2643 Also reading at the Lake, Team of Rivals

Actually, I'm listening to Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, the story of how President Lincoln packed his cabinet with some of the most brilliant minds and anti-slavery people of his era. However, the book has over 900 pages, so since I'm only on disk 10, I don't think I'll finish before we leave for Finland. The author is particularly outstanding in fleshing out the main characters with their wives, children, and close associates.

". . . The comparative approach has also yielded an interesting cast of female characters to provide perspective on the Lincolns’ marriage. The fiercely idealistic Frances Seward served as her husband’s social conscience. The beautiful Kate Chase made her father’s quest for the presidency the ruling passion of her life, while the devoted Julia Bathes created a blissful home that gradually enticed her husband away from public ambitions. Like Frances Seward, Mary Lincoln displayed a striking intelligence; like Kate Chase, she possessed what was then considered an unladylike interest in politics. Mary’s detractors have suggested that if she had created a more tranquil domestic life for her family, Lincoln might have been satisfied to remain in Springfield. Yet the idea that he could have been a contented homebody, like Edward Bates, contradicts everything we know of the powerful ambition that drove him from his earliest days.

By widening the lens to include Lincoln’s colleagues and their families, my story benefited from a treasure trove of primary sources that have not generally been sued in Lincoln biographies. The correspondence of the Seward family contains nearly five thousand letters, including an eight-hundred-page diary that Seward’s daughter Fanny kept from her fifteenth year until two weeks before her death at the age of twenty-one."

In my opinion, both the feminists and the male biographers of some of our most famous Americans have ignored or scorned the roles women played in their lives. Mary Lincoln comes out of this looking better than most portrayals, simply by using original sources, rather than Lincoln's enemies as the source. This has been an excellent review of the issues of slavery (which I think strongly resemble many of the immigration issues of the 21st century), and also the power and education levels of women "who also served." Also, Lincoln's nature and bouts with depression make a lot more sense when viewed through the sufferings of some of the other men around him, like Edwin Stanton, who nearly went insane after the death of his wife and daughter. According to his sister, at night he would lay out her bed clothes and walk through the house crying and calling out her name.

"In addition to the voluminous journals in which Salmon Chase recorded the events of four decades, he wrote thousands of personal letters. A revealing section of his daughter Kate’s diary also survives, along with dozens of letters from her husband, William Sprague. The unpublished section of the diary that Bates began in 1846 provides a more intimate glimpse of the man than the published diary that starts in 1859. Letters to his wife, Julia, during his years in Congress expose the warmth beneath his stolid exterior. Stanton’s emotional letters to his family and his sister’s unpublished memoir reveal the devotion and idealism that connected the passionate, hard-driving war secretary to his president. The correspondence of Montgomery Blaire’s sister, Elizabeth Blaire Lee, and her husband, Captain Samuel Phillips Lee, leaves a memorable picture of a daily life in wartime Washington. The diary of Gideon Welles, of course, has long been recognized for its penetrating insights into the workings of the Lincoln administration." From the author’s introduction

In this age of e-mails, text-messaging, and blogs, I do wonder what historians will have to work with when they write about our current crop of 20-somethings who will someday be in the halls of Congres.