Lincoln’s legacy

Every so often American Presidents let people know that they are reading a book. When George W. Bush was seen clutching a copy of Andrew Roberts’s History of the English Speaking People, acres of newsprint appeared on this elegant apologia for neo-conservatism. Now his successor in the White House wants us to know that he has a well-thumbed copy of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals; and just in case you missed that, the publishers have helpfully emblazoned the front of the UK paperback edition with the headline ‘The Book that Inspired Barack Obama’.

He could have done much worse. For Team of Rivals is one of the best biographical histories I have read in years. It is a powerful, personal and pacy account of the Lincoln Presidency told through the story of the four men who competed for the nomination at the Republican Party’s first ever Convention in 1860. William Henry Seward was outwardly the most impressive and the clear front-runner. Although born into a slave-owning family, he and his wife were profoundly affected by the dismal sight of a chain-gang of child slaves being whipped along a road near Richmond, Virginia. As Senator for New York, Seward had courageously led the campaign against the extension of slavery into the new territories of an expanding United States. The price he paid for that leadership was the fear that his election would hasten schism with the South. His closest rival for the nomination should have been the Governor of Ohio, Salmon Chase. Chase too was a leading voice of the movement against slavery and a founder of the new Republican Party.

But his fastidious self-importance and moralising did not endear him even to his own state, and judging from this book his company would have been insufferable but for the fact that, at this widower’s side, was his brilliant, beautiful daughter Kate — the ‘it girl’ of her day.