Team Of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Summary

The American Dream, articulated, in words guaranteed to be understood by everyone. You close this book knowing not just about these people, you actually feel like you know them, especially Lincoln. A fascinating read.

Key Takeaways

• Lincoln’s success in dealing with the strong egos of the men in his cabinet suggests that in the hands of a truly great politician the qualities we generally associate with decency and morality—kindness, sensitivity, compassion, honesty, and empathy—can also be impressive political resources.
• Never late for appointments, he had no patience with the sin of tardiness, which robbed precious minutes of life from the person who was kept waiting. 
• The bishop was an imposing figure, brilliant, ambitious, and hardworking. His faith, Chase observed, “was not passive but active. If any thing was to be done he felt that he must do it; and that, if he put forth all his energy, he might safely & cheerfully leave the event to Divine Providence.” Certainty gave him an unbending zeal.
• Following Benjamin Franklin’s advice for continual self-improvement, Chase founded a popular lecture series in Cincinnati, joined a temperance society, undertook the massive project of collecting Ohio’s scattered statutes into three published volumes, tried his hand at poetry, and wrote numerous articles for publication in various magazines.
• The printed word united his mind with the great minds of generations past. It was through literature that Lincoln was able to transcend his surroundings.
• Reading the Bible and Shakespeare over and over implanted rhythms and poetry that would come to fruition in those works of his maturity that made Abraham Lincoln our only poet-president.
• Though untutored in the sciences and the classics, Lincoln was able to read and reread his books until he understood them fully. “Get the books, and read and study them,” he told a law student seeking advice in 1855.

What I got out of it

• Storytell: observe and study greats, copy and teach their work in plain language. Osmosis, intuitively understand, then practice and teach to an audience for feedback.
• Read AND write often
• Act only when needed. In other cases, remain patient.
• Practice different things until you find what you’re made for. Then double-down.
• Benjamin Franklin inspired all men. Study him more.
• Read only the greatest works; learn only from the greatest minds.
• Have few “masters”, study their works until internalized. Understand intuitively, not rationally. Exposure and practice over study.

Summary Notes

Introduction

His rivals for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination—New York senator William H. Seward, Ohio governor Salmon P. Chase, and Missouri’s distinguished elder statesman Edward Bates. Taken together, the lives of these four men give us a picture of the path taken by ambitious young men in the North who came of age in the early decades of the nineteenth century. All four studied law, became distinguished orators, entered politics, and opposed the spread of slavery.

Lincoln’s barren childhood, his lack of schooling, his relationships with male friends, his complicated marriage, the nature of his ambition, and his ruminations about death can be analyzed more clearly when he is placed side by side with his three contemporaries.

His success in dealing with the strong egos of the men in his cabinet suggests that in the hands of a truly great politician the qualities we generally associate with decency and morality—kindness, sensitivity, compassion, honesty, and empathy—can also be impressive political resources.

Lincoln possessed an uncanny understanding of his shifting moods, a profound self-awareness that enabled him to find constructive ways to alleviate sadness and stress. Indeed, when he is compared with his colleagues, it is clear that he possessed the most even-tempered disposition of them all. Time and again, he was the one who dispelled his colleagues’ anxiety and sustained their spirits with his gift for storytelling and his life-affirming sense of humor.

As a young man, Lincoln worried that the “field of glory” had been harvested by the founding fathers, that nothing had been left for his generation but modest ambitions. In the 1850s, however, the wheel of history turned. The rising intensity of the slavery issue and the threatening dissolution of the nation itself provided Lincoln and his colleagues with an opportunity to save and improve the democracy established by Washington, Jefferson, and Adams, creating what Lincoln later called “a new birth of freedom.” Without the march of events that led to the Civil War, Lincoln still would have been a good man, but most likely would never have been publicly recognized as a great man. It was history that gave him the opportunity to manifest his greatness, providing the stage that allowed him to shape and transform our national life.

Part 1 – The Rivals 

Four Men Waiting

What captivated admirers, another contemporary observed, was “his winning manner, his ready good humor, and his unaffected kindness and gentleness.” Five minutes in his presence, and “you cease to think that he is either homely or awkward.”

Furthermore, in an age when speech-making prowess was central to political success, when the spoken word filled the air “from sun-up til sundown,” Lincoln’s stirring oratory had earned the admiration of a far-flung audience who had either heard him speak or read his speeches in the paper. As his reputation grew, the invitations to speak multiplied.

“He is beloved by all classes of people, irrespective of partisan predilections,” the Herald observed. “No philanthropic or benevolent movement is suggested without receiving his liberal and thoughtful assistance…. As a landlord he is kind and lenient; as an advisor he is frank and reliable; as a citizen he is enterprising and patriotic; as a champion of what he considers to be right he is dauntless and intrepid.” 

About Seward – The chief reason for his tranquillity lay in the knowledge that his campaign at the convention was in the hands of the most powerful political boss in the country: Thurlow Weed. Dictator of New York State for nearly half a century, the handsome, white-haired Weed was Seward’s closest friend and ally. “Men might love and respect [him], might hate and despise him,” Weed’s biographer Glyndon Van Deusen wrote, “but no one who took any interest in the politics and government of the country could ignore him.”

They made an exceptional team. Seward was more visionary, more idealistic, better equipped to arouse the emotions of a crowd; Weed was more practical, more realistic, more skilled in winning elections and getting things done. While Seward conceived party platforms and articulated broad principles, Weed built the party organization, dispensed patronage, rewarded loyalists, punished defectors, developed poll lists, and carried voters to the polls, spreading the influence of the boss over the entire state.

An intensely religious man of unbending routine, Chase likely began that day, as he began every day, gathering his two daughters and all the members of his household staff around him for a solemn reading of Scripture. The morning meal done, he and his elder daughter, Kate, would repair to the library to read and discuss the morning papers, searching together for signs that people across the country regarded Chase as highly as he regarded himself.

Never late for appointments, he had no patience with the sin of tardiness, which robbed precious minutes of life from the person who was kept waiting. On those evenings when he had no public functions to attend, he would sequester himself in his library at home to answer letters, consult the statute books, memorize lines of poetry, study a foreign language, or practice the jokes that, however hard he tried, he could never gracefully deliver.

He would sit for hours, long after every window on his street was dark, recording his thoughts in the introspective diary he had kept since he was twenty years old. Then, as the candle began to sink, he would turn to his Bible to close the day as it had begun, with prayer.

Unlike Seward, who frequently attended theater, loved reading novels, and found nothing more agreeable than an evening of cards, fine cigars, and a bottle of port, Chase neither drank nor smoked. He considered both theater and novels a foolish waste of time and recoiled from all games of chance, believing that they unwholesomely excited the mind. Nor was he likely to regale his friends with intricate stories told for pure fun, as did Lincoln. As one contemporary noted, “he seldom told a story without spoiling it.”

JUDGE EDWARD BATES The judge’s orderly life was steeped in solid rituals based on the seasons, the land, and his beloved family. He bathed in cold water every morning.

He found his legal work rewarding and intellectually stimulating, reveled in his position as an elder in the Presbyterian Church, and loved nothing more than to while away the long winter nights in his treasured library. In contrast to Seward, whose restless energy found insufficient outlet in the bosom of his family, and to Chase, plagued all his days by unattained ambition, Bates experienced a passionate joy in the present, content to call himself “a very domestic, home, man.”

The “Longing To Rise” 

The years following the Revolution fostered the belief that the only barriers to success were discipline and the extent of one’s talents.

“When both the privileges and the disqualifications of class have been abolished and men have shattered the bonds which once held them immobile,” marveled the French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville, “the idea of progress comes naturally into each man’s mind; the desire to rise swells in every heart at once, and all men want to quit their former social position. Ambition becomes a universal feeling.”

Lincoln traveled from Kentucky to Indiana, and then on to Illinois, where he would become a flatboatman, merchant, surveyor, and postmaster before studying law.

The family-focused and community-centered life led by most men in the colonial era was transformed at the dawn of the new century into an individual and career-oriented existence.

SALMON PORTLAND CHASE, in contrast to the ever buoyant Seward, possessed a restless soul incapable of finding satisfaction in his considerable achievements. He was forever brooding on a station in life not yet reached, recording at each turning point in his life his regret at not capitalizing on the opportunities given to him.

The bishop was an imposing figure, brilliant, ambitious, and hardworking. His faith, Chase observed, “was not passive but active. If any thing was to be done he felt that he must do it; and that, if he put forth all his energy, he might safely & cheerfully leave the event to Divine Providence.” Certainty gave him an unbending zeal.

While Seward joyfully devoured the works of Dickens and Scott, Chase found no room for fiction in his Spartan intellectual life. After finishing the new novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the author of The Last Days of Pompeii, he conceded that “the author is doubtless a gifted being—but he has prostituted God’s noblest gifts to the vilest purposes.”

Since he was surrounded by the tantalizing fruits of professional success and social eminence in the Wirt family’s parlor, it is no wonder that a career in law beckoned. His brother Alexander warned him that of all the professions, law entailed the most strenuous course of preparation: success required mastery of “thousands of volumes” from “centuries long past,” including works of science, the arts, and both ancient and contemporary history.

