The House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History are doing something unprecedented. They are launching an open,online graduate course called “Understanding Lincoln” that will be taught by noted Lincoln scholar Matthew Pinsker in Summer / Fall 2013 and available for anybody who wants to learn more about Abraham Lincoln and his legacy during the the period leading up to the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. The limited enrollment graduate section of this unique online seminar which offers a full-semester graduate course credit (3.0 hours certified by transcript from Dickinson College) is designed especially for K-12 educators who want to learn innovative ways to teach Lincoln’s writings within the new Common Core state standards. Registration for graduate students ends on Friday, July 19, 2013 but space is limited and enrollment will close on a first-come, first served basis.  The course tuition is $450.  The open section of the course is entirely free, however, and offers any lifelong learners a chance to follow along with selected elements of the experience and to receive a Certificate of Completion from Dickinson College if they complete certain key components of the coursework.

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Graduate students in the limited enrollment section of the online course will also have a very special opportunity to participate in the events surrounding the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.  On November 19, 2013, selected graduate students from “Understanding Lincoln”  will be invited to attend the anniversary commemoration in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania at no cost –including free travel and accommodations.  After the morning Dedication Day ceremonies, we will host a live-streaming webcast directly from the historic Wills House in Gettysburg where President Lincoln stayed during the night before he delivered his famous address.  Partly through the extraordinary generosity of the Lincoln Leadership Institute, we will then be able to highlight the best multi-media final  projects submitted by students in the course.  These are the students who will be selected by Prof. Pinsker to attend the ceremonies and present their work in a live online session with fellow students and other interested course observers.

If you’d like to see an example of how this online learning experience works in a history course, please check out this video segment on the Emancipation Proclamation, produced by Gilder Lehrman education coordinator Lance Warren and featuring Prof. Pinsker leading a short, close reading of the January 1, 1863 document.  You might be surprised by what you don’t know about this famous executive order and how much can be gained by going through it almost line-by-line.

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Additional Course Information

Faculty Profiles

Matthew Pinsker will be the main instructor for “Understanding Lincoln.”  Pinsker holds the Brian Pohanka Chair for Civil War History at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania where he also directs the House Divided Project, an innovative effort to create free digital resources on the Civil War Era for K-12 classrooms.  Pinsker is the author of various books and articles on Abraham Lincoln, including Lincoln’s Sanctuary (Oxford, 2003) and the forthcoming Boss Lincoln (W.W. Norton).  Currently, Pinsker serves as a Visiting Research Professor at the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.  He is also a Distinguished Lecturer with the Organization of American Historians (OAH) and a Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC.

Lance Warren will serve as the chief course producer.  Warren is Director of Digital Projects for the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.  He leads Gilder Lehrman’s online education programs and creates original video content for use in K-12 classrooms.  His co-directed film, That World is Gone: Race and Displacement in a Southern Town, won the Audience Award for Short Documentary at the 2009 Virginia Film Festival.  Warren received a B.A. in History and Political Science from Syracuse University  and an M.A. in History from Brandeis University.

Course Description

Nobody would have appreciated the power of open online education more than Abraham Lincoln, one of the great self-made, lifelong learners in world history.  This open online graduate history course aspires to create the kind of course that Lincoln would have appreciated. Just about 150 years ago, President Lincoln explained at Gettysburg how he believed that the Civil War would establish what he termed “a new birth of freedom” for the United States.  During our sessions in 2013 (July 23-Nov. 19), Professor Matthew Pinsker will use this anniversary moment to share the latest historical insights about Lincoln as well as to introduce participants to a number of cutting-edge digital resources for the study and teaching of Lincoln’s legacy.  The course will be organized around five popular designations that have been applied to the great president over the years (Railsplitter, Honest Abe, Father Abraham, Great Emancipator, and Savior of the Union) and will dig deeper into each of these themes in order to help explore their origins and assess their validity. In the process, participants will come to better understand Lincoln as man and president, and will also enjoy a unique online platform to share their own insights.

Course Objective

Crowd-sourcing is a phrase used to describe how individuals can help develop online projects by contributing content to them remotely.  Through the “Understanding Lincoln” course, we will attempt an experiment in what might be called “class-sourcing.”  Participants in this course will have the opportunity to develop various types of content that will be published online as part of a forthcoming multi-media edition of Lincoln’s selected writings.  The very best work by course participants will then be featured during a Livestreaming field trip to Gettysburg on November 19, 2013 –the date which marks the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.  We will webcast that day from the historic Wills House where Lincoln slept the night before delivering his famous remarks. Three seminar participants whose work has been judged the best in the course will then be invited to participate in the November 19 events at no cost to themselves –with travel and lodging costs paid for by the course sponsors.

