A group biography of Abraham Lincoln and the three rivals he defeated for the 1860 Republican nomination — Seward, Chase, and Bates — whom he then brought into his cabinet, and how that unlikely coalition steered the Union through the Civil War.
Books mentioned in Team of Rivals (30)
Hamlet by William Shakespeare: “A few days earlier, anticipating Booth’s Hamlet, Lincoln had talked about the play with Francis Carpenter, the young artist who was at work on his picture depicting the first reading of the Emancipation Proclamation.”
Aesop's Fables by Aesop: “He read and reread the Bible and Aesop’s Fables so many times that years later he could recite whole passages and entire stories from memory.”
Commentaries on the Laws of England by William Blackstone: “He buried himself in the dog-eared pages of Blackstone’s Commentaries; he unearthed the thoughts in Chitty’s Pleadings; he analyzed precepts in Greenleaf’s Evidence and Story’s Equity Jurisprudence.”
King John by William Shakespeare: “Three months after Willie’s death, while reading aloud a passage from Shakespeare’s King John in which Constance grieves over the death of her son, Lincoln paused; he turned to a nearby army officer and said: “Did you ever dream of some lost friend, and feel that you were”
Waverley by Walter Scott: “He had just finished and enjoyed three of Scott’s Waverley novels, but “there are a thousand things in them, as in Shakespeare, that one may enjoy more and much longer if one has somebody to converse with while dwelling upon them.””
Enoch Arden by Alfred Tennyson: “Later in the afternoon, he had listened to Fanny’s reading of “Enoch Arden” and remarked on how much he enjoyed it.”
Mortality by William Knox: “He particularly cherished “Mortality,” by William Knox, and transcribed a copy for the Stantons.”
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray: “Gray’s “Elegy,” which Lincoln quoted in his small autobiography to explain his attitude toward his childhood poverty, asserts that “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen/And waste its swee[tness on the desert air]””
Frederick the Great by Thomas Carlyle: “He sought guidance for his role as chief executive in Carlyle’s Frederick the Great and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.”
History of Julius Caesar by Napoleon III: “she wrote a note to Sumner, telling him that she would be sending along a copy of Louis Napoleon’s manuscript on Julius Caesar, which she had just received from the State Department and knew he would want to read.”
Richard III by William Shakespeare: “Lincoln read Shakespeare to Hay—“the end of Henry VI and the beginning of Richard III till my heavy eye-lids caught his considerate notice & he sent me to bed.””
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ by Lew Wallace: “At this point, only miscellaneous troops under the command of General Lew Wallace, later to become famous as the author of Ben Hur, barred the path to the nation’s capital.”
Henry VI by William Shakespeare: “They viewed the moon and the star Arcturus through a newly installed telescope before driving out to the Soldiers’ Home, where Lincoln read Shakespeare to Hay—“the end of Henry VI and the beginning of Richard III till my heavy eye-lids caught his considerate notice & he sent me to bed.””
Marco Bozzaris by Fitz-Greene Halleck: “Lincoln chose that night to read Marco Bozzaris, a lengthy poem celebrating the death of a Greek hero in the war against Turkey.”
The Last Days of Pompeii by Edward Bulwer-Lytton: “After finishing the new novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the author of The Last Days of Pompeii, he conceded that “the author is doubtless a gifted being—but he has prostituted God’s noblest gifts to the vilest purposes.””
Lessons in Elocution by William Scott: “Through Scott’s Lessons in Elocution, he first encountered selections from Shakespeare’s plays, inspiring a love for the great dramatist’s writings long before he ever saw a play.”
The Last Leaf by Oliver Wendell Holmes: “He could recite from memory “The Last Leaf,” by Oliver Wendell Holmes, and once claimed to the painter Francis Carpenter that “for pure pathos” there was “nothing finer…in the English language” than the sixline stanza”
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage by Byron: “Though the young Lincoln never left the frontier, would never leave America, he traveled with Byron’s Childe Harold to Spain and Portugal, the Middle East and Italy; accompanied Robert Burns to Edinburgh; and followed the English kings into battle with Shakespeare.”
Elementary Spelling Book by Noah Webster: “In an illustration from Noah Webster’s Elementary Spelling Book, widely read in Lincoln’s generation, a man strikes a heroic pose as he stands on a wooden barrel, speaking to a crowd of enthralled listeners.”
Commentaries on Equity Jurisprudence by Joseph Story: “He buried himself in the dog-eared pages of Blackstone’s Commentaries; he unearthed the thoughts in Chitty’s Pleadings; he analyzed precepts in Greenleaf’s Evidence and Story’s Equity Jurisprudence.”
Legends of Charlemagne by Thomas Bulfinch: “She closed the pages of the Legends of Charlemagne, turned down the gas lamps, and took a seat on the opposite side of the bed.”
The Life of Washington by Mason Locke Weems: “The story is often recounted of the time he borrowed Parson Weems’s Life of George Washington from Josiah Crawford, a well-to-do farmer who lived sixteen miles away.”
The Battle of Ivry by Thomas Babington Macaulay: “Saxton to read “Horatius at the Bridge,” which he followed with “The Battle of Ivry.” Midnight found him still seated by the fire, “repeating snatches of poetry.””
The Portent by Herman Melville: “Herman Melville, in his poem “The Portent,” would use the same metaphor, calling “Weird John Brown/ The meteor of the war””
The Prayer of Twenty Millions by Horace Greeley: “He published an open letter to the president in the New York Tribune on August 20, which he entitled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions.””
Death of Abraham Lincoln by Walt Whitman: “But Lincoln, his times, his death—great as any, any age— belong altogether to our own.” —Walt Whitman, “Death of Abraham Lincoln,” 1879”
Henry VIII by William Shakespeare: “Among the latter are Lear, Richard Third, Henry Eighth, Hamlet, and especially Macbeth.”
Henry IV, Part 1 by William Shakespeare: “At a performance of Henry IV: Part One, Stoddard noted how thoroughly Lincoln enjoyed himself.”
Highland Mary by Robert Burns: “Indeed, four years after Lincoln’s death, Mary journeyed to the poet’s birthplace in Scotland, where, recalling one of her favorite poems about a lost love, she “sighed over poor ‘Highland Mary’s’ grave.””
A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare: ““This general impression only amuses me,” he wrote, “for I think that I shall prove as gentle a lion as he who played that part before the Duke, in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’””
Books that mention Team of Rivals (1)
A Promised Land by Barack Obama: “I had been influenced by Doris Kearns Goodwin's book Team of Rivals and was self-consciously mimicking Lincoln by placing a former political opponent in my cabinet.”