“In fine, you must become a universal scholar.” 

Chase took it to heart, imposing a severe discipline upon himself to rise before daybreak to begin his monumental task of study. Insecurity and ambition combined, as ever, to fuel his efforts. “Day and night must be witness to the assiduity of my labours,” he vowed in his diary; “knowledge may yet be gained and golden reputation…. Future scenes of triumph may yet be mine.”

As part of his self-designed course of preparation, Chase diligently took notes in the galleries of the House and Senate, practiced his elocution by becoming a member of Washington’s Blackstone debating club, and read tirelessly while continuing his duties as a full-time teacher.

After struggling for several years to secure enough legal business to support himself, he developed a lucrative practice, representing various business interests and serving as counsel for several large Cincinnati banks. At the same time, following Benjamin Franklin’s advice for continual self-improvement, he founded a popular lecture series in Cincinnati, joined a temperance society, undertook the massive project of collecting Ohio’s scattered statutes into three published volumes, tried his hand at poetry, and wrote numerous articles for publication in various magazines. To maintain these multiple pursuits, he would often arise at 4 a.m. and occasionally allowed himself to work on Sundays, though he berated himself whenever he did so. 

Like Seward and Chase, young Edward revealed an early aptitude for study. Though schools in Goochland County were few, Edward was taught to read and write by his father and, by the age of eight, showed a talent for poetry.

Lincoln neither romanticized nor sentimentalized the difficult circumstances of his childhood. When asked in 1860 by his campaign biographer, John Locke Scripps, to share the details of his early days, he hesitated. “Why Scripps, it is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence…you will find in Gray’s Elegy: ‘The short and simple annals of the poor.’”

In an era when men were fortunate to reach forty-five, and a staggering number of women died in childbirth, the death of a parent was commonplace. Of the four rivals, Seward alone kept parents into his adulthood. Chase was only eight when he lost his father. Bates was eleven. Both of their lives, like Lincoln’s, were molded by loss. 

Lincoln was “clearly exceptional,” Lincoln biographer David Donald observes, “and he carried away from his brief schooling the self-confidence of a man who has never met his intellectual equal.” His mind and ambition, his childhood friend Nathaniel Grigsby recalled, “soared above us. He naturally assumed the leadership of the boys. He read & thoroughly read his books whilst we played. Hence he was above us and became our guide and leader.” 

Early on, Sarah Bush Lincoln recognized that Abraham was “a Boy of uncommon natural Talents.” Though uneducated herself, she did all she could to encourage him to read, learn, and grow.

His voyage would require a Herculean feat of self-creation. Perhaps the best evidence of his exceptional nature, as well as the genesis of his great gift for storytelling, is manifest in the eagerness with which, even at six or seven, he listened to the stories the adults exchanged as they sat by his father’s fireplace at night.

Night after night, Thomas Lincoln would swap tales with visitors and neighbors while his young son sat transfixed in the corner. In these sociable settings, Thomas was in his element. A born storyteller, he possessed a quick wit, a talent for mimicry, and an uncanny memory for exceptional stories. These qualities would prove his greatest bequest to his son. Young Abe listened so intently to these stories, crafted from experiences of everyday life, that the words became embedded in his memory. Nothing was more upsetting to him, he recalled decades later, nothing made him angrier, than his inability to comprehend everything that was told.

After listening to adults chatter through the evening, he would spend, he said, “no small part of the night walking up and down, and trying to make out what was the exact meaning of some of their, to me, dark sayings.” Unable to sleep, he would reformulate the conversations until, as he recalled, “I had put it in language plain enough, as I thought, for any boy I knew to comprehend.” The following day, having translated the stories into words and ideas that his friends could grasp, he would climb onto the tree stump or log that served as an impromptu stage and mesmerize his own circle of young listeners.

What he had in the way of education, he lamented, he had to pick up on his own. Books became his academy, his college. The printed word united his mind with the great minds of generations past.

It was through literature that he was able to transcend his surroundings.

Reading the Bible and Shakespeare over and over implanted rhythms and poetry that would come to fruition in those works of his maturity that made Abraham Lincoln our only poet-president.

He possessed a vivid sensibility for the beauty of the English language. Often reading aloud, he was attracted to the sound of language along with its meaning—its music and rhythms. He found this in poetry, and to the end of his life would recite poems, often lengthy passages, from memory. He seemed especially drawn to poetry that spoke of our doomed mortality and the transience of earthly achievements.

Working simply to “keep body and soul together” as a flatboatman, clerk, merchant, postmaster, and surveyor, he engaged in a systematic regimen of self-improvement. He mastered the principles of English grammar at night when the store was closed. He carried Shakespeare’s plays and books of poetry when he walked along the streets. Seated in the local post office, he devoured newspapers. He studied geometry and trigonometry while learning the art of surveying. And then, at the age of twenty-five, he decided to study law.

After a long day at one of his various jobs, he would read far into the night. A steadfast purpose sustained him.

What Lincoln lacked in preparation and guidance, he made up for with his daunting concentration, phenomenal memory, acute reasoning faculties, and interpretive penetration. Though untutored in the sciences and the classics, he was able to read and reread his books until he understood them fully. “Get the books, and read and study them,” he told a law student seeking advice in 1855.

Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.

“Only people who are capable of loving strongly,” Leo Tolstoy wrote, “can also suffer great sorrow; but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heal them.”

The Lure Of Politics 

The influential Journal, which eventually became the party organ for the Whigs (and later, for the Republicans), gave Weed a powerful base from which he would brilliantly shape public opinion for nearly four decades.

“It is not until one visits old, oppressed, suffering Europe, that he can appreciate his own government,” he observed, “that he realizes the fearful responsibility of the American people to the nations of the whole earth, to carry successfully through the experiment…that men are capable of self-government.”

Ambition had led him to stray, he now realized, “in thought, purpose, communion and sympathy from the only being who purely loves me.”

Three decades of immigration, commercial enterprise, and industrial production had invigorated Northern society, creating thriving cities and towns. The historian Kenneth Stampp well describes how the North of this period “teemed with bustling, restless men and women who believed passionately in ‘progress’ and equated it with growth and change; the air was filled with the excitement of intellectual ferment and with the schemes of entrepreneurs; and the land was honeycombed with societies aiming at nothing less than the total reform of mankind.”

Yet, crossing into Virginia, the Sewards entered a world virtually unchanged since 1800.

The poverty, neglect, and stagnation Seward surveyed seemed to pervade both the landscape and its inhabitants. Slavery trapped a large portion of the Southern population, preventing upward mobility. Illiteracy rates were high, access to education difficult. While a small planter aristocracy grew rich from holdings in land and slaves, the static Southern economy did not support the creation of a sizable middle class.

When he moved to Springfield in 1837, Lincoln began to attract the circle of friends and admirers who would play a decisive role in his political ascent.

While he worked during the day to build his law practice, evenings would find him in the center of Springfield’s young men, gathered around a fire in Speed’s store to read newspapers, gossip, and engage in philosophical debates. “They came there,” Speed recalled, “because they were sure to find Lincoln,” who never failed to entertain with his remarkable stories. “It was a sort of social club,” Speed observed. Whigs and Democrats alike gathered to discuss the events of the day.

Lincoln engaged in every aspect of the political process, from the most visionary to the most mundane. His experience taught him what every party boss has understood through the ages: the practical machinery of the party organization—the distribution of ballots, the checklists, the rounding up of voters—was as crucial as the broad ideology laid out in the platform. The same intimate involvement in campaign organization that he displayed in these early years would characterize all of Lincoln’s future campaigns.

To Lincoln’s mind, the fundamental test of a democracy was its capacity to “elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all.” A real democracy would be a meritocracy where those born in the lower ranks could rise as far as their natural talents and discipline might take them.

Young Lincoln’s great ambition in the 1830s, he told Joshua Speed, was to be the “DeWitt Clinton of Illinois.” The pioneering New York governor had opened opportunities for all New Yorkers and left a permanent imprint on his state when he persuaded the legislature to support the Erie Canal project. In the Illinois legislature, Lincoln hoped to leave a similar imprint by way of an ambitious program of internal improvements.

Even in this moment of despair, the strength of Lincoln’s desire to engrave his name in history carried him forward. Like the ancient Greeks, Lincoln seemed to believe that “ideas of a person’s worth are tied to the way others, both contemporaries and future generations, perceive him.” Unable to find comfort in the idea of a literal afterlife in heaven, he found consolation in the conviction that in the memories of others, some part of us remains alive.

Mental health, contemporary psychiatrists tell us, consists of the ability to adapt to the inevitable stresses and misfortunes of life. It does not mean freedom from anxiety and depression, but only the ability to cope with these afflictions in a healthy way. “An outstanding feature of successful adaptation,” writes George Vaillant, “is that it leaves the way open for future growth.” Of course, Abraham Lincoln’s capacity for growth would prove enormous.

Conscious of his superior powers and the extraordinary reach of his mind and sensibilities, Lincoln had feared from his earliest days that these qualities would never find fulfillment or bring him recognition among his fellows.

Periodically, when the distance between his lofty ambition and the reality of his circumstances seemed unbridgeable, he was engulfed by tremendous sadness.

