Lincoln Our Contemporary

“If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, then ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.”

Oh, Maud.  I've just seen the movie. I cannot recall when two and one half hours passed so quickly.

I have sometimes fantasized about time travel, and how I'd like to meet Lincoln, (and Emily Dickinson, Thoreau, Grant, Sherman, Sheridan) but tonight I had to remind myself I was not watching the actual man.

I am guessing your second man was Secretary of State Seward.  I had not realized how important or righteous he was. He is depicted as even more--a man who could see the genius of what Lincoln was doing, and he could change to accommodate it.

Of course, Thaddeus Stevens is a wonderful character. He really did hate the aristocracy of the South, and all they stood for, and his remarks in the kitchen to Lincoln about what he had planned for the South, the way he would do Reconstruction, comported well with all I've read about him. He wanted to lay waste to the whole region, and rebuild it from the ashes as a totally new place, with new values, if not new people. He wanted to humble the arrogant slave owners.  But Lincoln, as he told Grant in the movie, wanted no such revenge.  He understood you could not change the hearts of men with guns.

I was most relieved that Spielberg did not ruin the movie with his hallmark sentimentality--he always has one scene which is so sentimental, emotionally overwrought and false and obviously pitched to the tear jerker crowd, he can spoil a movie with it. But in this case, he got done with it  in the first scene, with all the soldiers reciting the Gettysburg address, and somehow it worked and was over quickly enough.

But the hard headed decision to focus on the passage of the 13th amendment, and the politics,  was a great one.  I have not read A Team of Rivals, but I have read President Obama has.  If you look at what Mr. Obama has heard from his own supporters (myself included) that he has not been strong enough, not willing to fight for his convictions, not willing to vilify his opposition, as they so richly deserve, you realize Lincoln had to navigate the same waters. That wonderful scene where Lincoln tells Thaddeus Stevens, who has accused him of having no moral compass, "Well, a compass tells you true north, but it doesn't help you to get where you want to go, if there is a swamp in your way. You have to navigate around the swamp." 

In a previous post I said that by 1862 all meaningful opposition to slavery in Congress had left town, but obviously I did not know what I was talking about.  I assumed that without knowing that.  Clearly, the Congress was, like some of the rest of the country, willing to fight to preserve the union without embracing the idea of freedom for the slaves. 

Of course, one of the pleasures of the movie is listening to Lincoln's stories, trying to figure out where he is going, and in the end, the point is always to the point, even if the on screen characters (especially Secretary of War Stanton) cannot see the point. 

The George Washington in the outhouse story really is priceless.

I loved the decision to end the movie with that famous Second Inaugural address--although I wish they had included more of it, especially the part where Lincoln outlines the history of the war, how most people wanted a result less drastic, how, in the end, slavery turned out to be the cause of the war.  

I was also hoping to see in the party scene that wonderful encounter between Lincoln and Harriett Beecher Stowe, where Lincoln bends over to shake the hand of the diminutive author of Uncle Tom's Cabin and says, "So this is the little lady who wrote the book that started the great big war."  Of course, that might not have happened in 1865, and the film makers were cleaving to historical accuracy--except for the soldiers reciting the Gettysburg address. 

So here is a movie without any sex, no female love interest, no chases, no explosions, no shootings, no gun fights, (well, almost none, except for a brief battle scene) and yet it kept me enthralled for 150 minutes. That's quite a feat.