Although “Lincoln” is a serious movie with a high moral purpose, there is still a great deal of comic relief provided mostly by an amusing trio of corrupt lobbyists.  What students might find confusing about these figures, however, is that despite the fact that they were “real” men, the movie either totally invents or sometimes just thoroughly rearranges their actual activities.  Robert Latham (John Hawkes), Richard Schell (Tim Blake Nelson), and William N. Bilbo (James Spader) were three nineteenth-century political figures authorized by Secretary of State William Henry Seward in the winter of 1864-65 to help promote passage of what ultimately became the Thirteenth Amendment.  Historians typically describe these men as the “Seward Lobby” but disagree over exactly how they lobbied for the amendment and to what degree President Lincoln was involved with or aware of their activities.  The most in-depth study of the lobbying effort appeared in 1963 and is available in full-text at the Internet Archive.  See especially the first chapter (“The Seward Lobby and the Thirteenth Amendment”) in LaWanda and John H. Cox, Politics, Principle, & Prejudice, 1865-66 (1963).

What you will discover by reading this remarkable account is that Latham and Schell were in fact old friends of  Seward’s and that Bilbo (James Spader) was a prominent southern attorney and businessman who had switched sides during the war and who was “known for his elaborate waistcoats, his long sideburns, and his elegant manners” (Cox and Cox, p. 6).  Bilbo was prominent enough that he actually met with President Lincoln just after the 1864 election and corresponded with him later.  Yet the movie introduces these characters as seedy outsiders, completely unknown to the president and forced to rent rooms in a “squirrel-infested attic,” as James Spader puts it memorably (Scene 10), because Seward was keeping them on such a tight retainer.  That might be how lobbyists work today –on retainer and often in secret– but it wasn’t quite true then.  After passage of the amendment, Latham, a major Wall Street investor (who later went bankrupt following the Panic of 1873), replied indignantly to an attempt by Seward to reimburse the men for their expenses.  He wrote in a letter to Seward’s son Frederick, “A Gentleman called to have me give an acct of expenses.  Which amt to nothing,”  adding, “At any time that I can be of service to the Hon Sec of State or yourself I will do all I can but at my own expence,” (Cox and Cox, p. 24).

Yet the Spielberg movie portrays the men in much different light –as rough, political guns-for-hire who curse freely (Bilbo / Spader even says directly to President Lincoln at one point, “Well, I’ll be fucked.”) and who spread bribes easily.  The movie makers invent a series of quick scenes involving fictional congressmen and the bribes that it takes to sway them.  The most notable example of this corruption involves Rep. Clay Hawkins of Ohio (Walton Goggins) who Bilbo / Spader initially switched with the promise of a postmastership in Millersburg, Ohio.  The movie actually has President Lincoln himself commenting cynically on this news by remarking, “He’s selling himself cheap, ain’t he?” (Scene 13).  All of this is made up.  There was a single lame duck Democratic congressman from Ohio who switched his vote in favor of the antislavery amendment in January 1865 but his name was Wells A. Hutchins and he did not receive any post-war patronage appointment in the federal government.  Nor was he much recognizable in the character of Clay Hawkins.  In real life, Hutchins was a reasonably tough, independent-minded Democrat who had voted to support the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia in 1862 and who had backed the Lincoln Administration on several controversial issues during the war, including the suspension of habeas corpus or civil liberties –an issue that was especially unpopular among Ohio Democrats.   Understanding this background helps explain why he was a lame duck in 1865 and why he was a natural target for supporting the amendment. It had nothing to do with hunting, drinking or patronage.

Equally important from a strictly historical perspective, there’s no evidence connecting the Seward lobbyists to Hutchins or any Democrat outside of the eastern states.  According to LaWanda and John Cox, the lobbyists, especially Bilbo, spent most of their time in New York (not Washington) generally attempting to persuade influential Democratic newspapers (such as the New YorkWorld) and the state’s Democratic governor (Horatio Seymour) to send signals that would allow wavering lame duck Democrats to feel more confident about switching their votes.

That is why in some ways the most telling example of “artistic license,” perhaps in the whole film, involves an amusing race between Bilbo / Spader and White House aide John Hay (Joseph Cross) during the day of the final House vote on January 31, 1865.  The movie has the two men racing to get Lincoln’s response to reports of impending peace talks –a leak that threatens to jeopardize the entire lobbying effort.  The younger Hay beats out the noticeably winded Bilbo, and then President Lincoln proceeds to draft an evasive reply that allows the final roll call to proceed and victory to be achieved.  It is a dramatic climax with political machinations and social justice converging in ways that illustrate the film’s major insight about Lincoln –that he understood how a flawed, messy democratic process can be bent toward  profoundly moral consequences.  However, in real life, Bilbo was in New York at the time of the vote.  There was actually an evasive message from the president but no footrace from the Capitol and no significant presence in Washington by the Seward lobbyists during the final fight to win House passage of the amendment.

