If there is one clear message conveyed in Spielberg’s newest
documentary/drama about a short segment in the life of President Lincoln it
would be that slavery was the fundamental cause of the American Civil War. Central
to Spielberg’s development of that theme which fundamentally rocked the mid nineteenth-century
American States to their very foundations on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line
was the concept of divine right. But the
intellectual argument against divine right shall have to be left to other
venues in order to be developed in its entirety. This movie opened up so many doors to contemplation
that Spielberg surely must follow-up in order to tell those unique stories as
well. Lincoln is the story of how one of
Americas most renowned and controversial presidents took an aggressive lead in
the little known saga of the politicking of the 13th Amendment into
law. This is the story of how a few
powerful and principled white men ended over 200 years of enslavement of
Africans and black men in North America, effectively completing what the
founders had failed to accomplish 100 years earlier at the birth of America.
Spielberg laid no tinsel or guild upon the artifice employed
to procure the narrowly ratified 13th Amendment or upon a war weary
congress struggling to make manifest the egalitarian ideals of the
Enlightenment; freedom and equality for all men. He revealed the grit and grime, the bribes
and back room deals, and the trickery so common now in our twenty-first century
congress/lobbyist relations; this was its origin. What is most notable is that he did not
shrink from including racially biased content delivered by characters who did
not embrace emancipation in order to achieve a higher degree of verisimilitude. Nothing was edited, no euphemisms were
afforded and characters spoke as clearly as they would have done, unfiltered to
deliver the mindset of the times. Notwithstanding,
the nobility of the ratification of the 13th Amendment was not
diminished; Spielberg demonstrated that however grudging, Congress understood
its duty to fulfill the egalitarian prophecy framed in The Declaration of Independence
and The Constitution over 100 years earlier by the founding fathers but he
accurately demonstrated how hard-fought that battle was.
The movie spans only a few months between the ending of Lincolns
first term and his untimely assassination at the outset of the second. It reveals a Lincoln who had clear and
carefully thought out plan to end slavery and how he bided his time in order to
change the course of history. The story
of Lincoln’s turbulent home life is a mere but humanizing background to the dizzying
politics of what would then have been a bustling and war-torn Washington,
D.C.
The movie opens as Lincoln speaks with former slaves now enlisted
as Union Officers in a segregated regiment.
Lincoln congratulates them for their legendary valour in battle setting
the tone for their presence throughout the movie as a sign of socioeconomic change. That they were so present at the meeting of
the Southern Delegation yet absent at Appomattox was also a cleverly embedded
note. Spielberg chose a radical
departure from what one might have expected of Appomattox, a gentlemanly gesture
of departure at the terminus of surrender… As such it is easy to visualize
Appomattox as such, a mere formality at the end of a much greater performance.
Overall, Spielberg’s “Lincoln” was a wonderfully accurate
and detailed account of the politicking of the 13th Amendment to the
American Constitution within its ensanguined context of gun smoke,
corpse-strewn battlefields, elegant parlors and the halls of congress it did
remind us that people who could easily have turned their backs on slavery came
together in one city to emancipate the enslaved forever, not with any clear
plan of how they would move forward once the deed had been done but doing so
because this change would ultimately be for the betterment of all men.
FIN
Written by David Vollin
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