Spielberg's 'Lincoln' and his legacy

In writing previously of Steven Spielberg, I noted that his films tend to be organized around the idea of a good or innocent community threatened by an external demonic force. This was the case in Jaws, where the villain was a shark, and in Schindler's List, where it was the Nazi perpetration of the Holocaust.

A similar dynamic is at work in Lincoln, which appears destined to be Spielberg's most successful film since Saving Private Ryan (1998), although this time the enemy lies coiled about the community's vitals. Its name is slavery, and the community is the Union.

Of course Spielberg always provides a hero who rides to the rescue of the distressed community, albeit an often-flawed one: Quint, the half-crazed shark hunter of Jaws; Oskar Schindler, the shady businessman who deals in Jews.

The protagonist of Lincoln, however, is America's greatest culture hero, and the story Spielberg wants to tell about him is what Lincoln supposedly regards as his culminating achievement: the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery in the reconstituted Union.

This, then, is no biopic, but a very tightly focused look at one of the critical episodes in American history.

Lincoln on slavery

The time is January 1865, and the place, Washington, D.C. Lincoln, recently re-elected, is two months away from his second inauguration and three from his assassination. The nation is still at war, but the South has clearly been defeated, and the Confederate Vice President, Alexander Stephens, has been secretly dispatched to negotiate terms of surrender.

Secession is no longer an option, nor, as a matter of political reality, is the expansion of slavery into the Union's unincorporated territories. But the preservation of slavery in the core states of the Confederacy remains at least a possibility. For Lincoln, this prospect is something to be reckoned with.

The evolution of Lincoln's thinking about slavery was complex. For him, the Union was the great good, and slavery the lesser evil. If slavery were the price of preserving the Union, he was willing to pay it.

On the other hand, as he had famously remarked in his debates with Stephen Douglas, a house divided against itself could not stand. This didn't mean that the Union had to abolish slavery to survive. It meant that the unresolved dispute about slavery held the potential to destroy the Union.

Negro inferiority

The solution was to find a compromise that both sides could live with. That had been the burden of American politics for 40 years. Such a compromise entailed the retention of slavery in some form, because the South would never consent to its abolition.

If preserving the Union was your primary goal, you could not be an abolitionist. Abraham Lincoln was no abolitionist, and he often said so. He ran for president in 1860 on a platform of preserving the Union. This meant retaining slavery.

Lincoln was also publicly agnostic on the question of Negro inferiority. He couldn't well have said that the black man was the moral and intellectual equal of the white one without aligning himself with the abolitionist cause, for that was the core of its case.

Back to Africa?

For abolitionists, slavery was the greater evil, and the Union the lesser good. If the dissolution of the Union were the price of abolition, men like William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown were willing to pay it. But Lincoln was not on their side, nor could he have ever been elected president— indeed, put up for nomination— if he had been.

Negro inferiority was not a question Lincoln was called upon to judge, and like most politicians he avoided moral philosophy whenever possible. But what did he think privately?

He certainly regarded blacks as human; it was precisely for this reason that he perceived involuntary servitude as an evil. Whether blacks were fully the intellectual equal of whites was not for him the question, because he gravely doubted whether they could ever be fully integrated into American society— a question that remains open today.

From this doubt he concluded that blacks were better off returning to Africa, and he was willing to subsidize their passage. If Lincoln was no abolitionist, neither was he an integrationist.

Personal attitudes

Spielberg engages the question of Lincoln's attitudes at only two points in his film. In the first scene in which he appears, two black soldiers stand before him. The first is deferential, but the second boldly questions him. Lincoln has "freed" the slaves in the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862— a wartime expedient of limited scope and duration— but, the soldier demands to know, will they become full citizens of the Union? Will it take another hundred years before they get the vote?

(It did, of course, at least in Southern states, and that question too isn't permanently settled, as this year's battles over voter ID laws made clear.)

Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) is shot from behind in this scene; the camera doesn't reveal his face. Nor does he reply.

Honest evasion

The second scene occurs toward the end of the film, when Mary Todd Lincoln's black dressmaker and confidante, Elizabeth Keckley (Gloria Reuben), asks him what he really thinks of Negroes and their capacity. Spielberg's Lincoln pauses over this question before answering, both honestly and evasively, "I don't know you."

These elliptical moments, then, are the only ones when Spielberg and his scriptwriter, Tony Kushner, engage the question of Lincoln's personal attitudes. For the rest of he film, he is simply the Great Emancipator.

Lincoln wishes to push an amendment to abolish slavery through before the war ends to preclude any possibility of its reinstatement afterwards. As he explains in an expository scene, the Emancipation Proclamation itself was merely a document confiscating slaves as belligerent property; it left unresolved whether such property could be reclaimed in peacetime. Only a constitutional amendment could settle this question beyond dispute.

Spielberg leaves the powerful impression that, for Lincoln, abolishing slavery was the good work of the war and the essential new basis of the restored Union. This is true, but not the whole truth.

Political carnage

Lincoln preferred a Union without slavery, but not such a Union procured at the cost of 600,000 dead. (This is the figure used in the film; more recent research has suggested that the real number of fatalities in the Civil War exceeded 700,000.) Since the price had been paid and couldn't be retracted, he was anxious that it never be paid again. The Union remained his cause.

