Team of Rivals, Except Bates

Thanks to the solitude of the holiday break, and to my procrastination from grading exams, I've been flying through my "to-read" list. The latest casualty is Doris Kearns Goodwin's much-anticipated 944-page addition to the mountain of literature on Abraham Lincoln's political life, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.

Like most who have reviewed the book, I found it wonderfully entertaining and elegantly narrated. But I couldn't help thinking, as I read it, that a big, currently-relevant chunk was missing.

Goodwin styles the book as being about Lincoln's relationship with his Cabinet, which he filled with some of his most bitter political rivals -- William H. Seward, the Secretary of State who was still bitter about losing the 1860 Republican nomination to Lincoln; Salmon Chase, the Secretary of the Treasury who never shied away from promoting his political career (and whom Lincoln would eventually nominate to succeed Roger B. Taney as Chief Justice); etc.  Goodwin's work also focuses on two other "rivals" -- Edwin Stanton, tapped by Lincoln to take over the War Department, and Missourian Edward Bates, who Lincoln named as his Attorney General. [Even my high school's namesake, Montgomery Blair, Lincoln's Postmaster General, receives significant attention in Goodwin's story.]

Yet, of the four principal rivals, Bates's interactions with Lincoln, especially during the Civil War, receive far less treatment than that of the other three. Indeed, Chase's energetic daughter Kate, the dominant social figure in wartime D.C., receives more attention in Goodwin's masterwork than does Lincoln's erstwhile Attorney General, at least once the war begins.

What makes the comparative neglect of Bates so unsettling is the undeniable role Bates played in formulating arguments about presidential power during wartime that are at the heart of contemporary debates over everything from military tribunals to secret prisons and domestic spying. It was Bates, in a famous 1861 Attorney General opinion, who provided the legal justification for Lincoln's unilateral suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, relying largely on the Commander-in-Chief Clause. It was Bates who provided the legal basis for relying on the war powers as the constitutional basis for the Emancipation Proclamation. It was Bates, despite his misgivings, who first powerfully argued from inside the Cabinet for the kind of executive power claimed by the Bush Administration today.

And yet, Bates's famous 1861 opinion receives barely a mention, and only as part of Goodwin's introduction to Ex parte Merryman. And, aside from Merryman, Bates's broader role in shaping the Administration's novel legal arguments vis-a-vis presidential power is entirely neglected.

I loved the book, as much for once again reminding us of just how unique Lincoln was as for reiterating the type of leadership he exemplified has likely not been seen before or since from any American political figure. But to give such a cold shoulder to Bates, if only because his conflicts with Lincoln were far less public and controversial as Seward's and Chase's, neglects an important part of the history that, although not essential to the narrative, is at least as important for contemporary purposes, and probably more so.

Then again, I'm only a little biased.