The Bearded Maestro

...His digging in the printed sources on his subject also benefits from a foreigner's perspective...

...This is particularly true of the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation, which was to take effect January 1,1863...

...After the election he fearlessly placed his potential successors in his Cabinet—a courageous move incumbents no longer make...

...Carwardine, who is puzzled as well, says Lincoln was not showing off when he grew a beard...

...The accepted story is that Lincoln took the suggestion of a young girl who wrote to him between the election and the inauguration...

...Carwardine, a Rhodes Professor of American history at Oxford, lacks Goodwin's writing flair, but he is a shrewd researcher...

...But more balanced new works by Doris Kearns Goodwin and Richard Carwardine, which stand with the foremost historical biographies of this generation, have now overshadowed them...

...The most helpful member of Lincoln's inner circle was former Governor and Senator William H. Seward of New York, who initially did not think the President was up to dealing with the secession crisis...

...More important, Goodwin and Carwardine clearly demonstrate that Abraham Lincoln was a dynamic, creative modern man who did not dwell alone in the Presidential bubble said to exist today...

...Displaying the uncommon kindness that pervades Team of Rivals, Lincoln appointed Chase chief justice of the United States...

...The continuity of Lincoln's public thinking stands out as the author admirably fulfills his pledge to show how Lincoln's "great achievement was to set ambitious but realizable political goals, to fathom the thinking of ordinary citizens and to reach out to them with uncommon assurance, and to hone his impressive skills as a manager of the often unstable and fractious elements that made up the political parties to which he belonged...

...Political scientists will find Carwardine's study immensely instructive...

...They were copying the hirsute fashion of the British Army and Navy they envied, who picked up the styles of the Russian troops they encountered during the Crimean War...

...The book also benefits from an intimate familiarity with the White House gained during a stint as a fellow in Lyndon B. Johnson's Administration...

...editor, "The Presidents: A Reference History" Abraham Lincoln has been revived as a favorite of publishers, replacing the Founding Fathers, who recently had a long run on best-seller lists...

...it ranks with David Herbert Donald's Lincoln as one of the best studies of the Emancipator...

...A definitive answer still eludes us, but the face he offered became the model for Presidents and would-be Presidents in the generation that followed...

...Until his performance faded and he left office in 1864, Bates was highly influential...

...Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power By Richard Carwardine Knopf...

...General George McClellan's boast—"I can do it all"— had turned out to be vacuous, and his shortcomings are fully revealed by Goodwin...

...The dazzling first 250 pages of Goodwin's book examine in often gripping detail her characters' lives and the political mazes they navigated on the way to national importance...

...Three books appeared earlier this year to make the case that if the electorate had known the real Honest Abe it would have judged him unfit for the Presidency: C.A...

...and Michael Lind's What Lincoln Believed portrays him as a racist in favor of segregation...

...Lincoln sympathetically greeted a delegation of aggrieved Jewish leaders: "And so the children of Israel were driven from the happy land of Canaan...

...Tripp's The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln unabashedly argues that he was a homosexual...

...Richard Carwardine's Lincoln focuses on the President's use of power in grappling with the problems of race, slavery and the salvation of the Union...

...Did Lincoln oblige her to transform himself from Honest Abe to Father Abraham, assuming the latter would be a worthier national voice and icon...

...Her emphasis is exclusively political, though she surely knows about the social and economic changes across the land that contributed heavily to the Union's victory on the battlefield...

...The President's difficulty in finding a winning general until he named Ulysses S Grant is familiar to students of the War...

...Grant was deemed worthy of commanding the Union Army despite the huge losses he had allowed his troops to suffer...

...Their doings, including her love life, receive lavish treatment from Goodwin...

...Joshua Wolf Shenk's Lincoln's Melancholy depicts him as a lonely, even suicidal man who suffered from persistent depression...

...Equally ambitious and dubious of Lincoln was another former governor and senator, Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, whose beautiful daughter Kate served as his principal adviser...

...Or was it simply a matter of stylishness...

...Lincoln promised protection immediately and instructed Grant's then superior...

...Goodwin, a superb storyteller, draws on the era's copious legacy of documents to render her subject's rags-to-riches life elegantly and with deep sensitivity...

...When he was first commissioned to serve as colonel of an Illinois regiment, his father was relieved, saying "You've got a goodjob now, Ulysses, don't lose it...

...The Civil War ignited Lincoln's determination to save the Republic at whatever cost...

...Those volumes will inevitably leave their marks on Lincoln's reputation...

...394 pp...

...Or was he yielding to the style of the country's senior generals and admirals...

...When it became clear to Lincoln that Chase had to be removed from his post as secretary of the Treasury, the President did not simply throw him out...

...Lincoln is portrayed as a perennial political failure—elected only to one term in the House and a twotime loser in runs for the Senate—before his 1860 victory and subsequent emergence as the wisest of leaders...

...The extent of the reversal in Stanton's estimation of his chief is captured in his famous remark as Lincoln breathed his last: "Now he belongs to the ages...

...Among the illuminating minutiae Goodwin tells afresh is Grant's order banning Jews from the Department of Tennessee...

...Rather, he knew he was at "a watershed in the nation's life" and sought to symbolize the shift by differentiating himself from previous Presidents...

...Ten years in the making, Team of Rivals is long, yet the pages roll forward easily as the account unfolds...

...General Henry Halleck, to cancel the order...

...Does not the legendary recruiting song with the stirring line "We're coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 strong" bear this theory out...

...He soon changed his opinion and became a reliable friend and secretary of state...

...Goodwin's off-putting title reflects her organizing principle...

...But his proposal to declare war on both Spain and France—because they had violated the Monroe Doctrine—as a means of reuniting the nation shows Seward was no surer than anyone about how to quiet the Confederates...

...He was later called upon to replace another Pennsylvanian, Secretary of War Simon Cameron, who was shipped off to be minister to Russia after he proved unreliable...

...Edwin M. Stanton of Pennsylvania, though not among the Republican contenders, started as an outright enemy of Lincoln too, even speaking of "the imbecility of the Administration...

...Indeed, given the increased public scrutiny of the current Presidency, they will undoubtedly remind readers how brightly the White House shone during the country's supreme internal crisis...

...As a historian who has pondered Lincoln all his life, I continue to wonder why the President wore a beard...

...The rivals in question are the remarkable men who vied vigorously for the Republican Presidential nomination Lincoln won in 1860...

...The War saga is recounted with the same gusto as the politics that fill the preceding pages...

...Reviewed by Henry F. Graff Professor of history emeritus, Columbia...

...If this part ofTeam of Rivals is somewhat less exciting, that is only because its episodes are better known...

...27.50...

...The author does not mention that Lincoln must have recalled President James K. Polk's decision 16 years earlier to choose as his insiders politicians qualified to run against him in the next election...

...A third rival, Edward Bates of Missouri, a former Free-Soil Whig who sought the 1860 Republican nomination claiming that only he could carry the border states, was named attorney general...

...Otherwise, as Seward said famously, the glorious decree would have been "our last shriek on the retreat...

...The opportunity finally came with the battle of Antietam in September 1862...

...He did not disappoint his father or the Union faithful...

...Lincoln had to wait for a Union victory to deliver it...