Two First Impressions of 'Team of Rivals'

I've been slowly reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's newest book, Team of Rivals, a sort of multi-person biography of Abraham Lincoln and the others who vied for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination and the story of how he brought them all together in his Administration.

Although my snail's pace in reading it is because a lot of other reading I'm also doing right now, the book itself starts a bit slowly. (Although I was interested to read about Salmon P. Chase's residence in my hometown in Columbus, where he served as governor. In fact, yesterday during a trip to visit family there, my wife and I wheeled by the corner of Sixth and State, just three blocks from the State House. There, Chase resided in a mansion where his beautiful teenage daughter served as de facto First Lady, owing to the fact that Chase was widower to three different women. But the house is no longer there. Why I'd never known about where Chase had lived while in Columbus, I'll never be able to explain.)

But once Goodwin gets into her tale, it's quite good. Two general impressions, one substantive, the other a matter of "style," I suppose.

1. No Lincoln biographer has done a better job of delineating the depths, the persistence, or the powerful force of Lincoln's ambition. It's not that other biographers haven't pointed to this central, defining aspect of Lincoln's personality before, David Herbert Donald especially. But Goodwin brings together all the indicators in fresh ways.

While Lincoln was magnanimous in defeat--he had little choice since he was defeated so many times--his ambition played a role like that of religious devotion in other people. Lincoln appears not to have believed in eternity. What he craved more than anything was to do something great and of positive, enduring value, that would cause his name to be remembered by subsequent generations.

(Ironically, in his book, The Day Lincoln Was Shot, Jim Bishop recounts a boyhood conversation of Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Booth, too, wanted his name to redound through history. But to him, Booth told his childhood friend, whether the notorious action brought fame or infamy was immaterial. The point was to be remembered.)

2. Goodwin is obviously (and understandably) pained by the plagiarism controversy that gathered around a previous work. Then, it was shown that some of the material she presented as her own actually was lifted from another historian's work. Frankly, it's easy to see how, in the course of voluminous research, one could accidentally plagiarize, something I constantly hope and pray I don't do in my little writings here and elsewhere.

But throughout this work, Goodwin tells us things like, "As historian so-and-so tells us..." Or, "As biographer such-and-such says..."

Some have criticized the frequent appearances of such phrases in Goodwin's book as being disruptive of the narrative. I don't agree. I'm enjoying Team of Rivals and think it's a notable achievement in biography, with keen insights into nineteenth century America and into the practice of politics.