Team of Rivals — Doris Kearns Goodwin
When Abraham Lincoln won the Republican presidential nomination in 1860, it was considered a minor political miracle — and a significant mistake. The party contained men of far greater national reputation, far deeper legal and political credentials, and far more established networks of support. William Seward of New York was the frontrunner — a former governor, a sitting senator, the most prominent antislavery politician in the country. Salmon Chase of Ohio was a statesman of towering ambition and genuine principle who had spent decades working toward the presidency. Edward Bates of Missouri was the candidate of the conservative wing, a man of impeccable credentials and wide respect.
Lincoln, by comparison, was a largely self-educated Illinois lawyer with one undistinguished congressional term to his name and a series of unsuccessful Senate campaigns. He had made a national reputation in his debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858, but losing a Senate race to someone who would become the Democrats’ standard-bearer in 1860 was not exactly a conventional qualification for the presidency.
The party professionals who controlled the convention had legitimate reasons to prefer almost anyone else.
What Lincoln understood about his own situation — and what his rivals didn’t fully appreciate — was that his apparent weakness was partly a strength. He was the candidate with the shortest list of enemies. In a party coalition that needed to hold together competing factions across a deeply fractured political landscape, the man nobody had strong reasons to oppose was sometimes more electable than the man everybody had reasons to admire. Lincoln’s men worked the convention floor with extraordinary skill, making strategic concessions that would come due after the election, and Lincoln won the nomination on the third ballot.
He then did something that no one expected and that would define the most consequential presidency in American history: he appointed his three main rivals to the most senior positions in his cabinet. Seward became Secretary of State. Chase became Secretary of the Treasury. Bates became Attorney General. The men who had believed they should be president were now working for the man who had beaten them — and Lincoln intended to use every ounce of their capability and every fragment of their political networks in the service of holding the republic together through its greatest crisis.
The Political Genius of Inclusion
Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals is organized around one central question: how did Lincoln do it? How did he take a cabinet of men who were, in varying degrees, convinced of their own superiority to their chief, managing their own ambitions and resentments, operating within a press and political culture that constantly speculated on their independence, and turn them into a functioning, ultimately effective governing team that held the Union together and won the Civil War?
The answer Goodwin constructs is simultaneously biographical, psychological, and political. It involves Lincoln’s specific character — his emotional security, his freedom from the need for petty dominance, his genuine respect for competence — but also his specific strategic intelligence, his understanding of political dynamics, his ability to read people and systems with a precision his rivals underestimated because it was clothed in a disarming informality.
The genius of the team of rivals concept is that it solved several problems simultaneously. By bringing Seward, Chase, and Bates into the cabinet, Lincoln neutralized the political threat they represented. Men inside the administration are occupied with governing. Men outside it are occupied with opposing. Lincoln kept his most capable opponents busy doing the most important work, leaving them no time to build the opposition movements their ambitions might otherwise have generated.
It also gave him access to the best available talent at a moment when he desperately needed it. Lincoln knew his own limits. He had relatively little experience in federal governance, no experience in military command, and no background in the financial administration a massive war would require. Seward’s deep diplomatic experience was essential. Chase’s financial expertise was indispensable. Even Bates’s legal conservatism, which sometimes frustrated Lincoln, served the function of grounding the administration’s legal judgments in the most cautious mainstream interpretation of constitutional power.
Lincoln’s Character: The Source of the Strategy
Goodwin’s portrait of Lincoln’s character is perhaps the most valuable contribution the book makes. The Lincoln of popular mythology is already a great man — honest, principled, eloquent, burdened by his responsibilities in ways that photograph and memoir have made iconic. Goodwin’s Lincoln is more specific and more instructive: a man whose psychological architecture made the team of rivals strategy not just possible but natural.
