Team of Rivals

“Somehow he managed,” Lincoln’s most thorough modern biographer has concluded, “to be strong-willed without being willful, righteous without being self-righteous, and moral without being moralistic,” thus yielding a “psychological maturity unmatched in the history of American public life.”110 Which is simply to say that he managed polarities: they

Every member of this administration was better known, better educated, and more experienced in public life than Lincoln.