Though Lincoln’s empathy was at the root of his melancholy, it would prove an enormous asset to his political career. “His crowning gift of political diagnosis,” suggested Nicolay, “was due to his sympathy…which gave him the power to forecast with uncanny accuracy what his opponents were likely to do.”

“Plunder & Conquest” 

Soon a favorite among his fellow boarders, Lincoln was always ready with a story or anecdote to entertain, persuade, or defuse argument.

A leader should endeavor to transform, yet heed, public opinion.

Though a tranquil domestic union might have made Lincoln a happier man, the supposition that he would have been a contented homebody, like Edward Bates, belies everything we know of Lincoln’s fierce ambition and extraordinary drive—an ambition that drove him to devour books in every spare moment, memorize his father’s stories in order to captivate his friends, study law late into the night after a full day’s work, and run for office at the age of twenty-three.

Indeed, long before his political career even took shape, he had been determined to win the veneration of his fellow men by “rendering [himself] worthy” of their esteem.

The Turbulent Fifties 

The principal weapon of political combatants was the speech. A gift for oratory was the key to success in politics. Even as a child, Lincoln had honed his skills by addressing his companions from a tree stump. Speeches on important occasions were exhaustively researched and closely reasoned, often lasting three or four hours. There was demagoguery, of course, but there were also metaphors and references to literature and classical history and occasionally, as with some of Lincoln’s speeches, a lasting literary glory.

Lincoln’s stories provided more than mere amusement. Drawn from his own experiences and the curiosities reported by others, they frequently provided maxims or proverbs that usefully connected to the lives of his listeners. Lincoln possessed an extraordinary ability to convey practical wisdom in the form of humorous tales his listeners could remember and repeat. This process of repetition is central to the oral tradition; indeed, Walter Benjamin in his essay on the storyteller’s art suggests that repetition “is the nature of the web in which the gift of storytelling is cradled.”

Life on the circuit provided Lincoln the time and space he needed to remedy the “want of education” he regretted all his life.

During his nights and weekends on the circuit, in the absence of domestic interruptions, he taught himself geometry, carefully working out propositions and theorems until he could proudly claim that he had “nearly mastered the Six-books of Euclid.” His first law partner, John Stuart, recalled that “he read hard works—was philosophical—logical—mathematical—never read generally.”

In addition to geometry, Lincoln’s solitary researches allowed him to study the astronomy, political economy, and philosophy that his fellow lawyers had learned in college. “Life was to him a school,” fellow circuit rider Leonard Swett observed, “and he was always studying and mastering every subject which came before him.”

For Lincoln, circuit life was invaluable. Beyond the congeniality of boardinghouse life and the opportunity to continue his lifelong education, these travels provided the chance to walk the streets in dozens of small towns, eat at local taverns in remote corners of the state, and gain a firsthand knowledge of the desires, fears, and hopes of thousands of ordinary people in Illinois—the people who would become his loyal base of support in the years ahead when the time came to return to his first love: politics.

Before speaking out against the Nebraska Act, Lincoln spent many hours in the State Library, studying present and past congressional debates so that he could reach back into the stream of American history and tell a clear, reasoned, and compelling tale. He would express no opinion on anything, Herndon observed, until he knew his subject “inside and outside, upside and downside.”

In order to make his argument, Lincoln decided to begin with nothing less than an account of our common history, the powerful narrative of how slavery grew with our country, how its growth and expansion had been carefully contained by the founding fathers, and how on this fall night in 1854 the great story they were being told— the story of the Union—had come to such an impasse that the exemplary meaning, indeed, the continued existence of the story, hung in the balance.

For the first time in his public life, his remarkable array of gifts as historian, storyteller, and teacher combined with a lucid, relentless, yet always accessible logic. Instead of the ornate language so familiar to men like Webster, Lincoln used irony and humor, laced with workaday, homespun images to build an eloquent tower of logic.

In order to “win a man to your cause,” Lincoln explained, you must first reach his heart, “the great high road to his reason.”

Building on his rhetorical advice, Lincoln tried to place himself in the shoes of the slaveowner to reason his way through the sectional impasse, by asking Southerners to let their own hearts and history reveal that they, too, recognized the basic humanity of the black man. Never appealing like Seward to a “higher law,” or resorting to Chase’s “natural right” derived from “the code of heaven,” Lincoln staked his argument in reality.

The Gathering Storm 

Lincoln’s magnanimity served him well. While Seward and Chase would lose friends in victory—Seward by neglecting at the height of his success his old friend Horace Greeley, and Chase by not understanding the lingering resentments that followed in the wake of his 1849 Senate victory—Lincoln, in defeat, gained friends. Neither Trumbull nor Judd would ever forget Lincoln’s generous behavior.

Seward was a superb master of ceremonies, putting all at ease with his amiable disposition. Though an inveterate storyteller himself, he would draw the company into lively conversations ranging from literature and science to theater and history.

Lincoln understood that the greatest challenge for a leader in a democratic society is to educate public opinion. “With public sentiment, nothing can fail;

without it nothing can succeed,” he said. “Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.”

Countdown To The Nomination 

Lincoln, as would be evidenced throughout his presidency, was a master of timing.

WHILE LINCOLN MOVED CAREFULLY, step by step, Seward, Chase, and even Bates had grown so eager for the presidential nomination that they made a number of costly errors as they headed down the final stretch.

His strength lay among old Whigs and nativists concentrated in the border states, and conservatives in the North and Northwest. To have a genuine chance for the nomination, he would have to prove himself acceptable to moderate Republicans as well.

Had he used the months prior to the nomination to travel to the very different states of Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Connecticut, or Maryland, he might have acquainted himself with the wide range of views that comprised the new party. But he never left his home state, preferring to rely on intelligence received from colleagues and supporters who came to visit him.

Secluding himself at home, Bates never developed a clear understanding of the varied constituencies that had to be aligned, a deficit that resulted in a number of missteps.

Though a successful bid for the nomination remained unlikely, a viable candidacy was no longer an impossible dream. Slowly and methodically, Lincoln set out to improve his long odds. He arranged to publish his debates with Douglas in a book that was read widely by Republicans. As more and more people became familiar with him through the newspaper stories of the debates, invitations to speak at Republican gatherings began to pour in. Not yet an avowed candidate, Lincoln delivered nearly two dozen speeches in Iowa, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Kansas in the four months between August and December 1859.

The snake metaphor acknowledged the constitutional protection of slavery where it legally existed, while harnessing the protective instincts of parents to safeguard future generations from the venomous expansion of slavery. This homely vision of the territories as beds for American children exemplified what James Russell Lowell described as Lincoln’s ability to speak “as if the people were listening to their own thinking out loud.” When Seward reached for a metaphor to dramatize the same danger, he warned that if slavery were allowed into Kansas, his countrymen would have “introduced the Trojan horse” into the new territory. Even if most of his classically trained fellow senators immediately grasped his intent, the Trojan horse image carried neither the instant accessibility of Lincoln’s snake-in-the-bed story nor its memorable originality.

Showdown In Chicago 

The many enemies Chase had made and failed to conciliate over the years came back to haunt him at this critical juncture. Any hope of persuading McLean to turn over his votes had been lost long before as a consequence of his manipulations to gain his Senate seat. Chase, McLean remarked, “is selfish, beyond any other man. And I know from the bargain he has made in being elected to the Senate, he is ready to make any bargain to promote his interest.”

Nor had Chase learned from his mistakes four years earlier. Once again, he failed to appoint a set of trusted managers who could guide his campaign, answer objections, cajole wavering delegates, and, at the right moment, make promises to buoy supporters and strengthen wills.

The hardest kind of death to die is that occasioned by indecisive, or lukewarm friends.”

No one challenged Seward’s ability; no one questioned his credentials as statesman of the party. He was opposed simply because it was thought he would damage the prospects of the Republican Party and hurt Republican candidates in local elections.

To reach his goal of becoming everyone’s second choice, Lincoln was careful not to disparage any other candidate. Nor was it in his nature to do so.

“Make no contracts that will bind me.”

Chance, positioning, and managerial strategy—all played a role in Lincoln’s victory. Still, if we consider the comparative resources each contender brought to the race—their range of political skills, their emotional, intellectual, and moral qualities, their rhetorical abilities, and their determination and willingness to work hard—it is clear that when opportunity beckoned, Lincoln was the best prepared to answer the call. His nomination, finally, was the result of his character and his life experiences—these separated him from his rivals and provided him with advantages unrecognized at the time.

Having risen to power with fewer privileges than any of his rivals, Lincoln was more accustomed to rely upon himself to shape events. From beginning to end, he took the greatest control of the process leading up to the nomination.

Though Lincoln had entered the antislavery struggle later than Seward or Chase, his speeches possessed unmatched power, conviction, clarity, and moral strength.

At the same time, his native caution and precision with language—he rarely said more than he was sure about, rarely pandered to his various audiences— gave Lincoln great advantages over his rivals, each of whom tried to reposition himself in the months before the convention. Seward disappointed liberal Republicans when he tried to soften his fiery rhetoric to placate moderates. Bates infuriated conservatives with his strongly worded public letter. And Chase fooled no one when he tried to shift his position on the tariff at the last moment.

