Team of Rivals

I realize I am a little late to the game in reading the book, nonetheless this weekend , i finished the wonderful tome by Doris Kearns Goodwin entitled: TEAM OF RIVALS : The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.. For a meaningful review check the NYTimes Review here.

Someone in a talk at worked referenced the book so I dropped in the library and picked it up. It took me awhile to plow through the 750+ page, but I totally enjoyed this unique view into history and the marvel that was president Lincoln.

The Gettysburg address is there:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met here on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense we can not dedicate - we can not consecrate - we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled, here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here.

It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

His 2nd inaugural address is there - "The address sounded more like a sermon than a state paper" (Autobiographies, 802).

"And the war came."
"Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other"
"The Almighty has His own purposes"
"The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. …In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party "
"Woe unto the world because of offences"
"until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword."
"With malice toward none, with charity for all."

Some wonderful quotes as well:

• He saw laughter as the joyous, universal evergreen of life
• adhere to your purpose and you will soon feel as well as you ever did. On the contrary, if you falter, and give up, you will lose the power to keep any resolution, and will regret it all your life
• no man resolved to make the most of himself, can spare time for personal contention
• 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
• as in religion, so in politics, it is faith, not despondency, that overcomes mountains and scales the heaven

But mostly the tribute to a man of vision, integrity, of insight, conviction, graciousness, forgiveness, open-minded and open-hearted. A man for the ages, a model for all and clearly a standard which few of us, and unfortunately fewer politicians measure.


From left to right: Edward Bates, attorney general; William H. Seward, secretary of state; Edwin M. Stanton, secretary of war; Salmon P. Chase, Treasury secretary.