What made you decide to write about Lincoln in the context of his cabinet? Was that your original concept for the book or did it change shape as you worked on it?

No, it definitely emerged as I went along. At first I really had no idea how to approach Lincoln other than knowing that I was going to live with him and learn about the Civil War and understand him. It was just kind of a leap of faith I took at the beginning that as I got into it I might be able to find my own angle into the story. And it took a while, because at the beginning I tried and realized it wouldn't work to tell the story of Abe and Mary as I had of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Was there just not enough about her?

Well, what I would like to believe worked about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt was that it wasn't simply the private story of their relationship but their public story as well, and Eleanor was such a major figure on the home front during World War Two that she could carry the narrative along with Franklin. If I'd been writing about the battles it would have been hard to keep Eleanor as an equal partner, but on the home front her role had an importance that allowed her to really carry one side of the story. She did so much in terms of civil rights and in terms of women working in the factories. But as I looked into Mary and Abe it was clear that by the time of the Civil War their relationship had evolved so that I would be telling essentially a private story about Mary along with a public story about Lincoln—and it wouldn't match correctly. In reading about Mary and about Lincoln's daily life during the war it soon became apparent that he was spending most of his time with these other characters—Seward and Stanton and Bates and Chase—and Mary was jealous of this. He would sit with them when they were waiting for news from the battlefront; they would accompany him on trips to see the soldiers after a battlefield loss; and he took carriage rides with Seward in the afternoon and relaxed with him late at night. I came to realize that in terms of emotion shared he was much more married to them than to her—and more importantly that they were fabulous characters. I'd known about them but I had never gotten into their lives before, and as I got more and more involved with reading about them—reading their letters and diaries— I felt that I began to know Seward and his wife and his daughter, and Chase and Stanton and their families. There was a sense of just feeling their presence. And then, when it turned out, of course, that they were not only in his cabinet but had been his rivals I realized that this was the story I'd like to tell.

Of those cabinet members—those rivals and Stanton as well—was there one whom you most enjoyed writing about?

Oh, absolutely Seward. I think part of it was that early in the project I went up to Seward's home in Auburn, New York, which has never been out of family members' hands and is now a private museum. Unlike many museums that are reconstructed after the fact, everything is as it was when the Sewards were there—the books he liked to read are in the study, the pictures on the walls are the family pictures, the china on the table is the family china, the garden where he sat to wait for the news from the Chicago convention has been kept the same. They even put the family clothes on mannequins. I felt somehow that I really got to know his family—his wife, Frances, so far ahead of her time, who suffered the typical nineteenth-century frailties that women seemed to get when they couldn't exercise their talents; and his daughter, Fanny, who wanted to be a writer and wrote that wonderful diary, but died at the age of twenty. And I think the fact that Seward reminded me in a lot of ways of Churchill—they both, in a certain sense, lived every man's dream that you can drink and smoke and live until you're ninety and have those huge appetites. More important, I suppose, was the enormous ability he had after the almost irrecoverable disappointment of not getting that nomination to somehow adjust himself to becoming Lincoln's ally and great friend. That surprising friendship moved me a lot.

Chase seemed to me an obvious candidate for least appealing. I was wondering if his story provided any special challenges when you were writing the book.

I think that the challenge was that on the one hand you knew that early on he had had such an honorable career and still did. His defense of the runaway slaves and his being willing to put himself beyond public opinion in the 1850s on curbing racial discrimination made you admire him for what he stood for. But temperamentally I think it would have been very difficult to warm up to him. Somebody said to me the other day that Seward might have been somewhat Clintonian and Chase was somewhat Nixonian in the sense that it didn't come naturally to him to like politics, even though he was very smart and became successful. It used to be said that Nixon would go home at night and practice conversations that he was going to have. Chase would go home at night and practice jokes that he could never deliver. I've often wondered whether his life would have been different if his first wife—who I think was the one he really loved passionately—had not died in childbirth. There was a real warmth in his attitude toward her and a love for her that seemed to have opened him up from the earlier much colder person that he had been. So it was hard to attach oneself to him, but on the other hand you had to say you understood where he was coming from.

You seem to give Lincoln more credit for his presidential victory than historians traditionally have, and I wondered if you could talk about what separated him from Seward and Chase and Bates and made him the Republican nominee.

Reading some of the accounts by people at the time and then by historians somewhat later, it seemed as if people assumed Lincoln won simply because he was in the center of the party and because the convention was held in Chicago. But when I looked into it, it seemed that he had already made possible the idea that he would be the second choice if any of the top people faltered. Lincoln somehow understood that his chance would come, as he said, "If people are willing to give up their first love." He wanted to be there as the second love, and because he, unlike his rivals, had not made enemies along the way and because he had actually been working harder than any of them in those months prior to the convention, his plan worked.

Lincoln spent his campaign going from one state to another giving wonderful speeches, making his name known, and writing letters to other people in the campaign to try and stake out a middle position, not just because he knew that's where the victory would be but because he naturally came to that. And then he successfully strategized to get the convention in Chicago. At the national committee meeting held to decide where the convention would be, the Seward people wanted it in New York, Chase in Ohio, Bates in Missouri, and they said, Why not Illinois? There's nobody really there. But Lincoln understood ahead of time, Let's get it in Illinois. Then he could pack the hall with all of his people and get them to yell louder for him than for Seward. It was a lifetime's work, in a way, that prepared him for that. He was really ready when the circumstances opened the opportunity for someone other than the top guys to get the nomination. ...