Lincoln remained consistent throughout.

In his years of travel on the circuit through central Illinois, engaging people in taverns, on street corners, and in shops, Lincoln had developed a keen sense of what people felt, thought, needed, and wanted.

Lincoln, like Seward, had developed a cadre of lifelong friends who were willing to do anything in their power to ensure his nomination. But unlike Seward, he had not made enemies or aroused envy along the way.

Though Lincoln desired success as fiercely as any of his rivals, he did not allow his quest for office to consume the kindness and openheartedness with which he treated supporters and rivals alike, nor alter his steady commitment to the antislavery cause.

“A Man Knows His Own Name” 

“He sat down beside me on the sofa,” wrote a correspondent from Utica, New York, “and commenced talking about political affairs in my own State with a knowledge of details which surprised me. I found that he was more conversant with some of our party performances in Oneida County than I could have desired.” He “can not only discuss ably the great democratic principle of our Government,” wrote a newspaperman from Missouri, “but at the same time tell how to navigate a vessel, maul a rail, or even to dress a deer-skin.” Each correspondent’s impression was quickly forwarded to the newspapers, the principal conduits between candidates and the public.

Lincoln was aware that being “a Man of the People” was an advantage, especially in the raw and growing Western states critical to the election of a Republican candidate. Prior to the campaign, he had reinforced this politically potent image with descriptions of his poor schooling, years of poverty, and manual labor. Although his grim beginnings held no fascination for him, Lincoln was astute enough to capitalize upon this invaluable political asset.

Although Lincoln himself made no public statements or speeches, he labored constantly on his campaign and fully justified Weed’s appraisal of his political acumen. He strove to hold his coalition together, while disrupting efforts of his opponents to unite on fusion tickets. He sent emissaries to his supporters with instructions to solve campaign problems and heal divisions.

Indirectly, he sought to clarify his position on important issues without breaking his vow of silence. He rigorously abstained from making patronage commitments. Responding to Senator Trumbull’s suggestion that he make some pledges in New York, Lincoln replied, “Remembering that Peter denied his Lord with an oath, after most solemnly protesting that he never would, I will not swear I will make no committals; but I do think I will not.”

Douglas understood what the Republicans failed to see—that Southerners were serious in their threats to secede from the Union if Lincoln won the election. “The cardinal error of the Republicans,” Nevins writes, was their failure to deal candidly with “the now imminent danger of secession.”

“An Intensified Crossword Puzzle” 

Listening patiently to each applicant, Lincoln revealed a quick-witted “adaptation to individual characteristics and peculiarities. He never evaded a proper question, or failed to give a fit answer.” What most impressed Villard was Lincoln’s remarkable ability to tell a humorous story or deliver an appropriate anecdote “to explain a meaning or enforce a point, the aptness of which was always perfect.”

Weed returned to Albany convinced that Lincoln was “capable in the largest sense of the term.” In the Albany Evening Journal, he wrote: “his mind is at once philosophical and practical. He sees all who go there, hears all they have to say, talks freely with everybody, reads whatever is written to him; but thinks and acts by himself and for himself.”

During the tumultuous time from Lincoln’s election in November 1860 to his inauguration in March 1861, Seward “fought,” Henry Adams judged, “a fight which might go down to history as one of the wonders of statesmanship.”

While his conciliatory address cost him the esteem of many longtime supporters, Seward still believed that offering his hand in peace in the attempt to prevent a civil war was the right judgment.

The president-elect was engaged in a more intricate game of political engineering than Seward realized. While undoubtedly pleased that Seward’s conciliatory tone had produced a calming effect on the border states, Lincoln knew that if he personally called for compromise, he would lose the support of an important wing of the Republican Party. Instead, he maintained firmness through silence while Seward absorbed the backlash for what might prove an advantageous posture of conciliation.

In the end, though Lincoln’s role was not fully recognized at the time, he was the one who kept his fractious party together when an open rupture might easily have destroyed his administration before it could even begin. By privately endorsing Seward’s spirit of compromise while projecting an unyielding public image, President-elect Lincoln retained an astonishing degree of control over an increasingly chaotic and potentially devastating situation.

“I Am Now Public Property” 

Lincoln had unerringly read the character of Chase and slyly called Seward’s bluff. Through all the countervailing pressures, he had achieved the cabinet he wanted from the outset—a mixture of former Whigs and Democrats, a combination of conciliators and hard-liners. He would be the head of his own administration, the master of the most unusual cabinet in the history of the country.

Lincoln’s “first decision was one of great courage and self-reliance.” Each of his rivals was “sure to feel that the wrong man had been nominated.” A less confident man might have surrounded himself with personal supporters who would never question his authority. James Buchanan, for example, had deliberately chosen men who thought as he did.

Joseph Medill of the Chicago Tribune asked Lincoln why he had chosen a cabinet comprised of enemies and opponents.

Lincoln’s answer was simple, straightforward, and shrewd. “We needed the strongest men of the party in the Cabinet. We needed to hold our own people together. I had looked the party over and concluded that these were the very strongest men. Then I had no right to deprive the country of their services.”

Part 2 – Master Among Men 

“Mystic Chords Of Memory”

Lincoln rose before sunrise to look over the inaugural address he had been crafting in his peculiar fashion. According to Nicolay, “Lincoln often resorted to the process of cumulative thought.” He would reduce complex ideas to paragraphs and sentences, and then days or weeks later return to the same passage and polish it further “to elaborate or to conclude his point or argument.”

While Seward or Chase would consult countless books, drawing from ancient to modern history to illustrate and refine their arguments, Lincoln built the armature of his inaugural out of four documents: the Constitution, Andrew Jackson’s nullification proclamation, Daniel Webster’s memorable “Liberty and Union Forever” speech, and Clay’s address to the Senate arguing for the Compromise of 1850.

Lincoln proceeded to recast and sharpen Seward’s patriotic sentiments into a concise and powerful poetry: “I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” Most significant, Seward’s “guardian angel” breathes down on the nation from above; Lincoln’s “better angels” are inherent in our nature as a people.

It was Andrew Jackson’s motto, he reminded, that “if you temporize, you are lost.”

Lincoln also implemented a drastic restructuring of his daily schedule.

Much as he wanted to give office seekers their due, he needed time and space to consider the grave problems facing the country. He ordered Nicolay to limit visiting hours from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., ending the hectic burden of twelve-hour days that Nicolay knew “would be impossible to sustain for a great length of time.”

For weeks, Seward had acted under “two supreme illusions”: first, that he was in reality the man in charge; and second, that Southerners would be appeased by the abandonment of Sumter and would eventually return to the Union. He had risked his good name on his conviction that Lincoln would follow his advice and surrender Sumter.

Desperate to save his own honor and prevent the country from drifting into war, while the administration established no clear-cut policy, Seward composed an extraordinary memo that would become the source of great criticism and controversy.

Seward’s mistake was not the diabolical plot that some critics later charged, but a grave misreading of the situation and a grave misunderstanding of Lincoln.

The president immediately dashed off a reply to Seward that he would never send, probably preferring to respond in person. Buried in Lincoln’s papers, the document was not unearthed until decades later, as Nicolay and Hay labored on their massive Lincoln biography.

To the astonishment of Welles, Lincoln “took upon himself the whole blame—said it was carelessness, heedlessness on his part—he ought to have been more careful and attentive.” In fact, Welles continued, Lincoln “often declared that he, and not his Cabinet, was in fault for errors imputed to them.”

Critics later claimed that Lincoln had maneuvered the South into beginning the war. In fact, he had simply followed his inaugural pledge that he would “hold” the properties belonging to the government, “but beyond what may be necessary” to accomplish this, “there will be no invasion—no using of force.”

Fort Sumter could not be held without food and supplies. Had Lincoln chosen to abandon the fort, he would have violated his pledge to the North. Had he used force in any way other than to “hold” government properties, he would have breached his promise to the South.

The Confederates had fired the first shot.

“The Ball Has Opened” 

While the executive branch needed Congress to raise armies and authorize spending, Lincoln was advised that “to wait for ‘many men of many minds’ to shape a war policy would be to invite disaster.” Seward was particularly adamant on this point, believing that “history tells us that kings who call extra parliaments lose their heads.”

He welcomed his old rival Stephen Douglas for a private meeting of several hours. Douglas was not well; a lifetime of alcohol and frenetic activity had taken its toll. In two months’ time, he would be dead.

Nevertheless, he offered his solid support to Lincoln, afterward publicly declaring himself ready “to sustain the President in the exercise of his constitutional functions to preserve the Union, and maintain the Government.”

His statement proved tremendously helpful in mobilizing Democratic support.

“In this hour of trial it becomes the duty of every patriotic citizen to sustain the General Government,” one Douglas paper began. Another urged “every man to lay aside his party bias…give up small prejudices and go in, heart and hand, to put down treason and traitors.”

“The response to the Proclamation at the North,” Fred Seward recalled, “was all or more than could be anticipated. Every Governor of a free State promptly promised that his quota should be forthcoming. An enthusiastic outburst of patriotic feeling—an ‘uprising of the North’ in town and country— was reported by telegraph.”