The most striking element of that architecture was Lincoln’s nearly complete absence of ego in the conventional political sense. He was not indifferent to his reputation — he cared deeply about how history would judge him. But he was genuinely indifferent to petty status competition, to the question of who received credit for what, to the need to assert his authority through public dominance. He told stories that made himself the butt of the joke. He accepted slights from his cabinet members — Seward’s early condescension, Chase’s constant maneuvering — that would have produced explosive responses from most presidents, and he absorbed them without apparent damage to his self-conception.
This emotional security was not passivity. Lincoln was capable of decisive, even harsh action when circumstances required it. He removed generals who failed repeatedly, fired cabinet members when their disloyalty crossed actionable thresholds, and made the most consequential unilateral decision in American executive history — the Emancipation Proclamation — at a moment when his own cabinet advised against it. But the security that allowed him to absorb the minor slights also allowed him to wait for the right moment for major action, to let situations develop rather than forcing them prematurely, to avoid the reactive cycles that ego-driven leaders fall into.
Goodwin traces this character back to Lincoln’s extraordinary upbringing — not extraordinary in the sense of privilege, but in the sense of hardship and self-formation. Lincoln was almost entirely self-educated. He grew up in poverty on the frontier, losing his mother at nine and his beloved sister at nineteen. He battled depression — what he called “the hypo” — throughout his adult life, developing a facility for managing internal darkness that translated into remarkable external composure under pressure. He had been tested by life before the presidency tested him, and the testing had built something genuinely durable.
Seward: The Rival Who Became a Partner
Of all the rival-turned-partner relationships in Lincoln’s cabinet, the one with William Seward is the most dramatically satisfying. Seward arrived in Washington believing, with some justification, that he was the superior man who would effectively run the administration while Lincoln managed its public face. His early communications with Lincoln carried a tone of barely concealed condescension. In April 1861, barely a month into the administration, Seward sent Lincoln a memo proposing essentially that Seward take over foreign policy — and, by extension, strategic direction of the entire government — because Lincoln seemed unable to manage it himself.
Lincoln’s response to this memo is one of the most revealing documents of his presidency. He wrote back firmly but without malice, making clear that all executive decisions would flow through the president, not the Secretary of State, and that he was fully capable of leading his own administration. The rebuke was unambiguous. It was also delivered entirely without humiliation, without the kind of language that creates permanent enemies, without the theatrical demonstration of dominance an insecure leader would have required. He made the point and moved on.
Seward took the point. Over the following months, something remarkable happened: he actually began to understand Lincoln rather than patronize him. He watched Lincoln operate — the combination of humor and steel, the careful timing of major decisions, the extraordinary quality of the writing Lincoln produced entirely alone — and gradually revised his assessment. By the end of the first year of the administration, Seward had become one of Lincoln’s most loyal and effective supporters, someone who defended the president’s judgment in cabinet debates, managed foreign diplomacy with skill and dedication, and formed a genuine friendship with a man he had initially treated as an embarrassment.
The transformation was Lincoln’s achievement as much as Seward’s. By absorbing the early condescension without retaliation, by allowing Seward time to learn rather than punishing him for initial arrogance, Lincoln created the conditions under which a potential enemy became an essential ally.
Chase: The Rival Who Wouldn’t Stop Running
Salmon Chase was a different challenge. Where Seward eventually found his proper orbit relative to Lincoln and settled into productive collaboration, Chase never fully accepted the reality that he was not and would not be president. Throughout his tenure as Treasury Secretary, he maintained a shadow presidential campaign — meeting with journalists, corresponding with party leaders, positioning himself as the alternative if Lincoln proved unequal to the crisis.
Lincoln was aware of all of this. His intelligence networks were good, and Chase was not particularly discreet. The question was what to do about it, and Lincoln’s answer — for years — was essentially nothing. He kept Chase in the cabinet because Chase was genuinely gifted at Treasury management, because removing him would create a larger political problem than tolerating his ambitions, and because he understood that Chase’s presidential dreams were not directly harming the administration’s functioning even when they were creating irritating noise.