Course Readings

All readings for this course will be freely available online.  Beyond intensive readings of Lincoln’s own letters, speeches and personal documents, participants will also have assigned essays and articles to read from leading historians such as David Blight, Michael Burlingame, Eric Foner, Mark Neely, James Oakes, and Sean Wilentz.

Course Assignments

Graded assignments for this course will include various types of online discussion and written participation as well as a series of short writing assignments, including blogging.  The culmination of the course will involve the production of a major multi-media teaching project with an accompanying research paper that describes the project’s pedagogical intentions.  The final multi-media projects will employ at least one of the digital tools introduced during the course utilized in a way that helps teach Lincoln’s legacy in a creative fashion by presenting various documents and writings from his contemporaries.

 Course Schedule

Dates and times for particular course sessions remain subject to change, but here is a tentative list of key course events:

Friday, July 19 Registration closes

Tuesday, July 23 Seminar Introduction (7-9pm EST)

Thursday, August 1 Discussion section (7-9pm EST)

Wednesday, August 7 Seminar –Lincoln the Railsplitter (7-9pm EST)

Wednesday, August 14 Discussion section (7-9pm EST)

Wednesday, August 21 Seminar –Honest Abe (7-9pm EST)

Wednesday, August 28 Seminar –Father Abraham (7-9pm EST)

Tuesday, September 3 Seminar –Great Emancipator (7-9pm EST)

Tuesday, September 10 Seminar –Savior of the Union (7-9pm EST)

Tuesday, October 15 Final multi-media projects due

Tuesday, November 19 Virtual Field trip –Gettysburg Address with special participant presentations (Time TBA)

Sunday, December 15 Final grades posted

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One of the several critical strands in the “Lincoln” movie concerns the controversy surrounding the Hampton Roads peace talks (February 3, 1865), where President Lincoln and Secretary of State Seward met with Confederate envoys Alexander Stephens, John Campbell and Robert M.T. Hunter for secret discussions about how to end the war on board the River Queen in Union-controlled Hampton Roads, Virginia (near Fortress Monroe).  No transcript exists for their conversations that day.  Lincoln and Seward died before leaving any recollection of the affair.  So historians have mostly relied upon on the dubious reminiscences of former Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens.  Partly for this reason, many Civil War historians consider the Hampton Roads talks as little more than a sideshow –one of several improbable efforts undertaken in the last year of the war to end the conflict.  According to this view, Francis P. Blair, Sr. (Preston Blair / Hal Holbrook in the movie) was just one of several foolish old men (including the famous and eccentric Horace Greeley) attempting foolish things in the name of peace but having little effect.  Both Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln were implacable in their positions by the war’s end.  Lincoln, for example, made his preconditions for peace clear from July 18, 1864 forward –an end to the rebellion, the restoration of the union, and the abandonment of slavery.  Those three conditions never changed, making true “peace talks” impossible. Yet other historians are more willing to take the Hampton Roads conference seriously, since it did result in a real meeting between Confederate envoys and President Lincoln.  Doris Kearns Goodwin takes the conference seriously in Team of Rivals (2005), but one of the best accounts available online which considers them significant and details the events surrounding the peace talks comes from an article by William C. Harris in the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association. 

The article helps illustrate ways that the movie takes major liberties in presenting Hampton Roads.  The movie has Lincoln meeting with Preston Blair and his children at the Blair House in early January, reluctantly agreeing to secretly “authorize” an unauthorized trip to Richmond for the elder Blair in exchange for their support with the antislavery amendment.  In reality, Blair and Lincoln met alone at the White House in December.  Lincoln authorized a pass for Blair to travel into enemy lines but not to make any peace overtures.  Blair began his journey on January 3, 1865, arriving in Richmond by January 12 and proceeded to outline a wild scheme to Jefferson Davis that included an end to the war followed by a joint expedition of former Confederate and Union troops to remove the French occupation in Mexico.  Davis rejected some of Blair’s ideas but agreed to the possibility of talks for ending hostilities between the “two countries.”   Blair returned to Washington on January 16 and met with Lincoln on January 18, 1865.  The president agreed that Blair could take back to Richmond a message that the president would receive envoys who would be willing to secure peace for “our one common country.”  Blair then presented this message to Jefferson Davis on January 21, 1865.  Davis subsequently met with Alexander Stephens on January 27.  Stephens was his Vice President but also one of his biggest critics.  Davis appointed Stephens and two other notable critics of his policies, John A. Campbell and Robert M.T. Hunter, as his envoys (a sign for some historians, by the way, that he wasn’t serious himself about the talks, but wanted to show up his critics).  Regardless of the motives, the men traveled toward Union lines on January 29 and met with General Grant on January 30 before they eventually spent the morning of February 3 with Lincoln and Seward.

