Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin

[Coexist]

After I heard Barack Obama said this is one of the books he would bring to a deserted island if he could only bring two, I purchased the weighty tome for my 2 week vacation.

All I can say is Wow.

I know so much about the politics of the Civil War era now. It was fascinating. I can see why he Obama keeps this book close. The parallels are plentiful, and Lincoln's strategy was brilliant beyond belief. I dog-eared so many pages to highlight later - seriously.

As John Forney of the Washington Daily Chronicle said "It was by ignoring men, and ignoring all small causes, but by closely calculating the tendencies of events and the great forces which were producing logical results" was he able to time things to his benefit. "... because he always moves in conjunction with propitious circumstances, not waiting to be dragged by the force of events or wasting strength in premature struggle with them."

If anyone else has read this, please post - I really want someone to discuss this with.

TIA.

[RoyGBiv]

1. I've read it ...

I don't share your "wow" though, so I'm not sure whether the discussion we might have would be what you want.

I think of it as typical Goodwin fare: a recycling of old ideas as new ones wrapped in superfluous language.

Her ideas on Lincoln are as old as biographies of Lincoln and pretty well accepted by the academy. She just used a lot of words and took the somewhat bizarre tack of weaving certain wives into the conversation without making it clear how they connected to her argument. Clearly it's about time *someone* made mention of those wives, but the way Goodwin does it is obnoxious and could be used as an argument against ever doing it again.

[Coexist]

2. then I will have to respectfully disagree with you

I loved the book.

[RoyGBiv]

3. Fair enough ...

For the record, I don't think it's a bad book. It's quite an enjoyable read. She's a marvelous writer, and I don't have even a quibble with her research, which is rare for me.

My problem with it, put as simply as I can, is that when I pick up an 800-odd page book on Lincoln, I want something I haven't read a dozen times already.

[Captain Hilts]

8. Goodwin has quotations from a conversation in which Franklin and Eleanor were the only ones in the..

room - AMAZING!

[RoyGBiv]

9. Yeah ...

Things like that should cause a person to pause.

This seems to be an extension of an old-school license that many historians once used where they would reconstruct a private conversation based on what others said they were told was said or what was later reported in memoirs, sometimes written decades after the fact. (Hell, I'd have trouble quoting myself from yesterday.) This has caused massive problems with interpreting various historical events, especially controversial ones.

Off the main topic, but you see this a lot with Civil War histories and books about the Old West. An entire conversation, and by extension many times value judgments, are derived from a single sentence one person later said another said at a given moment. I've had legendary arguments with a certain subset of Civil War "fans" regarding the planning for a certain battle. We have a dozen or so quotes, all of them either from published memoirs, other post-war remembrances, and third-hand accounts from people we know weren't even present for the discussion. And this concerned a planning session that took place over several hours. Out of these some will argue they know with precision what was intended when the truth is we can barely even guess.

[Captain Hilts]

10. That's really interesting.

I have actually done some work with a biographer and the field is just turned to trash. A recent bio came out chock full of anonymous sources, shim words, and innuendo. And the film reviewers that reviewed it were enchanted by all the "new" information! Shows why they review films for a living and not non-fiction. The book was total tripe.

[RoyGBiv]

11. Too many journalists ...

Edit:

I shouldn't say what I said, so I'm rephrasing.

People with a lot of different kinds of education get into biography writing, and some of them have few academic credentials at all. Not that I am married to the idea that a biographer *must* have lettered academic credentials, but far too many of the individuals who are putting out biographies come to the project without even a desire to be accurate. The use of the biography for many is to perpetuate a certain ideology, which is usually revealed more clearly when one looks past the biography that was written and toward the "biography" of the author.

Journalists especially seem to like to write biographies. It's a vehicle for publication of a book-length manuscript that elevates their status in the industry but adds little to historical knowledge and often detracts from it. There are exceptions to this, but not many to my knowledge.

And back to the Civil War subject, that's the initial problem with many Civil War histories. The first ones were written by journalists, many of whom wrote books about battles they never witnessed and after interviewing a limited number of individuals, most of whom had some sort of ax to grind. Afterward, it became a money-making scheme or, more politely stated, a method of increasing circulation for popular magazines to publish accounts from soldiers and leaders who, again, had their own agenda in publishing. Subsequently, the first "disciplined" histories used these works largely uncritically as source material, which brought to the academy the problem of inherently flawed source material.

[Captain Hilts]

12. Interesting...what is your take on the theory I've read that another...

problem with early Civil War/War of Northern Aggression 'scholarship' was that most of it was written by southerners because northerners just kind of went on with their lives and southerners didn't do so as quickly. And that, there was a tendency among some, to blame the loss on Virginians - Lee, Longstreet, etc. because Virginians thought of themselves as the Newport set of the South?

[RoyGBiv]

13. A lot of truth to it ...

One of Lee's charges to Longstreet after the surrender was to put quick thought into writing his memoirs so that "the truth" was left for future generations. (Some crazy irony there for you, if you're familiar with the controversies later.) And, yes, there was a Virginia-centric bloc as well as the Lee Cult, which were not entirely the same thing but had some similar themes. William Jones, Jubal Early, etc. made a living off of it.

I take issue with the "getting on with their lives" phrasing, which I know is not original with you. I've seen that for a long, long time too. A lot -- most -- Southerners and Northerners tried to get on with their lives, but what their lives were determined in part whether they wrote or argued or whatever. Longstreet, for example, was drawn into it in the 1870s. Lee never published a word. Then there was Ambrose Bierce, for whom it could be said never got on with his life except that his life was to a large degree writing, so he wrote. Not surprisingly the Civil War formed a significant backdrop to some of his best writing.