This patience had limits, and Goodwin documents the moment they were reached. Chase offered his resignation several times during various disputes, calculating each time that Lincoln would back down rather than accept it. Lincoln accepted it on the fourth or fifth offer, having calculated that at that particular moment, in the specific political context of mid-1864, Chase’s departure was manageable and his continued presence was not. The timing was deliberate. Lincoln had been waiting for the moment when acceptance was strategically viable, and he recognized it when it arrived.
In a final move of extraordinary political cleverness, Lincoln later appointed Chase as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court — giving him a prize he had not sought, removing him entirely from electoral politics, and binding him to an institution where his intelligence and principles could serve the nation without threatening Lincoln’s own position. Chase served as an effective Chief Justice for several years. Lincoln had, in the end, found exactly the right role for him.
The Management of the War
Goodwin’s account of Lincoln’s management of the Civil War is inseparable from her account of the team of rivals, because the war was managed largely through the cabinet and through Lincoln’s relationships with his generals — another set of difficult, proud, and not always cooperative individuals whom Lincoln had to manage with the same combination of patience, firmness, and strategic intelligence.
The general problem Lincoln faced was finding a commander who would actually fight. George McClellan, his first commanding general of the Army of the Potomac, was a superb organizer and trainer of troops and a completely ineffective battlefield commander — paralyzed by caution, always finding reasons why the army was not yet ready for the offensive action that winning a war required. Lincoln endured McClellan’s insubordination, his condescension (McClellan once left Lincoln waiting in a foyer while he went to bed), and his strategic timidity for over a year, the whole time searching for the general who could actually win battles.
He eventually found him in Ulysses Grant — a man who had been drummed out of the army for drinking before the war and had spent years in commercial failure before the war gave him a stage. Grant’s command philosophy was simple and brutal: find the enemy’s main army, engage it directly, and keep engaging it regardless of losses until one side could no longer continue. It was the opposite of McClellan’s cautious maneuvering, and it was what winning a war of attrition against a determined opponent required.
Lincoln’s decision to elevate Grant over more conventional military figures — and to defend him against Washington political culture’s endless attempts to find reasons to remove him — is another demonstration of the pattern Goodwin documents throughout the book. Lincoln was willing to support people whose specific qualities served the moment’s requirements, even when those people were conventionally difficult, even when the establishment was arrayed against them, even when the short-term political cost of the support was high.
The Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln’s Moral Evolution
One of the most complex threads in Goodwin’s account is Lincoln’s relationship to slavery and its evolution over the course of his life and presidency. The Lincoln who entered the presidency in 1861 was not a committed abolitionist — he opposed slavery’s extension into new territories but was prepared to leave it alone where it existed, and he explicitly disavowed any intention to interfere with it in the Southern states. His stated priority was preserving the Union, not ending slavery, and for the first year of the war that priority was reflected in policy.
The evolution toward the Emancipation Proclamation was complex, driven partly by Lincoln’s own moral development, partly by the logic of the war, and partly by political and diplomatic calculation. The most influential argument for emancipation as war policy was practical rather than moral: enslaved people were the South’s labor force, the material basis of its ability to sustain a war economy. Striking at slavery struck at the Confederacy’s ability to fight. And issued as a war measure — explicitly on the basis of military necessity — emancipation would be harder to challenge constitutionally than if issued on purely moral grounds.
But Goodwin’s portrait makes clear that Lincoln’s commitment to emancipation was not merely tactical. His engagement with the moral argument had deepened over the preceding years; he had been moved by the abolitionists even when he disagreed with their political methods; and his personal contact with Frederick Douglass — who became perhaps the most important non-cabinet figure in Lincoln’s second term — had reinforced his moral understanding of what slavery meant to the people who experienced it.
The Proclamation, issued on January 1, 1863, was the fulcrum of Lincoln’s presidency — the moment at which the war’s purpose became fully articulated as the redefinition of American freedom. It did not immediately free a single enslaved person; it applied only to states in rebellion, and the Confederacy was not going to comply. But it changed the moral character of the conflict in ways that had permanent consequences: it committed the Union to abolition, it made European diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy politically impossible (no European power could side with the pro-slavery force after Lincoln had framed the Union’s cause in terms of universal freedom), and it opened the door to the enrollment of Black troops in the Union army.