In their excitement, Southerners fell victim to the same hectic misjudgment that plagued the North, overstating their own chances as they underestimated their opponent’s will.

The commencement of war found Welles and the Navy Department in a grave situation. Southerners, who had made up the majority of navy officers in peacetime, resigned in droves every day. Treason was rampant.

The day the war claimed its first casualties was also the day when “the censorship of the press was exercised for the first time at the telegraph office,” a veteran journalist recalled.

Washington was isolated from all communication with the North.

“Perdition was the sure penalty of further hesitation.”

“Grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.”

To Lincoln’s mind, the battle to save the Union contained an even larger purpose than ending slavery, which was after all sanctioned by the very Constitution he was sworn to uphold. “I consider the central idea pervading this struggle,” he told Hay in early May, “is the necessity that is upon us, of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.”

The sorry condition of the White House provided the energetic Mary with a worthy ambition. She would restore the people’s home to its former elegance as a symbol of her husband’s strength and the Union’s power. In another era, this ambition might have been applauded, but in the midst of a civil war, it was regarded as frivolous.

WITH MORE THAN ENOUGH TROUBLES to occupy him at home, Lincoln faced a tangled situation abroad. A member of the British Parliament had introduced a resolution urging England to accord the Southern Confederacy belligerent status.

If passed, the resolution would give Confederate ships the same rights in neutral ports enjoyed by Federal ships. Britain’s textile economy depended on cotton furnished by Southern plantations.

Seward feared that England would back the South simply to feed its own factories. While the “younger branch of the British stock” might support freedom, he told his wife, the aristocrats, concerned more with economics than morality, would become “the ally of the traitors.”

Lincoln had no intention of fighting two wars at once. All his life, he had taken care not to send letters written in anger. Now, to mitigate the harshness of the draft, he altered the tone of the letter at numerous points

Thus, a threatening message that might have embroiled the Union in two wars at the same time became instead the basis for a hard-line policy that effectively interrupted British momentum toward recognizing the Confederacy.

History would later give Secretary of State Seward high marks for his role in preventing Britain and France from intervening in the war. He is considered by some to have been “the ablest American diplomatist of the century.” But here, as was so often the case, Lincoln’s unseen hand had shaped critical policy.

Only three months earlier, the frontier lawyer had confessed to Seward that he knew little of foreign affairs. His revisions of the dispatch, however, exhibit the sophisticated prowess of a veteran statesman: he had analyzed a complex situation and sought the least provocative way to neutralize a potential enemy while making crystal-clear his country’s position.

“We were entirely unprepared for such a conflict, and for the moment, at least, absolutely without even the simplest instruments with which to engage in war. We had no guns, and even if we had, they would have been of but little use, for we had no ammunition to put in them—no powder, no saltpetre, no bullets, no anything.” The demands placed on the War Department in the early days of the war were indeed excruciating. Not only were weapons in short supply, but uniforms, blankets, horses, medical supplies, food, and everything necessary to outfit the vast numbers of volunteer soldiers arriving daily in Washington were unobtainable.

Lincoln later explained that with “so large a number of disloyal persons” infiltrating every department, the government could not rely on official agents to manage contracts for manufacturing the weapons and supplies necessary to maintain a fighting force. With the cabinet’s unanimous consent, he directed Chase to dispense millions of dollars to a small number of trusted private individuals to negotiate and sign contracts that would mobilize the military.

Acting “without compensation,” the majority of these men did their utmost under the circumstances.

Butler himself would soon be equally delighted by Lincoln’s magnanimity in making him a brigadier general. “I will accept the commission,” Butler gratefully told Lincoln, but “there is one thing I must say to you, as we don’t know each other: That as a Democrat I opposed your election, and did all I could for your opponent; but I shall do no political act, and loyally support your administration as long as I hold your commission; and when I find any act that I cannot support I shall bring the commission back at once, and return it to you.”

Lincoln replied, “That is frank, that is fair. But I want to add one thing:

When you see me doing anything that for the good of the country ought not to be done, come and tell me so, and why you think so, and then perhaps you won’t have any chance to resign your commission.” Had Butler known Lincoln, he would have been less astonished.

Finding his only comfort in forward motion, he began drafting a memo incorporating the painful lessons of Bull Run into a coherent future military policy. Understanding that the disorder of the newly formed troops had contributed to the debacle, he called for the forces to “be constantly drilled, disciplined and instructed.” Furthermore, when he learned that soldiers preparing to end their three months of service had led the retreat, Lincoln proposed to let all those short-termers “who decline to enter the longer service, be discharged as rapidly as circumstances will permit.”

Anticipating European reactions to the defeat, he determined to move “with all

“I Do Not Intend To Be Sacrificed” 

The Attorney General’s impatience was understandable, but Lincoln’s reasoning behind the delay was far shrewder than Bates realized. Two days after Bates made his angry entry, Lincoln dispatched his friend Leonard Swett to hand-carry a removal order to Frémont. Before Swett reached St. Louis, however, the War Department released the damning report of Adjutant General Thomas to the press. Published on October 31, the detailed report was considered by the New York Times “the most remarkable document that has seen the light since the beginning of the present war.” So damning were the revelations about Frémont, the Times continued, that it was mystifying why the Lincoln administration had allowed their publication.

In fact, the decision to publicize the report was both calculated and canny.

By the time the message was delivered to Frémont, the public had been primed with powerful arguments for his dismissal. Had Lincoln acted earlier, people might have concluded that Frémont was sacrificed to the Blairs or, worse still, cashiered because of his proclamation emancipating the slaves. By leaking the facts in the report, Lincoln had adroitly prepared public opinion to support his decision.

As the meeting adjourned, Lincoln turned to his secretary of state.

“Governor Seward, you will go on, of course, preparing your answer, which, as I understand it, will state the reasons why they [the prisoners] ought to be given up. Now I have a mind to try my hand at stating the reasons why they ought not to be given up. We will compare the points on each side.”

After the meeting, Seward asked Lincoln why he had not presented “an argument for the other side?” With a smile, Lincoln replied, “I found I could not make an argument that would satisfy my own mind, and that proved to me your ground was the right one.”

BY THE END OF 1861, Lincoln realized that he had made a serious mistake in placing Simon Cameron at the head of the War Department. For many decades, Cameron had maintained his power base in Pennsylvania through the skillful use of patronage to reward loyalists and punish opponents.

A central system of civilian command was essential to construct a machine capable of providing strategy, supplies, logistics, and training for an army that had grown from 16,000 in March to 670,000 in December. Careful record keeping was indispensable when contracts worth millions had to be negotiated for rifles, cannons, horses, uniforms, food, and blankets.

As Lincoln confided to Nicolay, Cameron was “incapable either of organizing details or conceiving and advising general plans.”

Certain that he, too, would be commanded to revise his report, Welles resolved that he would resign before doing so. But to his bewilderment, Lincoln allowed the navy report to be printed without change. Shrewdly, Lincoln had recognized at once the political difference between the two situations: the army occupied territory in the border states, while the navy did not. Allowing blacks to find employment on naval ships or in surrounding harbors on the coast was fundamentally different from providing weapons to blacks in the slave states of Kentucky or Missouri, whose continued loyalty was critical to the Union.

“The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.”

Clearly, this upward mobility, the possibility of self-realization so central to the idea of America, was closed to the slave unless and until he became a free man.

“My Boy Is Gone”

In the end, each of the three men—Seward, Chase, and Cameron—assumed he was instrumental in Lincoln’s appointment of the new secretary of war.

Stanton kept his meetings brief and pointed. He was “fluent without wordiness,” George Templeton Strong wrote, “and above all, earnest, warmhearted, and large-hearted.” His tireless work style invigorated his colleagues. “Persons at a distance,” a correspondent in the capital city wrote, “cannot well realize what a revolution has been wrought in Washington by the change of the head of the War Department. The very atmosphere of the city breathes of change; the streets, the hotels, the halls of Congress speak it.”

Maintaining vivid consciousness of his dead child was essential for a man who believed that the dead live on only in the minds of the living.

“He Was Simply Outgeneraled” 

He borrowed General Halleck’s book on military strategy from the Library of Congress and told Browning a few days later that “he was thinking of taking the field himself.”

More than any other cabinet member, Seward appreciated Lincoln’s peerless skill in balancing factions both within his administration and in the country at large.

Seward expressed great confidence in Lincoln. “The President is wise and practical,” he wrote. His trust in Lincoln was complete, inspiring faith in the eventual success of the Union cause.

In the wake of the “Quaker gun” affair, Lincoln’s confidence in McClellan had also eroded. While acknowledging that the general was a great “engineer,” Lincoln noted drolly that “he seems to have a special talent for developing a ‘stationary’ engine.” The more he studied the general, he confided to Browning, the more he realized that when “the hour for action approached he became nervous and oppressed with the responsibility and hesitated to meet the crisis.”

Kate clearly understood the role that “parlor politics” could play in cementing alliances and consolidating power in furtherance of her father’s irrepressible political ambitions. She was determined to create nothing less than a “rival court” to the White House that could help catapult Chase to the presidency. In the spring of 1862, she reigned supreme.