Unlike Saving Private Ryan, the carnage in Lincoln, a few scenes apart (including the harrowing bloodbath of the curtain-raiser), takes the form of political infighting. Lincoln has already pushed his amendment through the Republican-controlled Senate, and (in a move carried out the previous year but unmentioned in the film) assured its ratification by the states through the hurried admission of Nevada to the Union. It has fallen short of the necessary two-thirds majority in the House, however, and Lincoln risks political capital in reintroducing it.

Mobilizing his base

He makes common cause with the Radical Republicans, led by the fiery and uncompromising Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania (Tommy Lee Jones), for whom abolition is a moral crusade. At the same time, however, Lincoln must win enough votes from the anti-abolition Democratic caucus to achieve his majority. He thus faces a classic squaring of the political circle: how to mobilize the energies of his supporters without alienating the fence-sitting Democrats he is trying to woo.

Some of the film's best scenes depict the boisterous House in session, a chamber far less sedate than the present-day one. In the critical scene, Stevens is baited by his Copperhead antagonist, George Pendleton, to declare his belief in Negro equality (which was nowhere suggested in the text of the amendment).

Unlike Lincoln, Stevens is fully committed on this subject, but he knows that any public declaration on his part will be taken as a gloss on the bill, and doom its support by Democrats. He declares that equality before the law is all that he believes and aims at, which draws hoots of derision from the Democrats but cheers from his fellow Republicans. It's a lie, and a personally painful one, but a lie for the greater good.

Covert bribery

Lincoln is still shy of votes, however, and so he turns to covert bribery. This is downright corrupt, but it too is a wrongful act that serves a higher purpose. (Actually, Lincoln had already used bribery to win Nevada's admission to the Union.) Not any means is justified to win one's ends— the Machiavellian principle— but, Spielberg suggests, in politics the latitude must be wide.

The relevance of this notion to our current debates over a Grand Bargain to fix America's fiscal woes is transparent. Rigid purists on either side will spoil the deal, and everybody will have to swallow something they don't like. If Tommy Lee Jones can give in on a point of principle, so can you.

Much of Lincoln is shot indoors, and much of it consists of talk. This practice is contrary to Spielberg's usual style, and there is not much suspense about the outcome of the plot, although the vote scene gets milked for all it is worth and then some.

Liam Neeson declines

Since Lincoln is not only the film's protagonist but its subject, a great deal falls on the performance of the role. Liam Neeson was originally cast in the part memorably played by Raymond Massey, Henry Fonda and even Gregory Peck. Neeson possessed the necessary physical heft and basset-eyed features, but he reportedly backed out after waiting on the project for several years (even Steven Spielberg needs financing, and the box office failure of his previous film about slavery, Amistad, disheartened investors), with the odd excuse that he had grown too old for the role.

Daniel Day-Lewis endows his Lincoln with a thoughtful gravity that occasionally seems to carry a little molasses along with the heavy makeup. It's a good Lincoln that allows for puckish humor and, on rare occasions, flashes of determination and anger; but it lacks, finally, the aura of a truly commanding performance.

Sally Field's Mary Lincoln is very good (and good for Day-Lewis, too, prodding him a little out of the Method shell he seems largely encased in). Tommy Lee Jones has a wig, a walking stick, and, as his last scene reveals, a mulatto mistress. David Strathairn's William Seward plays a faithful alter ego.

Silence at Appomattox

The film's best scene, though, is entirely wordless. It depicts Lee's surrender at Appomattox, days before Lincoln's assassination. Lee, having already proffered his sword, sits on his horse. Grant, his great adversary, stands on the courthouse porch with his officers, gravely tipping his hat in salute. Lee replies in kind, and turns away. Thus did the most terrible war in America's history— more costly in lives than all other American wars combined— come to an end.

Was it worth it? Slavery was of course as great an evil as its most fervent opponents saw it, but it was also a dying institution. The Union, thanks in large part to Lincoln, survived.

But the antebellum Union wasn't simply the good or innocent community, even apart from the taint of slavery. It was thrusting, commercial, imperial; it had already covered a continent and extended its dominion over a hemisphere, and its great poet, Walt Whitman, sang of its destiny to be a world power.

Imperial presidency

That destiny, which included the destruction of the German and Japanese empires and the eclipse of the Russian one, has now been fulfilled, and appears to have passed its zenith. Its price was not fully paid in the Civil War; it has been exacted too on the battlefields of Korea and Vietnam, of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Then too, we must consider the legacy of Lincoln himself. A brief mention is made in the film of his constitutionally dubious suspension of habeas corpus, a practice now extended by our past two presidents. At one moment in the film Lincoln suddenly thunders, "I am cloaked in immense power!" The American presidency, long imperial abroad, has now grown quasi-monarchical at home. This legacy too is part of Lincoln's meaning for us.

But Spielberg's pieties leave little room for such reflection. Lincoln invites us to feel good about the most clarifying and ennobling moment our country ever gave itself. It also wants us to appreciate how flawed and even venal men can participate in such a moment, which is the way democracy must often work.

The film's hero leaves us with the observation that the future must take care of itself, and that no one can tell what it will bring. That implies, certainly, that those who follow may prove unworthy of their bequest. But it's fair to turn the question, and ask what burdens Abraham Lincoln laid upon us.♦


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