Lincoln’s Communication and the Language of Leadership
The Gettysburg Address — 272 words, delivered at the dedication of the Gettysburg battlefield cemetery in November 1863, remembered forever while the other speeches of the day have been entirely forgotten — is the canonical example. But the quality is consistent throughout his presidential writings: the Second Inaugural Address with its “malice toward none, charity for all”; the letters to bereaved families that managed to be simultaneously formal and intimate; the exchanges with Grant that showed a president fully understanding military operations while maintaining appropriate command distance.
Lincoln wrote everything himself. He had no speechwriters. The voice in the documents is authentically his — and it’s a voice formed by decades of reading Shakespeare and the King James Bible in poverty on the frontier, by years of legal argument that required precise language under adversarial conditions, by a mind that found delight in both logical precision and poetic rhythm and refused to accept that the two were incompatible.
The Second Term and the Assassination
Lincoln’s reelection in 1864 was not inevitable. By midsummer, the war had ground into a bloody stalemate, Grant was attacking Lee in Virginia with enormous losses, and Lincoln believed he would lose. He wrote a memorandum binding himself to cooperate fully with his successor in saving the Union during the transition period — a document of such civic conscientiousness that it is hard to imagine any contemporary politician writing anything similar.
Sherman’s capture of Atlanta in September changed the political landscape overnight. The war was not a stalemate — it was a Union victory in progress, and Lincoln won the election decisively. The Second Inaugural, delivered in March 1865 with victory visible on the horizon, was his most eloquent address — a remarkable document that attributed the war’s causes honestly (slavery), acknowledged both sides’ shared culpability before God, and called for reconstruction on terms of generosity and reconciliation rather than punishment and humiliation.
He was shot five days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. He died the next morning, April 15, 1865, without regaining consciousness. Stanton, his Secretary of War, standing at Lincoln’s deathbed, said: “Now he belongs to the ages.”
Goodwin’s book ends not with the assassination but with its aftermath — with the ways in which the men Lincoln had worked with processed the loss of a leader who had, by the end, exceeded every expectation they had brought to their initial condescension. Seward, who had been nearly killed by a conspirator on the same night, survived to honor Lincoln’s memory. Chase, appointed to the Supreme Court, administered the oath of office to Lincoln’s successors. The rivals had become something else — not just colleagues, but men whose understanding of leadership had been permanently shaped by the example of someone they had once considered their inferior.
The Leadership Lesson That Endures
The lesson of the team of rivals is not that you should always appoint your enemies to your cabinet. The specific tactic was specific to Lincoln’s circumstances — the depth of talent available among the rivals, the particular structure of the political crisis, Lincoln’s particular character. What generalizes is the principle behind the tactic.
Leadership is not about surrounding yourself with people who agree with you. It is about surrounding yourself with people who are genuinely capable, even when — especially when — their capability challenges your own position or decisions. The leader who seeks consensus above competence gets an organization that makes comfortable decisions badly. The leader who seeks competence above comfort gets an organization that makes difficult decisions well.
Lincoln sought competence and got conflict, which he managed. The conflicts produced better decisions than the comfortable alternative would have permitted. The nation survived because the decisions were good enough, often enough, when it mattered most.
That is the standard against which leadership is ultimately measured: not whether it was pleasant or smooth or universally admired, but whether it produced outcomes adequate to the stakes of the moment. By that standard, Abraham Lincoln’s leadership was the most consequential and the most successful in American history. And the key to it was a quality almost no one would have predicted from his apparent qualifications: the emotional security to build a team of people who might have been better than him, and the intelligence to use them well.
