Commentary

Team of Rivals
By John J. Carroll, S.J.
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 20:08:00 05/16/2009
THE BOOK was not easy to find since President Barack Obama had let it be known that he had
read it and was giving copies to his Cabinet members.
Nor is it easy to hold: its 754 pages plus notes weigh heavily on the wrists as one reads. Yet the
reading is intensely rewarding for the view it provides of the political and moral heights on
which Americas first black president has fixed his gaze.
Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin focuses
primarily on the dynamics within Lincolns wartime Cabinet every member of which, writes
Goodwin, was better known, better educated, and more experienced in public life than Lincoln.
They were chosen and retained on the basis of their ability to do the task assigned them, not on
the basis of their personal loyalty to him. Three Cabinet members had been his rivals for the
presidential nomination of the Republican Party, and three belonged to the opposition
Democratic Party.
Lincolns Treasury secretary, Salmon P. Chase, had been governor of Ohio and one of Lincolns
rivals for the nomination; until late in life he continued to lust after the presidency. As a Cabinet
member he did his task at the Treasury excellently, while attempting to undermine the president
in his private conversation and building his political base with an eye to obtaining the
nomination when Lincolns first term would end. Lincoln kept him on at Treasury where he was
badly needed, tolerated his plotting, called him to account only when he overstepped bounds, and
three times refused Chases offer to resign.
The fourth offer came when Lincoln refused to confirm one of his political appointments; Chase
was confident that Lincoln would come begging him to remain in office, but to his surprise
Lincoln accepted the resignation. Yet when the office of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court
became vacant, and three of Lincolns Cabinet members were angling for it, he gave it instead to
Chase. Lincoln was confident of Chases firmness on the slavery issue; and though the president
remarked privately that he would rather have swallowed his armchair than appoint Chase, he did
so for the good of the nation. Thus, ironically, it was Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase who
administered the oath of office to Lincoln for his second term.
William H. Seward had been the odds-on favorite to obtain the Republican nomination. A former
governor of New York State and current senator, he had gained the admiration of anti-slavery
forces by taking on the legal defense at the risk of his own reputation and even life of a
mentally impaired black man accused of the brutal murder of a family in Sewards home town.
Regarded as the leading light of the Republican Party, he had relaxed while awaiting the
nomination, only to be done in at the convention by the treachery of a supposed friend.
Lincoln offered Seward the premier position in the Cabinet, the secretary of state; Seward
accepted in the belief that he would be the real power behind the throne of the prairie lawyer
and rail splitter. Early on and on more than one occasion, he did attempt to take over, only to
be outmaneuvered each time by Lincoln. He performed brilliantly as secretary of state, grew to
admire Lincoln tremendously and became his closest friend in the Cabinet.
The brilliant lawyer Edwin M. Stanton had offended Lincoln grievously in their younger years.
While the latter was a relatively unknown prairie lawyer in the frontier state of Illinois, he was
invited to be on the legal team of a Mr. George Harding in what was considered the most
important patent-infringement case of the period. Lincoln was invited principally because the
case was to be heard in Illinois, and he would know the judges there. The venue, however, was
changed to Cincinnati, Ohio; and Harding without informing Lincoln invited the brilliant
Stanton to take over the case.
When Lincoln presented himself to Harding and Stanton in Cincinnati on the day of the hearing,
Stanton drew Harding aside and murmured Why did you bring that d____d long-armed ape
here he does not know any thing and can do you no good. Lincoln turned over to Stanton the
brief he had prepared and quietly watched the hearing. He was so impressed by Stantons
performance that he later made him his secretary of war, while appointing Harding head of the
Patent Office. In the end, Stanton became one of Lincolns most effective and dedicated Cabinet
members.
Lincoln combined political genius with moral principle and an acute sense of the peoples
sentiments, against which, he realized, no political project could succeed. From early manhood
he had believed that if slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. Yet in leading the northern
states through a war which would cost them more than 360,000 dead, he realized that the people
would not pay such a heavy price for the freedom of the blacks. Hence he focused at the outset
on the preservation of the union between North and South, only pulling out all the stops on the
slavery issue when the war was almost won.
In saving the union, Lincoln set the stage for the final abolition of slavery, though he did not live
to see the completion of his lifes work. As he breathed his last, laid low by an assassins bullet,
it was Stanton who paid him tribute in words which still echo: Now he belongs to the ages.