While most of the material in Team of Rivals is well-known to scholars and specialists, few writers have put it together in such a comprehensive panorama. Indeed the power of the book lies in Goodwin's details, not in any novel interpretation. But in time, along with a host of other Washington insiders, both-sooner for Seward and later for Chase-came to appreciate their self-assured leader, who, from the start, was willing to surround himself with his ambitious competitors.Īnyone who has worked in Civil War–era manuscripts will appreciate the exhaustive research that makes this book engrossing. In the beginning, especially Seward and Chase thought themselves superior to their president in talent and experience. Thus the actors tell their own story, and Goodwin is at her best when she lets contemporaries talk about their personal relationships with Lincoln. This is a straightforward narrative history with the chronological story kept alive by Goodwin's energetic prose as well as her use of quotations from the participants. Goodwin lavishes 256 pages on the period before the war begins, and she ends with Lincoln's assassination and brief codas about the postwar lives of her central characters. Team of Rivals is a hefty half-million-word, 880-page, 26-chapter narrative that covers all the iconic events of prewar and wartime Civil War America and then some. 'Just as a hologram is created through the interference of light from separate sources,' writes Goodwin, 'so the lives and impressions of those who companioned Lincoln give us a clearer and more dimensional picture of the president himself' (xv). All three ended up in Washington as a 'team of rivals' in Lincoln's cabinet, and it is this cabinet-with its rivalries, disagreements, and even petty insults coupled with Lincoln's management of his counselors-that is the conceptual centerpiece of this book.

All four men had reason to believe that they might become the nominee of the new Republican party for the presidency. Chase, and the lesser-known, home-loving former congressman and officeholder Edward Bates of Missouri. Seward of New York, the self-centered but authentic antislavery radical Ohio governor Salmon P.

In her massive retelling of this story, Doris Kearns Goodwin focuses on Lincoln, but with the new twist of coupling his story with those of his competitors for the Republican nomination in 1860: the frontrunner senator William H. The Civil War is America's great national epic, and Abraham Lincoln, like Aeneas in ancient times, has forever been at its epicenter.

Team of rivals review