Lincoln’s Depression and Its Uses
This history has two implications for understanding Lincoln as a leader. The first is straightforward: a man who has been to the bottom of himself and survived has a specific kind of psychological resilience that people who have never been tested in that way sometimes lack. Lincoln knew what the worst felt like from the inside. He had survived it without flinching away. This prior experience of surviving the unsurvivable — of coming through darkness that felt absolute — may have contributed to his remarkable composure during the war’s worst periods.
The second implication is subtler. People who have experienced severe depression often develop an unusual quality of empathy for others’ suffering — not a performed empathy, but the kind that comes from actually knowing what sustained pain feels like. Lincoln’s famous melancholy, the quality in his face that Matthew Brady’s photographs capture so precisely, was not separate from his political effectiveness. It was partly constitutive of it. The man who could write to a bereaved mother with the specific, authentic weight of someone who understood grief — who could find words that reached because they were drawn from actual experience rather than sentiment — was partly the product of the hypo.
The Role of Frederick Douglass
Goodwin gives significant attention to Lincoln’s evolving relationship with Frederick Douglass, and the relationship is one of the most important threads in the book’s later chapters. Douglass was the most prominent Black American public figure of the nineteenth century — a former slave, a brilliant orator and writer, and the most relentless advocate for the full citizenship and equality of Black Americans that the era produced.
His initial relationship with Lincoln was complicated by profound skepticism. He considered Lincoln too slow, too cautious, too willing to temporize on the question of slavery in exchange for political viability. His early characterizations of Lincoln were critical and sometimes withering. And he was not entirely wrong — the Lincoln of 1861 was genuinely different from the Lincoln of 1865, and the earlier version had real limitations on the question of racial equality that the later version had largely outgrown.
Their face-to-face meetings, which Douglass requested and Lincoln granted, produced one of the most documented cross-racial encounters in American political history. Douglass described Lincoln as treating him with a complete absence of the condescension or discomfort that characterized most white politicians’ engagement with Black men in his experience. Lincoln was simply interested in what Douglass had to say. He asked questions. He listened to the answers. He changed his positions when Douglass’s arguments were persuasive.
By the time of the Second Inaugural, Douglass attended the ceremony and was received by Lincoln at the White House reception afterward — an unprecedented occurrence. Lincoln drew him aside, asked what he thought of the address, and when Douglass said it was a sacred effort, Lincoln replied that he was glad Douglass had said that. “I saw you in the crowd today, and I wanted to know what you thought of it.” This moment — a president seeking the evaluation of a Black abolitionist with genuine care for the answer — encapsulates something about who Lincoln had become by the end.
Why the Book Matters Beyond History
Team of Rivals is in one sense a history book about specific events in a specific period of American history. In a deeper sense it is a sustained argument about how human organizations achieve their best outcomes under conditions of maximum stress. The argument is that the best outcomes require the best people, and the best people often bring with them the most difficult temperaments, the most demanding egos, and the most inconvenient ambitions. The leader who can contain that difficulty while harvesting the capability is the one who produces outcomes adequate to the stakes.
This principle applies to any organization facing challenges that exceed the capability of any single individual. The startup that assembles a founding team of people who are each convinced they should be CEO. The academic department that brings together scholars with genuinely competing intellectual frameworks. The military unit that includes both the most creative tactical thinkers and the most rigidly disciplined executors. In each case, the challenge is the same one Lincoln faced: how do you get genuinely different, genuinely difficult, genuinely capable people to function as a coherent unit rather than a collection of competing egos?
Lincoln’s answer was not harmony. He did not seek to eliminate the disagreements that made the cabinet difficult. He managed them — sometimes letting them run, sometimes intervening decisively, always keeping his eye on the question of what the disagreement was actually serving. Productive tension is different from destructive conflict, and Lincoln seems to have had an almost intuitive ability to distinguish between the two and respond to each appropriately.
The Goodwin Method
Doris Kearns Goodwin’s approach to biography is worth noting for readers who want to understand what makes this book work as well as it does. She is not primarily a political historian or a military historian. She is, in the most precise sense, a biographer of character — someone whose central interest is in understanding how specific personalities, shaped by specific backgrounds and tested by specific circumstances, make the choices that produce historical outcomes.