So long as Lincoln believed Chase was the right man for the Treasury, he had no intention of requesting his resignation. As for Chase, so long as he could garner radical support by publicly opposing Lincoln on this critical issue, he would productively remain in the cabinet until the time was right to make a break.

Even after the defeat at Gaines’ Mill, however, McClellan’s troops remained a strong and resilient force. In the days that followed, they fought hard and well, inflicting more than five thousand casualties at Malvern Hill while suffering only half that number. In truth, McClellan was psychologically defeated. “He was simply outgeneraled,” Christopher Wolcott concluded.

Instead of counterattacking, he continued to retreat from Richmond until his exhausted troops reached a safe position eight miles down the James at Harrison’s Landing. Equally depleted, Lee’s troops returned to Richmond, and the Peninsula Campaign came to an end.

“We Are In The Depths” 

Now, in the wake of the Peninsula battle, confronted with public discontent, diminishing loan subscriptions and renewed threats that Britain would recognize the Confederacy, Lincoln demonstrated that his own purpose remained fixed. He decided to call for a major expansion of the army.

Known to history as the “Harrison’s Landing” letter, the document imperiously outlined for the president what the policy and aims of the war should be. “The time has come when the government must determine upon a civil and military policy,” McClellan brazenly began, warning that without a clear-cut policy defining the nature of the war, “our cause will be lost.”

The troops loved Lincoln. “His benignant smile as he passed on was a real reflection of his honest, kindly heart; but deeper, under the surface of that marked and not all uncomely face, were the unmistakable signs of care and anxiety…. In fact, his popularity in the army is and has been universal.”

As always, the president refused to let a subordinate take the blame for his own decisions. He insisted to Browning “that all that Stanton had done in regard to the army had been authorized by him the President.” Three weeks later, Lincoln publicly defended the beleaguered Stanton before an immense Union meeting on the Capitol steps.

For the soldiers, the need to communicate with their families was tantamount to their need to survive.

It had been an extraordinarily productive session. Relieved of Southern opposition, the Republican majority was able to pass three historic bills that had been stalled for years: the Homestead Act, which promised 160 acres of free public land largely in the West to settlers who agreed to reside on the property for five years or more; the Morrill Act, providing public lands to states for the establishment of land-grant colleges; and the Pacific Railroad Act, which made the construction of a transcontinental railroad possible. The 37th Congress also laid the economic foundation for the Union war effort with the Legal Tender bill, which created a paper money known as “greenbacks.” A comprehensive tax bill was also enacted, establishing the Internal Revenue Bureau in the Department of the Treasury and levying a federal income tax for the first time in American history.

If the rebels were divested of their slaves, who would then be free to join the Union forces, the North could gain a decided advantage.

Seen in this light, emancipation could be considered a military necessity, a legitimate exercise of the president’s constitutional war powers.

The constitutional protection of slavery could and would be overridden by the constitutionally sanctioned war powers of the president.

His draft proclamation set January 1, 1863, little more than five months away, as the date on which all slaves within states still in rebellion against the Union would be declared free, “thenceforward, and forever.” It required no cumbersome enforcement proceedings. Though it did not cover the roughly 425,000 slaves in the loyal border states—where, without the use of his war powers, no constitutional authority justified his action—the proclamation was shocking in scope. In a single stroke, it superseded legislation on slavery and property rights that had guided policy in eleven states for nearly three quarters of a century.

He expressed his worry that the proclamation might provoke a racial war in the South so disruptive to cotton that the ruling classes in England and France would intervene to protect their economic interests. As secretary of state, Seward was particularly sensitive to the threat of European intervention. Curiously, despite his greater access to intelligence from abroad, Seward failed to grasp what Lincoln intuitively understood: that once the Union truly committed itself to emancipation, the masses in Europe, who regarded slavery as an evil demanding eradication, would not be easily maneuvered into supporting the South.

Once Lincoln had made up his mind, Seward was steadfast in his loyalty to him. He demurred only on the issue of timing.

Having resolved to present it for publication upon the first military success, he set out to educate public opinion, to prepare the ground for its acceptance. Lincoln had long believed, as we have seen, that “with public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.” He understood that one of the principal stumbling blocks in the way of emancipation was the pervasive fear shared by whites in both the North and the South that the two races could never coexist peacefully in a free society.

Lincoln’s remarkable empathy had singularly failed him in this initial approach to the impending consequences of emancipation. Though he had tried to put himself in the place of blacks and suggest what he thought was best for them, his lack of contact with the black community left him unaware of their deep attachment to their country and sense of outrage at the thought of removal.

In time, Lincoln’s friendship with Frederick Douglass and personal contact with hundreds of black soldiers willing to give up their lives for their freedom would create a deeper understanding of his black countrymen that would allow him to cast off forever his thoughts of colonization.

“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause.”

“My Word Is Out” 

The devastating defeat put the president in an untenable position. The more he contemplated McClellan’s delay in sending his troops to Pope, the angrier he became. Yet there was no time to indulge in anger while Washington itself was threatened and he sorely needed the best forces at his disposal. He still believed McClellan was best equipped to reorganize the demoralized troops.

“What is the use of growing old?” he asked. “You learn something of men and things but never until too late to use it.”

The preliminary proclamation, published the following day, brought a large crowd of cheering serenaders to the White House. Though it would not take effect until Lincoln issued the final proclamation on January 1, 1863, giving the rebellious states one last chance to return to the Union, it had changed the course of the war.

“Abraham Lincoln may be slow…but Abraham Lincoln is not the man to reconsider, retract and contradict words and purposes solemnly proclaimed over his official signature…. If he has taught us to confide in nothing else, he has taught us to confide in his word.”

The Richmond Enquirer charged Lincoln with inciting an insurrection that would inevitably lead, as with Nat Turner’s uprising, to slaves being hunted down “like wild beasts” and killed. “Cheerful and happy now, he plots their death,” the paper accused. None of this surprised Lincoln. Analyzing the range of editorial opinion, he “said he had studied the matter so long that he knew more about it than they did.”

“While commendation in newspapers and by distinguished individuals is all that a vain man could wish, the stocks have declined, and troops come forward more slowly than ever. This, looked soberly in the face, is not very satisfactory.”

Seward was the one man in the cabinet Lincoln trusted completely, the only one who fully appreciated his unusual strengths as a leader, and the only one he could call an intimate friend. Still, he could scarcely afford to antagonize the Republican senators so essential to his governing coalition. He had to think through his options. He had to learn more about the dynamics of the situation.

As the conversation continued, Lincoln seemed to sense that the committee members were “earnest and sad—not malicious nor passionate.” He “expressed his satisfaction with the tone and temper” of the conversation, promised to examine the prepared paper with care, and left them with the feeling that he was “pleased with the interview.”

Knowing that, when personally confronted, the cabinet members would profess they had worked well together, Lincoln proposed a joint session later that evening with the cabinet and the Committee of Nine. Presumably, they would disabuse the senators of their notions of disunity and discord in the cabinet. Chase was panicked at the thought of the joint meeting, since tales of the malfunctioning cabinet had originated largely with his own statements to the senators. Chase argued vehemently against the joint meeting, but when everyone else agreed, he was forced to acquiesce.

When the meeting adjourned at 1 a.m., the senators suspected that no change in the cabinet would be made.

The disappointed senators now turned their wrath upon Chase, whose duplicitous behavior infuriated them.

Lincoln’s political dexterity had enabled him to calm the crisis and expose the duplicity of his secretary of the treasury.

For Lincoln, the most serious governmental crisis of his presidency had ended in victory. He had treated the senators with dignity and respect and, in the process, had protected the integrity and autonomy of his cabinet. He had defended the executive against a legislative attempt to dictate who should constitute the president’s political family. He had saved his friend Seward from an unjust attack that was really directed at him, and, simultaneously, solidified his own position as master of both factions in his cabinet.

“Fire In The Rear” 

All his life, Lincoln had exhibited an exceptionally sensitive grasp of the limits set by public opinion. As a politician, he had an intuitive sense of when to hold fast, when to wait, and when to lead. “It is my conviction,” Lincoln later said, “that, had the proclamation been issued even six months earlier than it was, public sentiment would not have sustained it.”

“A man watches his pear-tree day after day, impatient for the ripening of the fruit,” Lincoln explained. “Let him attempt to force the process, and he may spoil both fruit and tree. But let him patiently wait, and the ripe pear at length falls into his lap!”

As he had done so many times before, Lincoln withstood the storm of defeat by replacing anguish over an unchangeable past with hope in an uncharted future.

“The Tycoon Is In Fine Whack” 

“Often an idea about it would occur to me which seemed to have force and make perfect answer to some of the things that were said and written about my actions,” he later told a visitor. “I never let one of those ideas escape me, but wrote it on a scrap of paper.”

Pointing out that “long experience has shown that armies can not be maintained unless desertion shall be punished by the severe penalty of death,” Lincoln posed a question that was soon echoed by supporters everywhere: “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert? This is none the less injurious when effected by getting a father, or brother, or friend, into a public meeting, and there working upon his feelings, till he is persuaded to write the soldier boy, that he is fighting in a bad cause, for a wicked administration of a contemptable government, too weak to arrest and punish him if he shall desert.”