The movie accelerates and rearranges this timeline pretty ruthlessly.  It ignores the fact that Blair took two trips to Richmond (and most of that month) and instead presents him reporting back to Lincoln on or about January 10, 1865 with news that Davis had already appointed his three peace commissioners.  Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) then agrees to proceed with the talks if Blair (Holbrook) lobbies for the antislavery amendment.  Blair objects to the “horsetrading” but accepts the condition.  The next day, Seward (David Strathairn) reveals to Lincoln that he has found out about this deal with Blair and that he objects to it bitterly.  ”It’s either the amendment or this Confederate peace,” he says sternly.  ”You cannot have both.”  This is a central premise of the movie –one only made possible, however, by rearranging historical chronology and omitting contradictory details.  If the movie had accepted the actual timeline of events, then the connections between the peace talks and the amendment would not be so obvious, nor would the motivations of the key figures appear so starkly at odds.  In other words, there would be less conflict, less drama and eventually less satisfaction in the movie’s resolution.

The movie also ducks the biggest historical controversy over Stephens’s account of Hampton Roads –one which definitely undermines a key element of the Spielberg message.  According to the former Confederate vice president, Lincoln offered to allow southern states to reenter the union by ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment “prospectively,” suggesting that they could take up to five more years to put it into effect.  Stephens also claimed that Lincoln offered payments of up to $400 million for the South to abandon slavery. Historian William Harris also cites recollections from the other commissioners Campbell and Hunter indicating that Lincoln offered compensation.  There is no corroboration for Stephens’s outlandish claim about prospective ratification (which would be utterly unconstitutional) but there is contemporary evidence that Lincoln did consider paying southern states to end the war and abandon slavery.  He drafted such a proposal and presented it to his cabinet on February 5, 1865, which unanimously opposed it.  Lincoln then dropped the plan.  Whether or not he was serious remains an open question.  But it’s revealing that this idea –which certainly threatens to complicate views about Lincoln’s support for abolition– does not appear in the “Lincoln” movie at all.  Doris Kearns Goodwin addresses it in her book, Team of Rivals (2005) and William Harris analyzes the issue extensively in his article and in subsequent book, Lincoln’s Last Months (2004), but here perhaps is a good illustration of the difference between works of history and historical fiction.

(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).

Image courtesy of Dreamworks

According to the “Lincoln” movie script, Friday, January 27, 1865 was an action-packed and pivotal day.  It was the day of Thaddeus Stevens’s controlled performance in the House, declaring himself strictly for “equality before the law.”  It was also the day marked by Abraham Lincoln’s bitter argument with his oldest son Robert and then his subsequent clash with his wife Mary after he finally decided to concede to Robert’s desire to join the Union army.  And it was in the evening of the 27th that both Mary Lincoln and later dressmaker Elizabeth Keckley urged the president to abandon his hidden-hand approach and provide more decisive leadership in the fight for the antislavery amendment.  All of those “events” are fictional, but they are essential for understanding the film’s point-of-view –namely, that Lincoln interjected himself at the end of the battle for the constitutional amendment in a way that proved decisive.

The next several scenes subsequently show Lincoln meeting for the first time with the Seward lobbyists, cajoling support for the amendment by himself or with Secretary Seward, and then on the night of Sunday, January 29, 1865, holding an intense penultimate strategy session in the White House with Rep. James Ashley, Preston and Montgomery Blair, Secretary of State William Henry Seward and aides John Nicolay and John Hay.  This is one of the scenes that has been featured in the movie’s trailers, showing an angry, forceful Lincoln demanding action “Now now now!” and memorably declaring, “I am the President of the United States, clothed in immense power!”