Her research practice reflects this orientation. She reads diaries, letters, and private communications with the same care that other historians devote to official documents and public records, because she knows that the private record is where character actually reveals itself. The public Lincoln — the president making official pronouncements and managing public perception — is less interesting to her than the Lincoln of the private letters, the late-night conversations in the White House, the offhand remarks that let the actual person emerge from behind the presidential role.
The result is a biography that reads as intimately as a novel while meeting rigorous historical standards. Each of the major figures — Lincoln, Seward, Chase, Bates, Stanton, Grant, Douglass — emerges as a fully dimensional person rather than a historical abstraction. Their flaws are as visible as their virtues, their private doubts as present as their public certainties. This intimacy is not sentimental; it is the product of genuine historical research into the private record. And it is what makes the book so useful as a study of leadership rather than merely a record of events.
At more than seven hundred pages, Team of Rivals is a commitment. It repays that commitment many times over, in the depth of understanding it provides about how one of history’s most consequential leadership situations was navigated. Read it once for the story. Read it again for the leadership lessons that the story embeds. Return to it whenever facing a version of the problem it documents: how do you get a difficult, talented team to do the most important work well?
What Lincoln Did With His Time
One of the most practically instructive aspects of Goodwin’s portrait is her attention to how Lincoln actually spent his time in the White House — specifically, the remarkable degree to which he remained accessible to ordinary citizens during the most crisis-filled presidency in American history. He held regular public “office hours” at which any citizen could walk in and make a request, and he spent hours each week in these sessions despite the demands of war management that consumed everyone around him.
His advisors regularly tried to end this practice. It was inefficient. It was time-consuming. It left him exhausted. Lincoln refused to give it up. He called it his “public opinion baths” — his method of staying in direct contact with the lived experience of the people whose lives his decisions were affecting. In an era before polling, before systematic constituent communication, before any of the information technologies modern leaders use to understand public sentiment, this was his method of ground-truth calibration.
The practice also served a leadership function beyond information gathering. It demonstrated, in the most tangible possible way, that the president was accessible, that ordinary citizens mattered to him, and that the republic was not being run entirely by elite actors in closed rooms. In a time of maximum national stress, when the temptation toward secrecy and executive isolation was enormous, Lincoln chose radical openness. The choice was costly in time. It was invaluable in legitimacy.
The Comparison to Other Crisis Leaders
Lincoln’s leadership can be better understood by comparison to other crisis leaders of the modern era. Franklin Roosevelt during World War II provides the most obvious parallel — another president who navigated a massive military crisis, managed a complex coalition of difficult figures (Churchill and Stalin in addition to domestic rivals), made decisions under radical uncertainty, and communicated to a frightened public with remarkable effectiveness. The comparison illuminates both figures.
Roosevelt was a more conventional politician than Lincoln in some ways — more comfortable with the manipulation and maneuvering that political professionals recognize, more willing to use charm and evasion where Lincoln often used directness. But both shared the fundamental quality Goodwin identifies as central to Lincoln’s success: the emotional security that allowed genuine consultation, genuine deference to expertise, and genuine willingness to change course when the evidence pointed in a different direction.
The leaders who fail in great crises tend to share a different profile: emotional fragility that makes genuine consultation threatening, attachment to specific strategies beyond the point where evidence supports them, and an inability to separate their self-image from the success of the policy choices they have made. These leaders surround themselves with people who confirm rather than challenge, and they make worse decisions as a result — not because they are stupid, but because the information ecosystem they have created filters out the feedback they most need.
Lincoln’s team of rivals was, in its deepest function, an antidote to exactly this pathology. By placing the people most likely to challenge him in the positions with the most access, he ensured that the information reaching him included the most challenging available assessments rather than the most convenient ones. The decisions he made from that information were better than the decisions he would have made from a more comfortable, more confirmatory environment. The cabinet was difficult. The decisions were good. The connection between those two facts is the central lesson of the book.
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