Team of Rivals

The story in brief

Doris Kearns Goodwin, a historian who had worked for President Lyndon Johnson and written on Johnson, the Kennedys and Franklin Roosevelt, spent about a decade on Team of Rivals, published in 2005. It won the Lincoln Prize, and Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln (2012) drew on part of it.

The book is a group biography. It follows Abraham Lincoln alongside the three men who expected to defeat him for the Republican nomination in 1860: William Seward, senator from New York and the favourite; Salmon Chase, governor of Ohio; and Edward Bates, a respected elder statesman from Missouri. Each was better known, better educated and more experienced than Lincoln, a former one-term congressman from Illinois. Goodwin tells their parallel lives, Lincoln’s surprising victory at the Chicago convention, and then the story of how he appointed all three to his cabinet and governed with them, and later with Edwin Stanton, who had once treated him with contempt, through the Civil War.

The decisions that made it

At the convention in May 1860, Lincoln’s managers worked to make him everyone’s second choice. Seward was strong but had made enemies; Chase was disliked; Bates appealed to conservatives but not to radicals. When Seward failed to win on the first ballot, delegates moved to Lincoln. Goodwin shows that this was not luck alone. Lincoln had avoided offending any faction and had cultivated relationships across the party.

After his election, Lincoln decided to place his chief rivals in the most important cabinet posts: Seward at State, Chase at the Treasury, Bates as attorney general. Advisers warned him that such men would undermine him. His reasoning, as Goodwin presents it, was that the country needed the strongest men available, and that he could not afford to deprive it of their talents.

Early in his term, Seward tried to take control of policy, sending Lincoln a memorandum suggesting that the administration lacked direction and offering to run it. Lincoln replied calmly that if anything had to be done, he would do it, and never made the exchange public. Seward became his most loyal ally.

Chase, who wanted the presidency, used his position at the Treasury to build support for a challenge in 1864, and repeatedly offered his resignation as a way of exerting pressure. Lincoln kept him on because he was effective, accepted his resignation only when it suited him, and later appointed him chief justice of the Supreme Court.

In January 1862 Lincoln appointed Edwin Stanton as secretary of war. Years earlier, when the two were lawyers on the same case, Stanton had snubbed Lincoln contemptuously. Lincoln put aside the insult because Stanton was the most capable man for the job. Stanton came to revere him.

Lincoln’s timing on emancipation was another decision Goodwin follows closely. He drafted the Emancipation Proclamation in the summer of 1862 and, on Seward’s advice, waited for a military victory before issuing it, so that it would not look like an act of desperation. He announced it after the battle of Antietam.

What the book sees in them

Goodwin’s central argument is that Lincoln’s success came from qualities of character that she groups under emotional intelligence: empathy, the ability to put himself in others’ places; magnanimity, the capacity to forgive; humour, which defused tension; self-confidence secure enough to tolerate being surrounded by people who believed themselves superior; and a willingness to share credit and take blame. She shows him writing angry letters and not sending them, and visiting his generals and cabinet secretaries in their offices rather than summoning them.

She also shows that his choices were strategic. By including rivals from the party’s different factions, Lincoln held a fragile coalition together, and by keeping them inside the government he made it harder for them to oppose him from outside.

Since it was published

The book’s title passed into common use as a phrase for leaders who appoint former opponents, notably when Barack Obama, who cited the book, appointed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state in 2008. Some historians argued that the book overstated the harmony of Lincoln’s cabinet and his management skills, or gave too little attention to other figures and to the people whose lives the war changed, including Black Americans who pressed for emancipation. Goodwin’s later book Leadership in Turbulent Times (2018) returned to Lincoln alongside other presidents.

What it asks of someone deciding

The book asks whether you are secure enough to hire people who are better than you in some way, and who may say so. Lincoln’s cabinet worked because he was willing to be challenged and able to absorb it.

It asks how you handle someone who has wronged you. Lincoln’s treatment of Stanton shows that putting aside personal grievances in favour of ability can build loyalty. The site’s idea page Groupthink and the Silence of Rooms shows the danger of the opposite approach, a team chosen for agreement.

And it asks about timing. Lincoln waited, sometimes frustrating his allies, until a decision could be made in a way that strengthened it. Knowing when to act is part of knowing what to do.