Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln’s goal, in each of these instances, was to balance law against military necessity, in the expectation that the passage of time and the success of his armies would stabilize the equilibria. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” he wrote in 1864. “I cannot remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet, I have never understood tha

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Lincoln said nothing of slaves held in states remaining loyal: he could hardly have claimed war powers if not at war with them.80 He also knew, though, that he didn’t have to: the more blood the Union shed the more just—and, therefore, the more legitimate—emancipation would become. The proclamation, in this sense, was Lincoln’s Tarutino: with no mo

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What Lincoln had shown was the practicality, in politics, of a moral standard. I mean by this an external frame of reference that shapes interests and actions, not—like Douglas’s—an internal one that only reflects them. Lincoln’s didn’t arise from faith, or formal ethics, or even the law, a profession necessarily pragmatic in its pursuit of justice

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Abraham Lincoln. Dude was president at a time when half the country preferred war to abandoning slavery. His life was under constant threat by his enemies. In his personal life, two of his sons had died in childhood and he was struggling with crippling depression.

And yet, during his second inaugural address in 1865, he called for “malice towards n... See more