Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

“The years following the Revolution fostered the belief that the only barriers to success were discipline and the extent of one’s talents. ‘When both the privileges and the disqualifications of class have been abolished and men have shattered the bonds which once held them immobile’ marveled the French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville, ‘the idea of progress comes naturally into each man’s mind; the desire to rise swells in every heart at once, and all men want to quit their former social position. Ambition becomes a universal feeling.’” 

Modern readers of Team of Rivals must remember that the time period leading up to the American Civil War was extremely close to the end of the American Revolution and the founding of the country, such that the spirit aroused by the Revolution still imbued many Americans with a sense of awe and wonder of what they might be able to accomplish in this new era. The world in which Lincoln and many of his contemporaries grew up was marked by a spirit of industry that saw many a man rise from humble origins to become great. 

“In an era when men were fortunate to reach forty-five, and a staggering number of women died in childbirth, the death of a parent was commonplace. Of the four rivals, Seward alone kept parents into his adulthood. Chase was only eight when he lost his father. Bates was eleven. Both of their lives, like Lincoln’s, were molded by loss.” 

This brief passage in Chapter 2 might seem like a throwaway line, but it speaks to a certain aspect of Lincoln’s character, namely his great tendency towards empathy that would make him both a great wartime leader and a skilled manager of ambitious men. Because Lincoln had experienced loss, he was able to greatly understand the individual feelings and frustrations of loss in other people. This ability helped him to skillfully navigate scenarios that would arise during his political life and during the Civil War. 

“The distance between the educational advantages Lincoln’s rivals enjoyed and the hardships he endured was rendered even greater by the cultural resistance Lincoln faced once his penchant for reading became known. In the pioneer world of rural Kentucky and Indiana, where physical labor was essential for survival and mental exertion was rarely considered a legitimate form of work, Lincoln’s book hunger was regarded as odd and indolent. Nor would his community understand the thoughts and emotions stirred by reading; there were few to talk to about the most important and deeply experienced activities of his mind.” 

Lincoln truly was a self-made man. An outdoorsman who lacked many of the refined characteristics natural to the men who would become his rivals, Lincoln understood that the best way to raise himself from his station in life was to become a skilled academic and to garner as much knowledge as possible. Through his work ethic and self-training, Lincoln helped to transcend the expected roles of his station as a frontiersman and become an educated man of letters. This also shows the beginning of a social and cultural divide that will later take place in the United States, where academia and academics are seen as effete and contrary to physical work and labor, the latter of which will come to define and dominate what it means to be a man in America. 

“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.” 

Again, the modern reader must place themselves in the context of the time in which Lincoln lived. The fact that Americans could actively participate in their government made it almost like a form of entertainment, where people engaged in vibrant conversations in public places, read newspapers, and listened to speeches designed to further the public discourse on political matters and better allow the average man to intelligently involve himself in the political system. 

“While Seward endured the hostility of his hometown, his defense of [William] Freeman became famous throughout the country. His stirring summation was printed in dozens of newspapers and reprinted in pamphlet form for still wider distribution. Salmon Chase, himself a leading proponent of the black man’s cause, conceded to his abolitionist friend Lewis Tappan that he esteemed Seward as ‘one of the very first public men of our country. Who but himself would have done what he did for that poor wretch Freeman?’ His [Seward’s] willingness to represent Freeman, Chase continued, ‘considering his own personal position & the circumstances, was magnanimous in the highest degree.’” 

The time leading up to the American Civil War was rife with debates and controversies surrounding the institution of slavery in America and what should be done with it. For many leading politicians, the issue was a dangerous one because it could swing one’s public opinion drastically in one direction or another, as many people were intrigued by the issue of slavery but it was not their primary concern. This was especially true of people in the North, who unless they were staunch abolitionists were content with the status quo so long as slavery didn’t expand into the new territories occupied by the growing United States. Moreover, during this time William Seward was a very prominent politician at the peak of his career. He had very little to gain by taking on a legal case regarding a black man who was accused of murder. In doing so, Seward demonstrated his belief that all men in America were entitled to the same due process of law. 

“If [Lincoln] rarely spoke of his inner feelings, he often expressed emotion through the poetry he admired. Gray’s ‘Elegy,’ which Lincoln quoted in his small autobiography to explain his attitude towards his childhood poverty, asserts that ‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen / And waste its sweetness on the desert air.’ The poet laments a dead young villager of immense but untapped talent. ‘Here rests his head upon a lap of earth / A youth to fortune and to fame unknow / Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth / And melancholy marked him for her own.’” 

