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To jump-start national reconciliation, Obama should appoint Romney as Secretary of Commerce and Dick Lugar as Secretary of Defense.
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Lincoln's Team of Rivals
From left to right: Edward Bates, attorney general; William H. Seward, secretary of state; Edwin M. Stanton, secretary of war; Salmon P. Chase, Treasury secretary.
(Alan: Salmon Chase was an ancestor of my best friend, Steve Gibson R.N.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/books/review/06mcpherson.html?gwh=97576E739023E05A4391ADFCC78E7DAF
The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.
By Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Illustrated. 916 pp. Simon & Schuster. $35.
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."
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