(This post has been excerpted from a longer essay, “Warning: Artists at Work,” that appears in “The Unofficial Guide to Spielberg’s Lincoln” which is part of the House Divided Project’s new Emancipation Digital Classroom).

Images courtesy of Dreamworks

The main narrative of Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” movie opens with a dream that Abraham Lincoln describes to Mary Lincoln in early January 1865.  This is historical in nature, but not true in every respect.  The story of Lincoln’s dream derives not from Mary Lincoln’s papers, but rather from an account that appears in the diary of Gideon Welles, who served as Lincoln’s secretary of navy.  His entry, dated April 14, 1865 (but written afterward) describes the president telling his cabinet officers on the day that he was assassinated of a dream where “he seemed to be in some singular, indescribable vessel, and that he was moving with great rapidity towards an indefinite shore.”  He claimed that he had this dream before “nearly every great and important event of the War.”  Tony Kushner’s script alters the language of this account and puts it into an exchange between husband and wife preceding a “revelation” about his intention to fight for passage of an amendment to abolish slavery during the January 1865 lame duck session of Congress.  Mary Lincoln (Sally Fields) acts shocked by this news and argues against it, saying to her husband:

“No one’s loved as much as you, no one’s ever been loved so much, by the people, you might do anything now. Don’t, don’t waste that power on an amendment bill that’s sure of defeat.”

Yet in reality, Lincoln had already made public his plans to push for a January vote.  His annual message to Congress in December 1864 following landslide election victories for the Republican / Union party predicted with great confidence that “the next Congress will pass the measure [abolishing slavery] if this does not” and so suggested that since there was “only a question of time as to when the proposed amendment will go to the States” why “may we not agree that the sooner the better?”  The tone of this passage is almost taunting.  This is precisely how “artistic license” works in Hollywood movies.  Filmmakers must establish compelling conflicts at the outset and then work to resolve them with a suspenseful plot that also reveals the essential nature of their main characters.  History is messier.  So, even though the initial scene establishing the fundamental premise of this movie is full of interesting and historically-minded word choices (Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln subtly quotes Shakespeare by calling himself a “king of infinite space” and uses very Lincolnian-sounding phrases such as “flubdubs” and “shindy”) the gist of the scene conflates and confuses some of the fundamental political realities of that moment.

The movie actually conflates or pushes together several political conflicts from the end of the war that historians usually treat separately. There were deep divisions, for example, within the Republican Party during the 1860s, traditionally identified as a split between Radicals and Conservatives (though many historians  object to these broad categories), but those factions were not arguing over abolition by January 1865 as the movie depicts in its opening scenes.  The early scenes that show figures such as Secretary of State William Henry Seward, Republican Party elder statesman Francis Preston Blair, Sr., and Radical congressmen James Ashley and Thaddeus Stevens in conversation with each other and the president, take a number of critical liberties to help make complicated partisan in-fighting seem more understandable for a modern movie audience.

First and most important, nobody would  have been surprised by the President’s support for a January vote on the constitutional amendment.  He had already announced it publicly in December.  Second, the greatest cause of division among Republicans in early 1865 was over Reconstruction policy, not abolition, with Blair and other conservative figures arrayed against radicals such as Ashley and Stevens, over questions regarding not only the future of ex-slaves but also ex-Confederates.  The radicals, especially Stevens, wanted a social revolution in the South.  The conservatives preferred national reconciliation even at the cost of social change. The question of exactly where Lincoln and Seward stood in this reconstruction debate (and in relation to each other) remains a topic of disagreement among historians.  But the idea that Seward would lecture Lincoln on Republican party divisions (Scene 4) or that the president would be forced to defend his wartime emancipation policy in early 1865 against vigorous objections from some of his cabinet (Scene 7) is almost absurd.

