MORE books about Abraham Lincoln line the shelves of libraries than about any other American. Can there be anything new to say about our 16th president? Surprisingly, the answer is yes. Having previously offered fresh insights into Lyndon Johnson, the Kennedys and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Doris Kearns Goodwin has written an elegant, incisive study of Lincoln and leading members of his cabinet that will appeal to experts as well as to those whose knowledge of Lincoln is an amalgam of high school history and popular mythology.  Lincoln reading the Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet in 1862, from an engraving by Alexander Hay Ritchie after Francis Carpenter.  "Team of Rivals" (an apt but uninspiring title) opens in May 1860 with four men awaiting news from the national convention of the Republican Party in Chicago. Thousands of supporters were gathered in Auburn, N.Y., where a cannon was primed to fire a salute to the expected nomination of Senator William Henry Seward for president. In Columbus, Ohio, Gov. Salmon P. Chase hoped that if Seward faltered, the mantle would fall on his shoulders. In St. Louis, 66-year-old Edward Bates, a judge who still called himself a Whig, hoped the convention might turn to him as the only candidate who could carry the conservative free states, whose electoral votes were necessary for a Republican victory. In Springfield, Ill., a former one-term congressman who had been twice defeated for election to the Senate waited with resigned expectation that his long-shot candidacy would be flattened by the Seward steamroller.  Although her readers presumably know who won the nomination, Goodwin leaves them in suspense for almost 250 pages as she chronicles the personal stories and political careers of these four men. The unifying theme is the growing sectional polarization over the issues of slavery and its expansion. But each story follows a separate track until they begin to converge with the death of the Whig Party and the birth of the Republican Party in the mid-1850's.  Having served four years as governor of New York and nearly 12 as a senator, Seward emerged as the leader of the new party after 1856, when it fell just short of electing a president on a platform of restricting the expansion of slavery. Next to Seward in prominence was Chase, who had organized the Free Soil Party in 1848, became its first senator in 1849 and represented the cutting edge of the Republican antislavery ideology.  In contrast, Lincoln's career languished in relative obscurity before 1858. In Goodwin's telling, however, his story gradually and subtly takes precedence. His famous debates with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858 gave him national exposure, though Douglas won re-election to the Senate. Lincoln's Cooper Union address in New York and his subsequent tour of New England in early 1860 increased his visibility. Although some newspapers still spelled his first name "Abram," Lincoln appealed to a growing number of Republicans as the strongest potential nominee. Less radical than Chase and more firmly antislavery than Bates, he seemed the one most likely to carry the Lower Northern states of Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois that the Republicans had lost in 1856, without alienating the antislavery Northern tier states from New England to Minnesota. Although Lincoln's "house divided" speech in 1858 was as uncompromising as Seward's "irrepressible conflict" address that same year, Seward, as well as Chase, had a more radical reputation than Lincoln. But because they had been in public life much longer than Lincoln, they had also made more enemies.  Having set the stage for the nominating convention, Goodwin recounts the drama of Lincoln's surprising first-ballot strength (102 votes to Seward's 173½, Chase's 49, and Bates's 48). On the second ballot Lincoln pulled almost even with Seward, and amid rising excitement in a convention hall packed with a leather-lunged home-state cheering section, he won a stunning victory on the third ballot. All three of his shocked rivals believed the better man had lost. Lincoln's subsequent election as president did not change their minds.  The Republican victory without a single electoral vote (and scarcely any popular votes) from the 15 slave states provoked seven of them to secede and form the Confederate States of America. In this crisis, Lincoln took the unparalleled step of appointing to his cabinet all three of his rivals plus a fourth, Simon Cameron, Pennsylvania's favorite son. Seward got the top spot as secretary of state; Chase became secretary of the Treasury, Bates attorney general and Cameron secretary of war. Could this "team of rivals," each of them initially convinced of his superiority to the inexperienced president, work together in harmony? Joseph Medill, the editor of The Chicago Tribune and one of Lincoln's most loyal supporters, later asked the president why he had made these appointments. "We needed the strongest men of the party in the cabinet," Lincoln replied. "These were the very strongest men. Then I had no right to deprive the country of their services." They were indeed strong men, Goodwin notes. "But in the end, it was the prairie lawyer from Springfield who would emerge as the strongest of them all."  James M. McPherson is emeritus professor of history at Princeton University and the author of several books on Lincoln and on the Civil War, including "Battle Cry of Freedom."
Doris Kearns Goodwin's study reveals Lincoln's style for dealing with subordinates: to assert his own policy firmly but not in a way as to make an enemy.