Forget Sandburg unless you’ve got a hankering for Lincoln fairy tales. Forget DiLorenzo unless you’ve got a hankering for rabid confederate revisionism. The best are probably “Lincoln” by David Herbert Donald and “Team of Rivals” by Doris Kearns Goodwin, and
“’Team of Rivals’ by Doris Kearns Goodwin”
This book is wildly popular, so unless it’s a huge fluke it can’t be all bad. But I think Goodwin is a hack historian and mediocre writer. More importantly, the main conceit of the book—that somehow internal rivalry made Lincoln’s administration strong and that Lincoln is somehow a genius for having planned it that way—remains largely unexplored. That is because it’s not teneable. Rivalry makes administrations rivalrous, not productive.
We all know the benefit of healthy competition, but I don’t see the application to Lincoln’s administration, and frankly I don’t see them as exceptionally successful. As for Lincoln being a genius, well, he is, but not because he assembled a team of rivals. In fact, that had nothing at all to do with Lincoln and everything to do with the Republican party being brand new and not yet having established a firm ideological range.
What’s left are interesting stories, naturally, those being interesting times. But thematically, it is empty.