Consider this incongruity:  in the movie, Seward (David Strathairn) asks Lincoln, “since when has our party unanimously supported anything?”  and yet the correct historical answer to that question is simply the last time the abolition amendment appeared in the House (June 1864) when the ONLY Republican to vote against it was Rep. James Ashley, the sponsor, who did so on technical grounds so that he could bring it back later for reconsideration.  By the end of the war, Republicans supported the abolition of slavery –it was a central plank of their party platform in the 1864 election and part of the basis for their landslide victories in November.  Border states such as Maryland and Missouri were already in the process of abolishing slavery on their own –with full Republican support. Montgomery Blair had been “pushed out” of the president’s cabinet in September 1864 as part of a deal with radicals –as the movie suggests– but Preston Blair (Hal Holbrook) surely never told Lincoln, as he does in the film: “We can’t tell our people they can vote yes on abolishing slavery unless at the same time we can tell ‘em that you’re seeking a negotiated peace.”  It’s not even entirely clear that the elderly and highly controversial Blair had any “people” left in the House now that his other son Frank (Francis Preston Blair, Jr.), a former congressman, was back in the Union army.

More important, the so-called Conservative Republicans were not in any sense the obstacle to passage of the amendment.  The challenge for the amendment’s backers was to win over Democratic votes, presumably lame duck Democratic votes –not hold together Republicans (at least not on this question). Finally, it’s worth noting that the curious scene involving the White House visit from Mr. and Mrs Jolly of Jefferson City, Missouri is wholly invented (Scene 5).  Even their congressman –”Beanpole” Burton– is fictional.  This is a perfectly fair use of artistic license, because the imaginary conversation reveals the complicated –and quite real– ambivalence of many Unionists regarding the future of race relations after slavery, but it does seem like a strange choice for filmmakers when there was an important Missouri Unionist congressman named James S. Rollins, whom Lincoln did personally lobby to support this amendment.  Why Rollins gets omitted from the movie is difficult to explain.

(This post has been excerpted from a longer essay, “Warning: Artists at Work,” that appears in “The Unofficial Guide to Spielberg’s Lincoln” which is part of the House Divided Project’s new Emancipation Digital Classroom).

Images courtesy of Dreamworks

February 1 is National Freedom Day in the United States and has been since 1948.  The question is why?   The story begins with a bit of presidential trivia but then turns into a fascinating tale of an extraordinary citizen. It was on February 1, 1865 that President Abraham Lincoln signed a joint congressional resolution proposing a Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would abolish slavery.  But any good civics student knows that the process for amending the Constitution was by no means complete.  Congress (and not the president) sends amendments to the states for ratification, and it is the states that must finalize any proposed changes.  The requisite number of states did not ratify the Thirteenth Amendment until December 6, 1865, an event which set off an explosion of celebrations in the North, immortalized by John Greenleaf Whittier’s once-famous poem, “Laus Deo!”:

IT is done!
Clang of bell and roar of gun
Send the tidings up and down.
How the belfries rock and reel!
How the great guns, peal on peal,
Fling the joy from town to town!

Yet Lincoln himself had appeared to acknowledge the special nature of  February 1 when he placed an otherwise superfluous signature on the joint resolution.  He had called the proposed amendment “a king’s cure” to the challenge of ending slavery and clearly wanted to bear witness to the transformation that was being wrought by the bloody Civil War.  Though he did not live to see ratification, Lincoln’s contributions as military emancipator and advocate for constitutional abolition deserve commemoration.

That was the idea that eventually inspired a former slave to lobby Congress to designate February 1st as National Freedom Day.  Richard R. Wright was a 9-year-old enslaved boy living in Georgia when Lincoln signed the joint resolution.  After the war, while attending a freedmen’s school during Reconstruction, he became known as the source for yet another once celebrated poem by Whittier, this one entitled, “Howard at Atlanta,” about the visit of Union general Oliver O. Howard to a black school:

The man of many battles,
With tears his eyelids pressing,
Stretched over those dusky foreheads
His one-armed blessing.

And he said: “Who hears can never
Fear for or doubt you;
What shall I tell the children
Up North about you?”
Then ran round a whisper, a murmur,
Some answer devising:
And a little boy stood up: “General,
Tell ’em we’re rising!”