This excerpt shows how Lincoln was both a deeply educated man and thinker and a romantic who lived poetry’s mode of expression. Gray’s poem showcases the difference between the Old World and the New World; whereas in Gray’s world a poor man was fated, more often than not, to be poor and never truly be able to fully utilize his abilities possess, in Lincoln’s New World there was ample chance for one to make it if they worked hard enough and strove for a better life. Lincoln is proof of this, as he overcame the poverty of his youth. 

“Washington was a city in progress when the Lincolns arrived at the wooden railroad station in December 1847 for the opening of the congressional session. The cornerstone of the Washington Monument would not be laid until the following summer. Cobblestoned Pennsylvania Avenue was one of only two paved streets. Not yet fitted with its familiar high dome, the Capitol stood on a hill that boasted a ‘full view of the cities Washington, Georgetown, and Alexandria, and the varied and forest-clad hills in Maryland and Virginia.’ In the backs of most houses, recalled one of Lincoln’s colleagues, ‘stood pig-styes, cow-sheds, and pens for the gangs of unyoked geese. During the day the animals and fowls roamed at will in lordly insolence, singly or in herds and flocks, through the streets and over the fields.’”

Kearns Goodwin takes time to set the mood of the time for the modern reader. This view of Washington, D.C., as an almost backwater town helps to frame the newness of the United States with the more established capital cities of Europe. Washington was not a powerful place on the world stage. 

“The America of 1850 was a largely rural nation of about 23 million people in which politics and public issues—at every level of government—were of consuming interest. Citizen participation in public life far exceeded that of later years. Nearly three fourths of those eligible to vote participated in the two presidential elections of the decade.” 

Politics was the dominant social activity of Lincoln’s time, a form of entertainment where people would come and watch speakers and gather around taverns and inns to discuss what they read in pamphlets and newspapers. As the only people in the world who had the ability to directly influence their government, Americans of this time took a special pride in their politics. 

“The slavery issue had been a source of division between North and South from the beginning of the nation. That difference was embodied in the Constitution itself, which provided that a slave would be counted as three fifths of a person for purposes of congressional representation and which imposed an obligation to surrender fugitive slaves to their lawful masters.” 

Slavery had been a practice at the foundation of the country, and could have been addressed by the original framers of the Constitution, but they left slavery in place as a matter to be settled by local government through popular sovereignty. The Three-Fifths Compromise was put in place so that the South would not be able to dominate national politics in the House of Representatives; fully counting enslaved people would have assigned larger representation to the southern states, allowing them to outvote their northern counterparts on nearly any issue. The compromise did nothing to address the moral outrage of slavery.  

“Until the introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, there was no signal point around which the antislavery advocates could rally. As the Senate debate opened, Northerners were stirred into action ‘in greater numbers than ever,’ the historian Don Fehrenbacher has written, fighting ‘with all the fierceness of an army defending its homeland against invasion.’” 

For much of the 19th century, forces opposed to slavery were disunited. For many people living in the North, slavery was something that existed, but which did not directly affect their everyday lives. Because of this, many people simply felt that slavery should be left alone, and it would die a natural death as progress and industrialization slowly made the use of manual labor obsolete. However, with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, slavery was allowed into new territories and into northern parts of the United States. This was greatly opposed by northern radicals and moderates alike, and helped to finally solidify the North into an anti-slavery bloc.  

“Rather that upbraid slaveowners, Lincoln sought to comprehend their position through empathy. More than a decade earlier, he had employed a similar approach when he advised temperance advocates to refrain from denouncing drinkers in ‘thundering tones of anathema and denunciation,’ for denunciation would inevitably be met with denunciation, ‘crimination with crimination, and anathema with anathema.’ In a passage directed at abolitionists as well as temperance reformers, he had observed that was the nature of man, when told that he should be ‘shunned and despised,’ and condemned as the author ‘of all the vice and misery and crime in the land,’ to ‘retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart.’” 

Ever the astute politician, Lincoln refused to demonize people during his political career. While he as opposed to slavery in principle, he did not wish to alienate those people who either owned slavers or those who lived in the South and did not want the federal government encroaching on what they believed were their rights. He thought the best way to win people to his position was to astutely attack the problems of an institution, not the people who might have practiced it. This evenhanded approach served him very well in his handlings with his peers and with leading the country during the Civil War.

“Lincoln’s goals was to rekindle those very beacons, constantly affirming the revolutionary promises made in the Declaration [of Independence]. When the authors of the Declaration spoke of equality, Lincoln insisted, ‘they did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying equality…They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.’”