All of these scenes are entirely fictional (see previous posts here for details on Stevens and here for details on the Lincoln family), but that memorable quotation from Lincoln actually has its roots in a real primary source.  Rep. John B. Alley (R, MA) claimed more than twenty years after the fact that he had heard from some unnamed person during the battle for the amendment that at some point the president had called into his office two congressmen in order to tell them that only two more votes were needed for passage and that they “must be procured.”  Then Alley’s recollection provided a lengthy verbatim quotation (86 words) which he attributed to Lincoln that culminated with the ringing phrase, “I am President of the United States, clothed with immense power” (note that the script silently changes “clothed with” to “clothed in” –a more fitting usage).  The problem is that this quotation is almost completely useless as historical testimony.  Alley was recalling events from two decades past that he had apparently heard about second- or third-hand.  There are no names, no dates, and the only specific detail –two votes short of the required two-thirds super-majority– seems suspiciously like the final vote tally (two more than needed).  Regardless, nobody can be trusted to remember verbatim quotations of such length.  Yet Doris Kearns Goodwin quotes the entire passage in her book, Team of Rivals (p. 687) and it appears it was from this account that Kushner got the raw material for his script, which he then embroidered by placing at the very end of the lobbying effort and in a meeting with several of the movie’s principal characters, not simply two unnamed congressmen.

The vote for what ultimately became the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution did occur on January 31, 1865 and the “Lincoln” filmmakers worked diligently to recreate that moment in its full historical grandeur.  But they also employ here, as elsewhere, various types of artistic license.  None of the floor exchanges from the movie actually match with the official accounts in the Congressional Globe.  Instead, the movie takes as its dramatic centerpiece for that day the story of President Lincoln’s evasive reply about impending peace talks.  This story derives not from the official record but rather from a recollection by Rep. James Ashley and from copies of notes he claimed he wrote to the president and to which the president replied.  According to Ashley, he wrote to the president on January 31:

“Dear Sir, The report is in circulation in the House that Peace Commissioners are on their way or are in the city, and is being used against us.  If it is true, I fear we shall loose [sic] the bill.  Please authorize me to contradict it, if not true.   Respectfully, J.M. Ashley.”

On the reverse side of this note, Lincoln wrote:

“So far as I know, there are no peace Commissioners in the City, or likely to be in it.  Jan. 31, 1865.  A. Lincoln”

The filmmakers present this exchange in the most dramatic fashion possible, having Democratic leader Fernando Wood (D, NY) first disrupt the proceedings, allegedly waving “affidavits from loyal citizens” confirming the existence of secret peace talks.  This creates chaos on the floor of the House that leads a fictional “conservative” Republican named Aaron Haddam to indicate (after receiving a critical nod from Preston Blair, perched in the gallery) that the “conservative faction of border and western Republicans” could not support an amendment “if a peace offer is being held hostage to its success.”  Then there is a mad footrace from the Capitol to the White House, involving Lincoln’s aides and the Seward lobbyists.  John Hay, the president’s young assistant private secretary, heatedly warns him against “making false representation” but Lincoln crafts his reply (technically true but obviously deceptive –since the commissioners were on their way to Hampton Roads, VA) and hands the note to seasoned lobbyist William N. Bilbo (James Spader).  Bilbo then delivers it to Rep. Ashley who reads it with a flourish to the entire House.   There is no record of any of this in the official proceedings.  Nor does Ashley claim in his recollection that he read the note from the president on the House floor.  Instead, it seems he may have simply showed it to some key figures.  Bilbo was not even in Washington at the time (see previous post here).  There was almost certainly no footrace.  And no contemporary or historical account has Preston Blair in the gallery giving directions to conservative congressmen.  Aaron Haddam is a fictional character, listed as a Republican from Kentucky, with no obvious historical counterpart.  All of these details are included in the film for dramatic effect but without any real documentation –beyond the notes which Ashley claimed to have in his possession but which are not apparently available in their original forms, and his recollection of the episode, which most historians have accepted as credible.