Lincoln took every step to ensure that his words would shape public opinion.

in the end, the feuding cabinet members, with the exception of Chase, remained loyal to their president, who met rivalry and irritability with kindness and defused their tensions with humor.

As he was forced to deal with quarreling generals on almost every front, it is little wonder that Lincoln developed such respect and admiration for Ulysses S. Grant. Steadily and uncomplainingly, Grant had advanced toward Vicksburg, the Confederate stronghold whose capture would give the Union control of the Mississippi River and split the Confederacy.

Before sending the letter, which he knew would leave Meade disconsolate, Lincoln held back, as he often did when he was upset or angry, waiting for his emotions to settle. In the end, he placed the letter in an envelope inscribed: “To Gen. Meade, never sent, or signed.”

While Lincoln spent hours writing letters to keep generals and politicians on an even keel, he apparently never found the solace Seward and Chase took in their extensive family correspondence. Nor did his wife and children write regularly.

Both Seward and Lincoln agreed that “one fundamental principle of politics is to be always on the side of your country in a war. It kills any party to oppose a war.” As, indeed, Lincoln knew from his own experience in opposing the Mexican War.

With Seward in upstate New York, Stanton in the mountains of Pennsylvania, Nicolay out west, and Hay setting out for a week’s vacation in Long Branch, New Jersey, Lincoln was left in relative solitude. “The White House,” Stoddard noted, “is deserted, save by our faithful and untiring Chief Magistrate, who, alone of all our public men, is always at his post.”

Notwithstanding, Stoddard observed, “he looks less careworn and emaciated than in the spring, as if, living only for his country, he found his own vigor keeping pace with the returning health of the nation.”

“I Feel Trouble In The Air” 

Before they parted, Lincoln told Douglass that he had read a recent speech in which the fiery orator had lambasted “the tardy, hesitating and vacillating policy of the President of the United States.” Though he conceded that he might move with frustrating deliberation on large issues, he disputed the accusation of vacillation. “I think it cannot be shown that when I have once taken a position, I have ever retreated from it.”

Douglass and Lincoln had established a relationship that would prove important for both men in the weeks and months ahead. In subsequent speeches, Douglass frequently commented on his gracious reception at the White House.

The Philadelphia Inquirer had regarded Lincoln’s unconventional habit of writing public letters with skepticism, but granted that his recent letters, including this one, “have dispelled the doubt. If he is as felicitous in the future, we hope he will continue to write.”

In its fulsome praise of the letter to Conkling, the New York Times also commended a long line of Lincoln’s writings, including his inaugural, the letters to McClellan made public by the congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War, and his published letters to Greeley and Corning, which revealed “the same fitness to the occasion, and the same effectiveness in its own direction.”

“It was an extraordinary feat of logistics,” James McPherson writes, “the longest and fastest movement of such a large body of troops before the twentieth century.”

“In dealing with the public, Lincoln’s heart was greater than his head, while Stanton’s head was greater than his heart.”

All the troubles they described could be explained by the fact that during a civil war, confusion abounds: “Deception breeds and thrives. Confidence dies, and universal suspicion reigns.”

Several months later, when Lincoln became convinced that Schofield was actually leaning toward the conservatives instead of using “his influence to harmonize the conflicting elements,” he decided to replace him with Rosecrans, a man long favored by the radicals. But even then, he engineered the transfer in a manner that protected Schofield’s good name, while preserving his own presidential authority to determine when and where to change his commanders.

Lincoln, too, could see the “time coming” for a constitutional amendment, and then whoever “stands in its way, will be run over by it”; but the country was not yet ready. The “discordant elements” of the great coalition still had to be held together to ensure victory in the war. Moreover, he objected, “I have never done an official act with a view to promote my own personal aggrandizement, and I don’t like to begin now.”

Herein, Swett concluded, lay the secret to Lincoln’s gifted leadership. “It was by ignoring men, and ignoring all small causes, but by closely calculating the tendencies of events and the great forces which were producing logical results.”

Lincoln was “the most truly progressive man of the age, because he always moves in conjunction with propitious circumstances, not waiting to be dragged by the force of events or wasting strength in premature struggles with them.”

“Still In Wild Water” 

Lincoln had translated the story of his country and the meaning of the war into words and ideas accessible to every American. The child who would sleeplessly rework his father’s yarns into tales comprehensible to any boy had forged for his country an ideal of its past, present, and future that would be recited and memorized by students forever.

Few believed that this novice, who “came to his post with less of practical experience in the Government than any individual,” was equal to the task. Nevertheless, the past three years had seen treason excised from the government; European nations had come to look upon the North with respect; the Treasury was flush with funds to support the armed forces; the army had grown to “half a million men,” and the navy was now “respected upon every sea in all parts of the globe.” All this had been accomplished, Adams acknowledged, with a remnant tinge of condescension, not because Lincoln possessed “any superior genius” but because he, “from the beginning to the end, impressed upon the people the conviction of his honesty and fidelity to one great purpose.”

In a democratic nation, Lowell added, “where the rough and ready understanding of the people is sure at last to be the controlling power, a profound common-sense is the best genius for statesmanship.”

“There’s A Man In It!” 

Lincoln considered his meetings with the general public his “public-opinion baths.” They “serve to renew in me a clearer and more vivid image of that great popular assemblage out of which I sprung,” he told a visitor, “and though they may not be pleasant in all their particulars, the effect, as a whole, is renovating and invigorating to my perceptions of responsibility and duty.”

LINCOLN’S GIFT FOR MANAGING men was never more apparent than during the presidential boomlet for Chase that peaked in the winter months of 1864. While Chase’s supporters prematurely showed their hand, Lincoln, according to the Pennsylvania politician Alexander McClure, “carefully veiled his keen and sometimes bitter resentment against Chase, and waited the fullness of time when he could by some fortuitous circumstance remove Chase as a competitor, or by some shrewd manipulation of politics make him a hopeless one.”

So long as he remained confident that he had the public’s support, he could afford to let the game play out a little longer. Keeping Chase in suspense, Lincoln simply acknowledged receipt of the letter and promised to “answer a little more fully when I can find time to do so.” Then he sat back to measure the reaction of the people to the circular.

It did not take long. The morning it was printed, Welles correctly predicted:

“Its recoil will be more dangerous I apprehend than its projectile. That is, it will damage Chase more than Lincoln.” Even papers friendly to Chase lamented the circular’s publication.

In moving gradually toward emancipation, as he had done, the Harper’s editor observed, Lincoln understood that in a democracy, “every step he took must seem wise to the great public mind.” Thus, he had wisely nullified the premature proclamations issued by Frémont and Hunter, waiting until “the blood of sons and brothers and friends would wash clear a thousand eyes that had been blinded.”

“The masses are taken in by Lincoln’s apparent simplicity and good-naturedness, by his awkwardness, by his vulgar jokes, and, in the people’s belief, the great shifter is earnest and honest.”

Discipline and keen insight had once again served Lincoln most effectively.

By regulating his emotions and resisting the impulse to strike back at Chase when the circular first became known, he gained time for his friends to mobilize the massive latent support for his candidacy. Chase’s aspirations were crushed without Lincoln’s direct intrusion. He had known all along that his treasury secretary was no innocent, but by seeming to accept Chase’s word, he allowed the secretary to retain some measure of his dignity while the country retained his services in the cabinet. Lincoln himself would determine the appropriate time for Chase’s departure.

LINCOLN’S ABILITY TO RETAIN his emotional balance in such difficult situations was rooted in an acute self-awareness and an enormous capacity to dispel anxiety in constructive ways.

As the leader of his cabinet and the leader of his country, however, he understood the need to remain collected and project hope and confidence to his colleagues and his people. Between anxious hours at the War Department awaiting news from the front, Lincoln made time to get to the theater, attend a public lecture on Gettysburg, and see an opera. “People may think strange of it,” he explained, “but I must have some relief from this terrible anxiety, or it will kill me.”

“Anger is the poorest of counselors,” she conceded, “& revenge is suicide.”

“Atlanta Is Ours” 

Lincoln decided to visit Grant at his headquarters at City Point. Welles strongly disapproved of the decision. “He can do no good,” he predicted. “It can hardly be otherwise than to do harm, even if no accident befalls him. Better for him and the country that he should remain at his post here.” The navy secretary failed to understand the importance of these trips to Lincoln, who needed the contact with the troops to lift his own spirits so that he, in turn, could better buoy the spirits of those around him.

“Having hope,” writes Daniel Goleman in his study of emotional intelligence, “means that one will not give in to overwhelming anxiety, a defeatist attitude, or depression in the face of difficult challenges or setbacks.”

Hope is “more than the sunny view that everything will turn out all right”; it is “believing you have the will and the way to accomplish your goals.”

It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to fall into a bad habit. Chase has fallen into two bad habits…. He thinks he has become indispensable to the country…. He also thinks he ought to be President; he has no doubt whatever about that.” These two unfortunate tendencies, Lincoln explained, had made Chase “irritable, uncomfortable, so that he is never perfectly happy unless he is thoroughly miserable.”