Lincoln believed that the framers of the Constitution created a society where all were to be seen equal in the eyes of the law and government and afforded the proper due processes and protections of the Federal Government. He wanted to help create a society where all people were afforded equal freedoms and protections, but he did not necessarily believe in the equality of separate societal groups. In some respects, this was a masterful stroke of elocution, which allowed him to appeal to conservative and moderate alike. 

“For generations, people have weighed and debate the factors that led to Lincoln’s surprising victory. Many have agreed with the verdict of Murat Halstead, who wrote that ‘the fact of the Convention was the defeat of Seward rather than the nomination of Lincoln.’ Seward himself seemed to accept this analysis. When asked years later why Lincoln had won, he said: ‘The leader of a political party in a country like ours is so exposed that his enemies becomes as numerous and formidable as his friends.’ Abraham Lincoln, by contrast, ‘comparatively unknown, had not to contend with the animosities generally marshaled against a leader.’” 

Many scholars view Lincoln’s rise to the Republican presidential nomination not Lincoln’s achievement but as Seward’s failure. A compromise candidate, Lincoln was hardly viewed as an exalted statesmen. It is only through the lens of history that we have come to view Lincoln as a political giant. At the beginning of his political career, he was merely a lesser player in the Republican and Whig political machine. 

“In the end, though Lincoln’s role was not fully recognized at the time, he was the one who kept his fractious party together when an open rupture might have easily destroyed his administration before it could even begin. By privately endorsing Seward’s spirit of compromise while projecting an unyielding public image, President-elect Lincoln retained an astonishing degree of control over an increasingly chaotic and potentially devastating situation.” 

This passage is in reference to Lincoln’s role in calming many of the more radical elements in the young Republican Party after Seward offered a speech in which he seemed to almost bend over backwards to try and find a way to placate the South. While at this point many radical Republicans saw it as weakness, Lincoln realized that Seward was trying to create a better position from which the administration could work. 

“Lincoln face a dual challenge in this long-awaited speech, his first significant public address since his election. It was imperative that he convey his staunch resolution to defend the Union and to carry out his responsibilities as president, while at the same time mitigating the anxieties of the Southern states. Finding the balance between force and conciliation was not easy, and his early draft tilted more toward the forceful side.” 

Lincoln’s first inaugural address needed to be perfect; the South viewed his election as a referendum on slavery and believed that he would do everything in his power to bring about its swift end. Lincoln hoped that by striking the right tone in his address he might assuage the fears of many Southerners and also reassure Northerners who voted for him that he would be strong and steadfast in defending the Union. It was a no-win situation, yet one from which Lincoln emerged in a stronger position as he placed all the onus on unity at the feet of Southern leaders. It would be their decision, not his, as to whether the Union was to endure or not. 

“The immediacy of this crisis [Fort Sumter] posed great difficulties for Lincoln. His revised inaugural had no longer contained a promise to ‘reclaim’ fallen properties, but Lincoln had most definitely pledged to ‘hold, occupy and possess’ all properties still in Federal hands. No symbol of Federal authority was more important that Fort Sumter. Ever since Major Anderson, in the dead of night on December 26, had surreptitiously moved his troops from Fort Moultrie to the better-protected Sumter, he had become a romantic hero in the North. Surrender of his garrison would be humiliating. Still, the president felt bound by his vow to his ‘dissatisfied countrymen’ that the new ‘government will not assail you [the South]. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors.” 

Caught between the wording of his inaugural address and the current state of affairs in South Carolina, Lincoln needed to walk a very fine line. He did not want to be seen as an aggressor, and thereby give the South cause to see him as one ready to trample upon their rights, but he also had made a promise to defend Union possessions and troops residing in Southern lands. While it would have been easy for Lincoln to order military action, he allowed the South to make the first move. In doing so he managed to maintain the moral high ground. His cautious and tempered approach here also probably helped to keep border states such as Maryland from leaving the Union which would have made the Union’s defensive position in Washington, D.C. untenable. 

“History would later give Secretary of State Seward high marks for his role in preventing Britain and France from intervening in the war. He is considered by some to have been ‘the ablest American diplomat of the century.’’ 

European powers had a vested interest in the American Civil War. Many of the rapidly industrializing economies of Europe needed Southern cotton and other goods in order to run their factories at full capacity, and the Union blockades caused disruptions. Moreover, the Europeans also saw that a divided America would not pose as great a threat on the world stage. Because of this, both England and France flirted with the idea of officially recognizing the Confederacy as an independent nation and offering their support. This would have made the war unwinnable for the North. Keeping the Europeans out of the war was an invaluable accomplishment achieved by Seward. 

