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THE BOOK was not easy to find since President Barack Obama had let it be known that he had read it and was giving copies to his Cabinet members.

Nor is it easy to hold: its 754 pages plus notes weigh heavily on the wrists as one reads. Yet the reading is intensely rewarding for the view it provides of the political and moral heights on which America’s first black president has fixed his gaze.

“Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” by Doris Kearns Goodwin focuses primarily on the dynamics within Lincoln’s wartime Cabinet every member of which, writes Goodwin, was “better known, better educated, and more experienced in public life than Lincoln.” They were chosen and retained on the basis of their ability to do the task assigned them, not on the basis of their personal loyalty to him. Three Cabinet members had been his rivals for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, and three belonged to the opposition Democratic Party.

Lincoln’s Treasury secretary, Salmon P. Chase, had been governor of Ohio and one of Lincoln’s rivals for the nomination; until late in life he continued to lust after the presidency. As a Cabinet member he did his task at the Treasury excellently, while attempting to undermine the president in his private conversation and building his political base with an eye to obtaining the nomination when Lincoln’s first term would end. Lincoln kept him on at Treasury where he was badly needed, tolerated his plotting, called him to account only when he overstepped bounds, and three times refused Chase’s offer to resign.

The fourth offer came when Lincoln refused to confirm one of his political appointments; Chase was confident that Lincoln would come begging him to remain in office, but to his surprise Lincoln accepted the resignation. Yet when the office of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court became vacant, and three of Lincoln’s Cabinet members were angling for it, he gave it instead to Chase. Lincoln was confident of Chase’s firmness on the slavery issue; and though the president remarked privately that he would rather have swallowed his armchair than appoint Chase, he did so for the good of the nation. Thus, ironically, it was Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase who administered the oath of office to Lincoln for his second term.

William H. Seward had been the odds-on favorite to obtain the Republican nomination. A former governor of New York State and current senator, he had gained the admiration of anti-slavery forces by taking on the legal defense – at the risk of his own reputation and even life – of a mentally impaired black man accused of the brutal murder of a family in Seward’s home town. Regarded as the leading light of the Republican Party, he had relaxed while awaiting the nomination, only to be done in at the convention by the treachery of a supposed friend.

Lincoln offered Seward the premier position in the Cabinet, the secretary of state; Seward accepted in the belief that he would be the real power behind the throne of the “prairie lawyer” and “rail splitter.” Early on and on more than one occasion, he did attempt to take over, only to be outmaneuvered each time by Lincoln. He performed brilliantly as secretary of state, grew to admire Lincoln tremendously and became his closest friend in the Cabinet.

The brilliant lawyer Edwin M. Stanton had offended Lincoln grievously in their younger years. While the latter was a relatively unknown “prairie lawyer” in the frontier state of Illinois, he was invited to be on the legal team of a Mr. George Harding in what was considered the most important patent-infringement case of the period. Lincoln was invited principally because the case was to be heard in Illinois, and he would know the judges there. The venue, however, was changed to Cincinnati, Ohio; and Harding –without informing Lincoln – invited the brilliant Stanton to take over the case.

When Lincoln presented himself to Harding and Stanton in Cincinnati on the day of the hearing, Stanton drew Harding aside and murmured “Why did you bring that d____d long-armed ape here … he does not know any thing and can do you no good.” Lincoln turned over to Stanton the brief he had prepared and quietly watched the hearing. He was so impressed by Stanton’s performance that he later made him his secretary of war, while appointing Harding head of the Patent Office. In the end, Stanton became one of Lincoln’s most effective and dedicated Cabinet members.

Lincoln combined political genius with moral principle and an acute sense of the people’s sentiments, against which, he realized, no political project could succeed. From early manhood he had believed that “if slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong.” Yet in leading the northern states through a war which would cost them more than 360,000 dead, he realized that the people would not pay such a heavy price for the freedom of the blacks. Hence he focused at the outset on the preservation of the union between North and South, only pulling out all the stops on the slavery issue when the war was almost won.

In saving the union, Lincoln set the stage for the final abolition of slavery, though he did not live to see the completion of his life’s work. As he breathed his last, laid low by an assassin’s bullet, it was Stanton who paid him tribute in words which still echo: “Now he belongs to the ages.”