Team of Rivals

I was hoping to write this a week or so ago and never got around to it.  I’m afraid the original idea has faded a bit, but we’ll see what the result is.

I finished Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin and had a thought that really stuck with me.  The book itself was quite interesting.  It highlights President Lincoln and his Cabinet and how they operated.  It is a comprehensive view of the political side of the Civil War, and the era directly preceding it, at least as seen by Lincoln and his rivals in the Republican Party.

Lincoln’s idea to surround himself with his chief rivals was a brilliant decision.  He was capable of harnessing them to his purpose, and they had already demonstrated their competence by being his rivals.  They all were viewed as more likely candidates right up until the last moment for the Republican nomination.

The book was not just a biography of Lincoln but also a biography of his major cabinet members, it gave a very human look at the immediate players in Washington throughout the War, after having given the reader a perspective on what shaped these people.  Lincoln always is very high in the Pantheon of great presidents, but this book manages to shape his story as well as that of the other players to make them seem human.  They are fallible, petty, ambitious.  And yet all are accomplished men who are striving for the salvation of the nation.

I could go on at length about the different personalities.  Chase, Seward and Bates all were interesting people, but they weren’t the parts that intrigued me most.  The first was Lincoln himself.  It’s amazing just how good a politician he was.  He knew that he could only get things done if he rode public sentiment, yet he was no crass populist.  He had definite thoughts on what he wanted to accomplish and he knew how to prepare the way in order for those things to be done.  Yet throughout his life he did not compromise himself.  He did not make hasty decisions, but when he made them he stuck to them.  I could say so much more on this, and many people already have, but I better understand why he is upheld as an exemplar of all things good and right.

The next person that intrigued me was Mary Todd Lincoln.  Before this all I knew was that she was Lincoln’s Crazy Wife.  That was about as incomplete a picture as I could have formed.  She was ambitious and insecure.  She was temperamental.  She threw fits at inappropriate times and spent money she didn’t have to fit into the Washington circuit.  Yet she also spent a lot of time in Army hospitals caring for troops while going out of her way to not let the newspapers know.  She was a loving wife and a caring mother.  In other words she was an individual, with her own quirks, foibles and flaws.

The last person to briefly touch on is General McClellan.  The funniest bit of the book to me was that my initial impression of McClellan was accurate.  He was an arrogant, egotistical man who was an inferior military leader with the sole redeeming quality that he could train troops well.  He could not accept blame for anything. he belittled everyone above him and criticized them for his own mistakes.  His sole redeeming quality was his love for his troops.

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Tags: Civil War, Lincoln, Lincoln's wife, McClellan, Personalities