In his misery, Chase searched for reasons why Lincoln had so abruptly accepted his resignation. His answers betray an unwillingness to take the slightest responsibility for his own missteps.

The Raymond letter, like the reply to Robinson, was placed in an envelope and “slept undisturbed” for over two decades until unearthed by Nicolay and Hay when writing their biography of Lincoln.

Chase stopped en route in New York. There, he had an unsettling conversation with a “gentleman who thought Lincoln very wise—if more radical would have offended conservatives—if more conservative the radicals.” Would this, Chase asked himself, be the “judgment of history?”

Monty would never forget that Lincoln had stood by him after the mortifying publication of his private letter to Frémont three years earlier, which contained passages demeaning the president. He knew that his father had never been turned away when he requested a private audience with Lincoln, and that his sister, Elizabeth, was always welcome at the White House. His entire family would forever appreciate Lincoln’s support for Frank during his continuing battle with the radicals in Congress. Indeed, Lincoln’s countless acts of generosity and kindness had cemented a powerful connection with the close-knit Blair family that even Monty’s forced resignation could not break. In the end, Lincoln gained the withdrawal of Frémont and the backing of the radicals without losing the affection and support of the conservative and powerful Blairs.

Stanton never would understand the indispensable role that laughter played in sustaining Lincoln’s spirits in difficult times.

It was clear to both parties that the absentee vote could prove critical in the presidential election. Democrats, remembering the fanatical devotion McClellan had inspired among his men, believed their man would receive an overwhelming majority of the soldier vote.

Lincoln thought differently. He trusted the bond he had developed with his soldiers during his many trips to the front. After every defeat, he had joined them, riding slowly along their lines, boosting their spirits. He had wandered companionably through their encampments, fascinated by the smallest details of camp life. Sitting with the wounded in hospital tents, he had taken their hands and wished them well. The humorous stories he had told clusters of soldiers had been retold to hundreds more. The historian William Davis estimates that “a quarter-million or more had had some glimpse of him on their own.” In addition, word of his pardons to soldiers who had fallen asleep on picket duty or exhibited fear in the midst of battle had spread through the ranks. Most important of all, through his eloquent speeches and public letters he had given profound meaning to the struggle for which they were risking their lives.

Lincoln told a visitor: “I would rather be defeated with the soldier vote behind me than to be elected without it.” It is likely that McClellan shared Lincoln’s sentiment.

‘It’s a slip and not a fall.’

“The verdict of the people was likely to be so full, clear, and unmistakable that there could be no dispute,” thereby affording him the chance to continue the war until both liberty and Union were secured.

Most impressive, the soldier vote had swung overwhelmingly in his favor.

There was something else, something Democrats had failed to understand. Over the years, Lincoln had inspired an almost mystical devotion among his troops. “The men had come to regard Mr. Lincoln with sentiments of veneration and love,” noted an Illinois corporal. “To them he really was ‘Father Abraham,’ with all that the term implied.” By supporting Lincoln, the soldiers understood that they were voting to prolong the war, but they voted with their hearts for the president they loved and the cause that he embodied.

“A Sacred Effort” 

Seward’s playful remarks about his colleagues reflected the improved atmosphere in the cabinet now that Chase and Blair were gone. Both men had symbolized the animosity between radicals and conservatives in the country at large; their clashing emotions had long reverberated through the cabinet. The periodic jealousy Welles felt over the superior access Seward and Stanton enjoyed with the president had been intensified a hundredfold so long as Blair was there to fuel the flames. Likewise, when Stanton was angry with Lincoln over pardons or appointments, Chase had eagerly lent an approving ear to his complaints. Never initiated into this contentious drama, Fessenden and Dennison brought cooperation and amity to the cabinet.

“Accuse not a servant to his master, lest he curse thee, and then be found guilty.”

Storytelling played a central role in the president’s ability to communicate with the public. “The character of the President’s mind is such,” Bates remarked, “that his thought habitually takes on this form of illustration, by which the point he wishes to enforce is invariably brought home with a strength and clearness impossible in hours of abstract argument.

Lincoln later told Senator Chandler that personally he “would rather have swallowed his buckhorn chair than to have nominated Chase,” but the decision was right for the country. “Probably no other man than Lincoln,” Nicolay wrote to Therena, “would have had, in this age of the world, the degree of magnanimity to thus forgive and exalt a rival who had so deeply and so unjustifiably intrigued against him. It is however only another most marked illustration of the greatness of the President.”

Sherman’s March to the Sea proved devastating to Southern property and countryside. Frank Blair, whose troops played a major role in the historic march, rationalized the indiscriminate destruction in a letter to his father: “We have destroyed nearly four hundred miles of Railroad, severing the western from the Eastern part of the Confederacy, and we have burned millions of dollars worth of cotton which is the only thing that enables them to maintain credit abroad & to purchase arms & munitions of war & we have actually ‘gobbled’ up enough provisions to have fed Lee’s army for six months.” Though the military gains justified the march in the minds of Union soldiers, the memory of its terrible impact on civilian lives haunts the South to this day.

If the spirited crowd expected a speech exalting recent Union victories, they were disappointed. In keeping with his lifelong tendency to consider all sides of a troubled situation, Lincoln urged a more sympathetic understanding of the nation’s alienated citizens in the South. There were no unbridgeable differences, he insisted: “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”

Drawing upon the rare wisdom of a temperament that consistently displayed uncommon magnanimity toward those who opposed him, he then issued his historic plea to his fellow countrymen: “With malice toward none;

with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan —to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

Perhaps the most surprising contemporaneous evaluation of Lincoln’s leadership appeared in the extreme secessionist paper the Charleston Mercury.

“He has called around him in counsel,” the Mercury marveled, “the ablest and most earnest men of his country. Where he has lacked in individual ability, learning, experience or statesmanship, he has sought it, and found it…. Force, energy, brains, earnestness, he has collected around him in every department.”

His political genius was not simply his ability to gather the best men of the country around him, but to impress upon them his own purpose, perception, and resolution at every juncture.

The Final Weeks 

That inner strength had sustained Lincoln all his life. But his four years as president had immeasurably enhanced his self-confidence. Despite the appalling pressures he had faced from his very first day in office, he had never lost faith in himself. In fact, he was the one who had sustained the spirits of those around him time and again, gently guiding his colleagues with good humor, energy, and steady purpose. He had learned from early mistakes, transcended the jealousy of rivals, and his insight into men and events had deepened with each passing year.

Though “a tired spot” remained within that no rest or relaxation could restore, he was ready for the arduous tasks of the next four years.

Experience had finally taught him that he must set priorities and concentrate on the vital questions of war and Reconstruction confronting his administration.

“I think now that I will not remove a single man, except for delinquency,” he told New Hampshire senator Clark. “To remove a man is very easy,” he commented to another visitor, “but when I go to fill his place, there are twenty applicants, and of these I must make nineteen enemies.”

Lincoln’s penchant for portentous dreams and his tendency to relate them to others were remarked on by many of his intimate acquaintances.

His devastating wound, the doctors reported with awe, “would have killed most men instantly, or in a very few minutes. But Mr. Lincoln had so much vitality” that he continued to struggle against the inevitable end.

“First prepare yourself for the most painful and startling news that could be received,” he warned. As he made plans to return to Washington, he told Julia that the tidings filled him “with the gloomiest apprehension. The President was inclined to be kind and magnanimous, and his death at this time is an irreparable loss to the South, which now needs so much both his tenderness and magnanimity.”

Perhaps more than any of Lincoln’s colleagues, the Southern-born Blairs understood that the assassination was a calamity for the South. “Those of southern sympathies know now they have lost a friend willing—& more powerful to protect & serve them than they can now ever hope to find again,”

“But Abraham Lincoln was not there. All felt this.” None felt that absence more keenly than the members of his cabinet, the remarkable group of rivals whom Lincoln had brought into his official family. They had fiercely opposed one another and often contested their chief on important questions, but, as Seward later remarked, “a Cabinet which should agree at once on every such question would be no better or safer than one counsellor.” By calling these men to his side, Lincoln had afforded them an opportunity to exercise their talents to the fullest and to share in the labor and the glory of the struggle that would reunite and transform their country and secure their own places in posterity.

“I HAVE NO DOUBT that Lincoln will be the conspicuous figure of the war,” predicted Ulysses S. Grant. “He was incontestably the greatest man I ever knew.”

Why was Lincoln so great that he overshadows all other national heroes? He really was not a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skilful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.

“Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country—bigger than all the Presidents together.

“EVERY MAN IS SAID to have his peculiar ambition,” the twenty-three-year-old Abraham Lincoln had written in his open letter to the people of Sangamon County during his first bid for public office in the Illinois state legislature.

“Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other [ambition] so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition, is yet to be developed.”

An indomitable sense of purpose had sustained him through the disintegration of the Union and through the darkest months of the war, when he was called upon again and again to rally his disheartened countrymen, soothe the animosity of his generals, and mediate among members of his often contentious administration.

His conviction that we are one nation, indivisible, “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” led to the rebirth of a union free of slavery. And he expressed this conviction in a language of enduring clarity and beauty, exhibiting a literary genius to match his political genius.