Richard R. Wright (1855 - 1947)

The phrase, “Tell ’em we’re rising!” became an anthem for the post-war black middle class of which young Richard Wright soon became one of the most notable embodiments.  He served as an officer in the Spanish-American War and later became a renowned educator (and mentor to W.E.B. DuBois) and eventually a banker in Philadelphia,

Pennsylvania, a self-made man who never seemed to stop striving. At age 67, Wright  enrolled  in Wharton Business School to help retrain for his new commercial endeavor, The Citizens and Southern Bank and Trust Company.  In early 1942, at age 86, he began an intensive lobbying effort for the creation of National Freedom Day.  The first grassroots celebration drew 3,500 people to the Academy of Music in Philadelphia.  The crowd held a mass Pledge of Allegiance in front of the Liberty Bell and then organized a patriotic parade “with forty flag-bedecked automobiles,” according to a report from the Baltimore Afro-American (Feb. 7, 1942).  The turnout was especially impressive because the national climate did not seem promising for such an earnest effort.  World War II had already begun, Japanese internment was about to be launched and a climate of segregation and oppression still prevailed across the South and much of the North.  Attendees at this first gathering, for example, felt compelled to formally denounce a recent lynching in Missouri.  Yet Wright persisted, undertaking a national speaking tour and working behind-the-scenes with various members of the Pennsylvania congressional delegation.

Seven years later, the effort finally bore fruit on June 30, 1948 when President Truman signed Public Law 842, establishing “National Freedom Day” into the federal code.  The final legislation encouraged national observance of February 1st as a way to commemorate the abolition of slavery, but did not mandate a new federal holiday.  That had been the original intent of Wright’s proposal, but some in Congress had objected to canceling a work day in the short and already commemoration-crowded month of February.   Unfortunately, Wright was not present to fight for more.  He had died in July 1947 and never lived to see the formal establishment of his dream, not so unlike Abraham Lincoln who also had been unable to witness the ratification of his.

General Sources:  Hanes Walton, Jr., et.al., “R. R. Wright, Congress, President Truman and the First National Public African-American Holiday: National Freedom Day,” PS: Political Science and Politics 24 (Dec. 1991): 685-688 and Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery and the Thirteenth Amendment (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

A version of this blog post also appears at Constitution Daily, a blog of the National Constitution Center.

One hundred fifty years ago today the Ripley (OH) Bee reported that three families from central North Carolina had recently passed through Ripley, Ohio on their way to Indiana. These families, as the Bee explained, “were escaping from the reign of terror” that existed in the South. The families’ “joy over their deliverance from the thralldom and terrorism of secession was openly expressed.” As the Bee explained, they had been forced to leave in North Carolina “their farms stock and other property, which they could not bring in their wagon.” As they traveled north, the Bee described how “they had as little communication, as possible, with the people on the road and when asked as to their destination, said they were going to Fleming Co., Ky., and sometimes Missouri.” They did not dare admit that their true destination was in Indiana. You can read more about the political situation in North Carolina this time in Daniel W. Crofts’ Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (1993).

One hundred fifty years ago today the New York Times reported that Confederate forces had retreated from Harpers Ferry to Manassas, Virginia. Harpers Ferry, which was home to a federal arsenal and the target of abolitionist John Brown’s raid in October 1859, “[was] not a position to hold against a powerful enemy.” Instead, as the New York Times explained, the location was “an admirable trap into which one may be decoyed to be annihilated.” The New York Times speculated that the Confederates had left only “long enough to see the approaching army of the West fairly caged, and then, reoccupying the surrounding heights, have every advantage in the work of slaughter.” As the Confederates retreated, they also destroyed bridges and buildings. The New York Times reflected on what those actions meant in terms of the differences between the Confederate and Union armies:

[Confederates] destroy bridges, tear up railroads, overthrow canal dams, and mark their retreat by so many wanton acts of the same character, that the idea of their being acts purely protective and defensive is inadmissible. The Northern troops, on the contrary, bring order, skill and civilization with them. It is for them to relay the displaced tracks, repair the disabled engines, rebuild the burnt bridges, erect the overthrown workshops, restore the damaged canals ; in short, to replace the malicious mischief of an enraged barbarism, with the splendid resources of civilization.

You can learn more about Harpers Ferry in Chester G. Hearn’s Six Years of Hell: Harpers Ferry During the Civil War (1999) and Dolly Nasby’s Harpers Ferry (2004).

One hundred fifty years ago today the Fayetteville (NC) Observer published excerpts from the New York Commercial Advertiser and Richmond (VA) Dispatch to show how “it [was] criminal now again… to speak [ill] of” President Abraham Lincoln in northern states. As the Commercial Advertiser explained, a merchant had been arrested in New York City for “using seditious language, and making scandalous assertions in regard to the character of the President of the United States and some members of his family.” While at first “he claimed… to speak from personal knowledge,” the merchant later admitted that “his information was derived from Southern papers.” After “a reprimand and warning,” authorities let him leave the city. The excerpt from the Richmond (VA) Dispatch, however, focused on conditions in Washington DC. The Dispatch had heard shocking stories from those who had “just arrived here from Washington” and condemned the Lincoln administration for the way in which they apparently treated some southerners.

