Steven Spielberg's Lincoln (2012): A Review From a Fan of the Historic Lincoln

Last Tuesday night, patriotic feeling showered over me as I left a showing of Lincoln at my local AMC theater. I was overcome with a heavy sorrow for the ghastly sacrifices my forefathers made to make America great. As I exited the theater, I overheard a group of teenagers muttering among themselves. One of them said, "That was a lame movie." If you're looking for action and suspense, see the latest Bond movie instead. But if you're looking for a film to learn something from, you will not want to miss Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln.

What will you learn from a film like this? As an avid reader of history, I sincerity believe Spielberg portrays Abraham Lincoln and the people of his times accurately and responsibly. By taking the battle for passage of the Thirteenth Amendment (which forever abolished the practice of slavery in the United States) as the focal point of the story's events, Spielberg slays the mythology that President Lincoln freed slaves only to pack his armies with more soldiers to wage the Civil War.

If that were true, Lincoln's efforts to free enslaved African Americans would have ended with the Emancipation Proclamation (January 1^st, 1863) - a temporary, wartime measure intended to undermine the capacity of the Confederacy to continue the war. On the contrary, Lincoln placed his own re-election in jeopardy to further the work of the Emancipation Proclamation by pushing for a constitutional amendment that would forever extinguish slavery. The amendment passed the House of Representatives on January 31^st, 1865, and formally became part of the U.S. Constitution on December 6^th of the same year.

Setting history straight is not the only virtue of this film. Superb, Oscar-worthy performances abound throughout Lincoln.  Daniel Day-Lewis looks exactly the way Lincoln was rendered in photographs and behaves precisely the way Lincoln was described by his contemporaries. The historic Lincoln's homey mannerisms and sometimes off-color jokes are on vibrant display in Lewis' rendering. The fiery, anguished, emotion-drenched Mary Todd Lincoln could not be more effectively brought to life by anyone other than by the magnificent Sally Field. The rugged, idealistic, congressional abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens nearly steals the show in Tommy Lee Jones' masterful hands.

The sometimes tedious political discourse in the film is navigable if you understand a few concepts. In the context of the Civil War period, Democrats wanted to leave slavery alone and end the war with or without victory. "Conservative Republicans" did not like slavery, but were unenthusiastic about freeing slaves as a necessary means of winning the war.

 "Radical Republicans" (like Thaddeus Stevens) were crusaders for social justice who cared more about destroying slavery and righting the social wrongs of American culture than about winning the war or preserving the Union; if anything, they wanted to wage the war to forge a new Union based on equality for all.  Lincoln's success was based on his ability to bring the conservative and radical wings of his party together to advance his twin goals of social justice and preservation of the Union. To harvest bipartisan support, Lincoln offered government jobs to lame-duck Democrats who had been turned out of office during the November 1864 election but were still voting in Congress until their term expired.

In sum, Steven Spielberg's Lincoln is a badly needed correction to the mythology promulgated by writers (Thomas Di Lorenzo, author of The Real Lincoln for one) who believe Lincoln was driven by cynical, political calculations rather than moral values centered on social justice.  Quite the opposite, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (based in part on the exhaustively researched work of history Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin) shows the Great Emancipator to have had the qualities of leadership most-needed in America’s current political culture: courage to do what’s right regardless of the political consequences, a willingness to reach across the aisle to look for common ground, and a sincere desire to accomplish something for the greater good of our society.  

Jason Aldous

11/25/2012