“If Lee achieved victory at Gettysburg, he could move on to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington. His aura of invincibility might, it was feared, eventually lead the British and French to recognize the independence of the Confederacy and bring the war to an end.” 

Kearns Goodwin takes careful measure to make sure that the reader realizes how tenuous the North’s position at the beginning of the war. Confederate forces had won a series of victories against Union troops and had yet to be defeated in a decisive manner. The longer the Confederate forces held on, the greater the chance that the Europeans would side with them. Moreover, if the Confederacy captured major Northern cities, they could essentially dictate their terms to the North. The fact that the South so often had chances to win the war early on is an important fact to remember and something that weighed very heavily on Lincoln as he attempted to keep his coalition of statesmen intact.  

“[Reconstruction] divided the Republican Party. Radicals insisted that only those who had never displayed even indirect support for the Confederacy should be allowed to vote in the redeemed states. Lawyers and teachers who had not been staunch Unionists should not be allowed to resume their professions. Slavery should be immediately abolished without compensation, and newly freed blacks should be allowed to vote in some cases. Conservative Republicans preferred compensated emancipation and a lenient definition of who should gain suffrage. They argued that in every Southern state, a silent majority of non-slaveholders had been dragged into secession by the wealthy plantation owners. It would be unjust to exclude them in the new order so long as they would take an oath to uphold both the Union and emancipation.” 

One of the most important political decisions facing Lincoln and the North was how to handle a conquered and defeated South. It was central to shaping the new face of the country politically and socially and would have far reaching ramifications. Unfortunately there was little accord as to how this issue should be handled. Winning the 1864 election allowed Lincoln a mandate to proceed with his vision of Reconstruction, which would have been a moderate yet forceful reconciliation that did not too harshly punish the South. His assassination prevented his vision from being achieved. 

“Herein, Swett concluded, lay the secret of Lincoln’s gifted leadership. ‘It was by ignoring men, and ignoring all small causes, but by closely calculating the tendencies of events and the great forces which were producing logical results.’ John Forney of the Washington Daily Chronicle observed the same intuitive judgment and timing, arguing that Lincoln was ‘the most truly progressive man of the age, because he always moves in conjunction with propitious circumstances, not waiting to be dragged by the force of events or wasting strength in premature struggles with them.’” 

Lincoln understood that to get what he wanted he needed to proceed methodically. In doing this, he was able to make people think that they wanted things, and thereby make it appear as he was acting on behalf of the people, not imposing things from on high. This approach won him massive support as the war went on and may have allowed him to handle the Reconstruction of the United States in a more nuanced manner than any of his contemporaries. 

“Agreeing that no rebellious state could be reconstructed without emancipation, Lincoln still refused to tolerate the radicals’ desire to punish the South. He offered full pardons to all those who took the oath, excepting those who had served at high levels in the Confederate government or the army. When the number of loyal men taking the oath reached 10 percent of the votes cast in the 1860 election, they could ‘re-establish a State government’ recognized by the United States.” 

Kearns Goodwin highlights how Lincoln wanted to deal with the South. He did not view the Confederacy as a vanquished opponent. He saw it as part of the United States that needed to be brought back into the fold. Had Lincoln been allowed to enact his plan for Reconstruction, much of the modern history of the United States might have been profoundly different.

“As the election drew close, Lincoln told a visitor: ‘I would rather be defeated with the soldier vote behind me than to be elected without it.’ It is likely that McClellan shared Lincoln’s sentiment. The election would tell which man had won the hearts and minds of more than 850,000 men who were fighting for the Union.” 

Although he was a grand politician, Lincoln also understood that he needed the support of the common people, especially the army, to validate his positions. Should the support of the army turn against him, it would be a referendum on his leadership. Lincoln’s desire to rather lose with the army than win without it shows how highly he esteemed the opinion of those who were sacrificing their lives and how he believed that it was they, more than any other group, that could offer the most honest assessment of his policies. 

“Nothing on the home front in January [1865] engaged Lincoln with greater urgency than the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery. He had long feared the Emancipation Proclamation would be discarded once the war came to an end. ‘A question might be raised whether the proclamation was legally valid,’ he said. ‘It might be added that it only aided those who came into our lines… or that it would have no effect upon the children of the slaves born hereafter.’ Passage of a constitutional amendment eradicating slavery once and for all would be ‘a King’s cure for all the evils.’” 

Lincoln worried that without an amendment to the Constitution, slavery could find a way back into daily life in America and the war would have been for nothing. An amendment outlawing slavery would validate the sacrifice of the Union and prevent any further debate on the topic.