| [BRITANNICA] Abraham Lincoln’s chief competitors for the nomination as the presidential candidate of the Republican Party in 1860 were front-runner William H. Seward, a U.S. senator from New York; Salmon P. Chase, the governor of Ohio; and Edward Bates, a prominent state legislator from Missouri. Lincoln, whose sole experience in national government had been as a one-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois, confounded contemporary pundits by appointing all three of these political powerhouses to his cabinet: Seward as secretary of state, Chase as secretary of the treasury, and Bates as attorney general. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals chronicles their historic collaboration. |