producing a kind of girlish impatience which one can neither dispose of nor comfortably endure… every day and almost every hour since [leaving] I have suffered a womanish longing to see you. But all this is too ridiculous for the subject matter of a letter between two grave Senators, and I’ll leave unsaid three fourths of what I have been dreaming on since I left Albany.”

Seward urged: “there is not a white man or white woman who would not have been dismissed long since from the perils of such a prosecution.” There was never any doubt that the local jury would return a guilty verdict. “In due time, gentlemen of the jury,” Seward concluded, “when I shall have paid the debt of nature, my remains will rest here in your midst, with those of my kindred and neighbors. It is very possible they may be unhonored, neglected, spurned! But, perhaps years hence, when the passion and excitement which now agitate this community shall have passed away, some wandering stranger, some lone exile, some Indian, some negro, may erect over them a humble stone, and thereon this epitaph, ‘He was Faithful!’ ” More than a century afterward, visitors to Seward’s grave at the Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn would find those very words engraved on his tombstone.

Lincoln engaged in every aspect of the political process, from the most visionary to the most mundane. His experience taught him what every party boss has understood through the ages: the practical machinery of the party organization—the distribution of ballots, the checklists, the rounding up of voters—was as crucial as the broad ideology laid out in the platform.

“to the ideal that all men should receive a full, good, and ever increasing reward for their labors so they might have the opportunity to rise in life.”

To Lincoln’s mind, the fundamental test of a democracy was its capacity to “elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all.”

resisting the tide of public opinion in Illinois, Lincoln proclaimed that “the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy,”

Lincoln always believed, he later said, that “if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” and he could not remember when he did not “so think, and feel.”

Harvard law professor Joseph Story is famously quoted as saying that the law “is a jealous mistress, and requires a long and constant courtship.”

“once put your words in writing and they Stand as a living & eternal Monument against you.”

Lincoln seemed to believe that “ideas of a person’s worth are tied to the way others, both contemporaries and future generations, perceive him.”

Lincoln gradually recovered from his depression. He understood, he told Speed later, that in times of anxiety it is critical to “avoid being idle,” that “business and conversation of friends” were necessary to give the mind “rest from that intensity of thought, which will some times wear the sweetest idea threadbare and turn it to the bitterness of death.”

Lincoln’s masterful approach to leadership: he counseled temperance advocates that if they continued to denounce the dram seller and the drinker in “thundering tones of anathema and denunciation,” nothing would be accomplished. Far better to employ the approach of “erring man to an erring brother,” guided by the old adage that a “drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.”

Mental health, contemporary psychiatrists tell us, consists of the ability to adapt to the inevitable stresses and misfortunes of life. It does not mean freedom from anxiety and depression, but only the ability to cope with these afflictions in a healthy way. “An outstanding feature of successful adaptation,” writes George Vaillant, “is that it leaves the way open for future growth.”

Gray’s “Elegy,” which Lincoln quoted in his small autobiography to explain his attitude toward his childhood poverty, asserts that “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen/And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”

Lincoln’s abhorrence of hurting another was born of more than simple compassion. He possessed extraordinary empathy—the gift or curse of putting himself in the place of another, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires.

Lincoln maintained that children should be allowed to grow up without a battery of rules and restrictions. “It is my pleasure that my children are free—happy and unrestrained by paternal tyrrany,”

“That ‘union is strength’ is a truth that has been known, illustrated and declared, in various ways and forms in all ages of the world,”

“he whose wisdom surpasses that of all philosophers, has declared that ‘a house divided against itself cannot stand.’