“…numbers of men and women are confined in the basement rooms of the Capital as suspected persons either from the South, or who sympathize with the South. The tyrant Lincoln has the citizens arrested without form of law, gives them no trial, and in some cases not even deigns to let them know the cause of their arrest. The despotism and terrorism of the worst days of the French Revolution did not exceed this.”

Some southerners in Washington were apparently so concerned that they sent letters to friends and family in Fayetteville “without signatures.” While “relatives of course knew from whom [the letters] came,” the Observer noted that “the writer… had not dared to sign his name.”

One hundred fifty years ago today the Chicago (IL) Tribune published an excerpt from the Savannah (GA) Republican that described a new controversial order from Georgia Governor Joseph E. Brown. If the Confederate War Department wanted to move any Georgia regiments out of the state, Governor Brown required that they first seek his permission. As “the Confederate States have existed but for a day,” the Savannah Republican explained that they had no choice but to “rely upon the several States” for men and supplies. Yet Governor Brown’s order came at the worst possible time. As the Savannah Republican argued:

“Governor Brown may be technically right in this order; but he has, at least, selected an unfortunate time for issuing it. From the beginning a misunderstanding seems to have existed between him and the Confederate authorities to be found with no other State, and it is high time it had been brought to a-close. It has been a source of serious confusion and embarrassment in all our movements for defence, and it allowed to continue, will wholly demoralize the service.”

You can read more about Gov. Brown in Joseph H. Parks’ Joseph E. Brown of Georgia (1977).

One hundred fifty years ago today the New York Herald reported on problems with the mail delivery to Union soldiers stationed around Washington DC. “Nothing is more frequent than to hear complaints of the non-receipt of letters at the various camps in and Washington,” as the Herald explained. Yet after the Herald investigated the problem it found that “the Post Office authorities [in New York] or at Washington” were not responsible. Instead, the problem was created by New York residents who were not mailing the letters properly. As the Herald described,

In most instances letters addressed to the members of the various regiments in service are dropped into the lamppost boxes in various quarters of the city, without bearing the extra one cent stamp in addition to the three cent stamp – the regular postage for letters deposited at the General Post Office.

If residents remembered to include the correct postage, the Herald hoped that “there will be no more complaints of missing letters.”

One hundred fifty years ago today the Savannah (GA) News published a short report on the serious conditions that existed in Missouri. The News characterized the situation as one in which the Republicans were trying to take over the state with force. They “are making open war upon the people of that State who refuse abject submission to Abe Lincoln,” as the News explained. In addition, the News described an incident in St. Louis in which Republicans had apparently killed civilians:

According to the newspaper accounts, the late massacre by his troops in St. Louis was of a more serious character than at first reported. – Some twenty persons – men, women and children – were killed, and a large number were wounded. It is further stated that no attack was made upon the troops by the people, who hooted and jeered the Lincoln troops, when three of the German companies fired upon them.

Yet even though northerners were “collecting supplies to be sent immediately to the Lincoln forces in Missouri,” the News remained confident “that the day of retribution… is not far distant.” As the News concluded, “there is a spirit of resolute resistance in both Missouri and Maryland, that will not be easily subdued.” You can learn more about the war is Missouri in Bruce Nichols’ Guerrilla Warfare in Civil War Missouri, 1862 (2004) and Donald L. Gilmore’s Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border (2005).

One hundred fifty years ago today the Chicago (IL) Tribune reported on the recent announcement that the United Kingdom would not intervene in the struggle between the United States and the Confederacy. “The only crumb of comfort for Jeff. Davis…[is] that the Southern Confederacy will be recognized, not as a power, not as a Government, but simply as a “belligerent,” as the Tribune noted. As a result, “Jeff Davis’s privateers [would] not be seized” unless they interfered with English merchant ships. Some Confederates had predicted that the United Kingdom would immediately intervene in the Civil War, but the Foreign Secretary’s announcement had dashed those hopes. “The wild idea that England will send out a naval force to break through the blockade established by the United States Government, is not mentioned as a thing which has ever been dreamed of in Downing street,” as the Tribune explained. You can read more about this issue in Howard Jones’ Union in Peril: The Crisis Over British Intervention in the Civil War (1992), Blue & Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations (2010), and Amanda Foreman’s A World on Fire: An Epic History of Two Nations Divided (2010).