The root issue with this, to borrow from Ricky Ricardo, is that the South had 'lot of 'splainin' to do. How did we, God's chosen people and bearer of the original traditions of the Revolution and the Constitution, lose this thing against the godless heathens of Yankeedom? Southerners, before the war and well into it, believed their own press, in other words. Oddly enough, a lot of Unionists did too.

One of the first histories of the war was written by the Northern journalist Swinton (first name I can't think of off the top of my head). Trying to figure out how the South lost, as opposed to why the North won, was one of his main purposes. He is among those responsible for popularizing Gettysburg as the so-called "turning point" of the war. He interviewed Union and Confederate soldiers and wrote his book, and it put Gettysburg at the center of the thing, with most explanations of the result of the war resting on the outcome of that battle.

This had started somewhat before with a Southern journalist who wrote some horribly flawed accounts of battles along with English and German observers who had their own things to say. They were by and large fascinated by the Southern army. Sir Arthur Freemantle's book was among the best, and it was wholly concerned with the South, ergo it's name _Three Months in the Southern States_. He was a witness to Gettysburg and did a lot to popularize that battle outside the US.

In any case, it's wrong to suggest that Northerners weren't doing the same things that Southerners were, but they did it in a different way. Rosecrans, Grant, Sherman, et al all published accounts of their battles, both in article and book form. Col. Chamberlain was obsessed with it. For Northern soldiers, they largely concerned themselves with controversy among themselves or with certain opponents. Chamberlain and Oates faced off against each other at Gettysburg and argued incessantly about how far the Confederate advance made it and whether Chamberlain's "wheel" move was what repulsed them, for example. Meanwhile, Southerners did that too while also trying to explain (away) their military loss.

For all of them, it became political and messed up in national and local politics. (The Chamberlain and Oates argument had a clearly political motive from both fronts.) And that's a whole 'nother can o' beans.

[Captain Hilts]

14. Interesting! Ever read Barrington Moore's take on the Civil War?

Craziest damned thing I've ever read.

I think the fact that the South had to live with the devastation for years also created a different pattern of blame and memory.

Thanks for your post. It's really helpful.

Okay...what is your opinion of Sandburg's Lincoln?

[RoyGBiv]

15. Sandburg ...

Sandburg's Lincoln is great literature. :) I don't like criticizing Sandburg because what he writes is so well written, and without him, there's a great deal we might not understand at all. But he was obviously overwhelmed by his subject and fails to offer balance where it is much needed, by which I mean criticism where it is justifiable. I don't generally like iconic bios, but for the most part, Sandburg gets a pass.

I'm very familiar with Moore. My opinion of his work is very difficult to summarize because such a summary would requiring mowing down everything to a single point of contention that would lose the flavor of the larger analysis. I think some of his insights are brilliant, some ideologically driven to the point he contradicts his own sources of information that he uses elsewhere in agreement. I guess my main quibble is with the lack of nuance in his argument about the capitalist influence on Northern resistance to slavery. I don't think he's wrong. I just think he underplays other influences that were at least equally important. Overall, he was brilliant and justifiably influential, imo.

[Captain Hilts]

16. I like the fact that he makes you look at things from a different perspective, something...

I always try to do.

I thought his essay on the Civil War was really interesting, but without balance as to other theories.

Anybody who makes me look at something old in a new way is okay by me. I like to step out of myself. I wish more folks on DU 'got' that.

Thanks for your time and insight!

[RoyGBiv]

17. Agreed ...

I like Marxist history for that reason, and Moore is sometimes described as a neo-Marxist.

I could pick a great lot of it apart, but it takes a lot of care to do so. Strange as it seems to some, that's part of *why* it is good. It challenges the conventional wisdom, always a good thing with history.

I like Stanley Elkins and his work on slavery as an institution for similar reasons. Parts of his most famous thesis are rightly pilloried, but when you get down to it, the level, depth, and amount of criticism that is derived from and against Elkins shows his quality. Agree or disagree, he made a person think.

Thank you as well. I enjoy these kinds of discussions.

[MrSlayer]

4. I just finished it.

A fantastic book. I find it hard to believe that anyone could be as good a person as President Lincoln apparently was. He just didn't have a mean bone in his body. He had all the qualities one would want in a leader, wisdom, intelligence, compassion, strength, personality and wit. I wept over his death as if it happened yesterday. When the traitorous coward Booth assassinated this great man he deprived our nation terribly and did no service to the South.

[Are_grits_groceries]

5. Growing up in the South,

one of the ideas I was taught was that Lincoln's death was one of the worst
things that could have happened to the South. I don't think it was a widely
shared opinion at that time. My aunt was a history teacher and she taught
us that Lincoln would handled the time after the war so much better. There
still would have been problems, but not as severe as what Reconstruction created.

[Onceuponalife]

6. this is on my buy list

I've always wanted to read Goodwin. This looks like a good one.

I worked with a lady once who mentioned she was "distantly related" to J. W. Booth. I called him a lunatic and she bristled at that lol.

[Captain Hilts]

7. Goodwin organizes books welll...

to make the topic appealing and accessible to the non-specialist.

But she contracts too much of her research, hence, the plagerism rap.

She missed an important memoir that would really change the tone of the first part of No Ordinary Time. If you've read the memoir, reading Goodwin drives you nuts!