Then there is the matter of the roll call.  It was an unusual affair.  The House galleries were crowded, anticipation was high and the celebration afterward was unprecedented.  Newspapers and magazines all took note of the revolutionary nature of the moment.  Even the Congressional Globe invested this particular roll call with special drama, recording as it rarely did, outbursts of “considerable applause” when certain lame duck Democratic members, such as Rep. James English (D, CT), voted “ay” for the amendment. This has particular meaning in today’s context since there has erupted a small degree of controversy about Connecticut’s votes in 1865.  In the “Lincoln” movie version of the roll call, two fictional congressmen from Connecticut cast the very first votes on the amendment –both nays.  Yet in reality, the roll call proceeded in alphabetical order by congressman (not by state) and the entire four-man Connecticut delegation actually voted in favor of abolition (because of English’s critical switch).  This second fact helped convince modern-day Connecticut congressman Joe Courtney (D, CT) to demand an apology from Steven Spielberg  in early 2013 and to request a promise for a correction to the DVD edition of the movie.  Scriptwriter Tony Kushner quickly dismissed the request and the affair struck many as a publicity stunt, but New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd then sided with the congressman with an op-ed provocatively headlined, “The Oscar for Best Fabrication.”  What Dreamworks might do in the DVD that it promises to make freely available to every middle and high school in America remains to be seen.

Courtney was not the only figure upset by the filmmakers’ decisions regarding the roll call.  The script altered dozens of names of representatives in the 38th Congress, some for obscure reasons.  The filmed version of the final vote, for example, is full of fictitious names and invented dialogue.  One of these characters –Walter H. Washburn of an unidentified state– casts a vote against the amendment.  The problem is that there were two Washburns in the 38th Congress –a William Washburn and Elihu Washburne –both Republicans who voted eagerly in favor of the amendment. And naturally, their descendants are now disturbed by the implications of the movie and also want changes or corrections.

Most academic historians are less concerned about the name changes (although they seem strangely unnecessary) and have been more fixated on other minor differences from historical reality.  There is the problem of the voting by state (which is a convention of political movies but not the historical Congress).  Then the movie has figures in the gallery who were almost surely not there –such as Mary Lincoln and Preston Blair– but omits identifying figures we know to have been present, such as Frederick Douglass’s son, Charles, who wrote a touching letter afterward about the experience to his father.  The film also attempts to enhance the suspense of the moment by cutting away to places such as Grant’s headquarters at City Point, Virginia, where there is depicted a telegraph reporting in real time about the voting –something that did not actually happen.  And finally, there is the curious decision to have Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) take the official copy of the amendment from Edward McPherson, the House clerk, claiming that he will “return it in the morning. Creased but unharmed.”  One suspects that scriptwriter Tony Kushner must have some kind of source for that unique story –but if so, it is not yet apparent.

(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).

No single film could ever hope to capture the range of historical interpretations that have been offered to explain the complicated Lincoln family dynamics.  Some historians consider the marriage between Abraham and Mary Lincoln to have been “a fountain of misery.”  Others see longstanding affection and partnership.  Some find Lincoln to have been essentially an absentee father.  Others extol his sensitive parenting toward very different sons. And these debates have proven especially difficult to resolve because the evidence is so thin.  Hardly any of the family correspondence remains.  None of the family members kept diaries.  Almost all of our information about their relationship derives from second- or third-hand accounts, usually recollected after the war.

Yet this deficit of evidence also provides “Lincoln” scriptwriter Tony Kushner, director Steven Spielberg and actors such as Daniel Day-Lewis and Sally Field with freedom to offer their own interpretations.  They can imagine private moments where historians are otherwise forced to remain silent or least circumspect.  Two good examples of this occur in the film during Scenes 29 and 30 where President Lincoln engages in loud, back-to-back arguments with his oldest son Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and then with his wife Mary.  In one episode outside a temporary wartime hospital, the president actually slaps his son in anger.  This is wholly invented.  There is no source for this scene, and it seems entirely implausible to most Lincoln historians, not only because both Lincolns were almost notorious as parents for not disciplining their children, but also because Robert had a reputation for being so outwardly respectful toward his parents.  It seems almost impossible to believe that eldest Lincoln son would have told his father, as he does in the movie, “It’s mama you’re scared of, not me getting killed” and that his father would have then lost control and slapped him in public.  And yet … it could have happened.  There were tensions between father and son, and there was a quiet debate over whether or not Robert should join the Union army.  Nonetheless, this is a risky use of artistic license disconnected from any serious evidence.

The second major argument depicted in the movie is more plausible, but also wholly invented.  The script has Mary Lincoln telling her husband that “you’ve always blamed Robert for being born, for trapping you in a marriage that’s only ever given you grief and caused you regret!”  The line implies that the Lincoln’s had a shotgun wedding of some sort, but Robert was born almost exactly nine months after their wedding day in the early 1840s.  Nor is there any contemporary evidence that Mary Lincoln refused to console their youngest son Tad after his older brother Willie died, or that the president ever threatened her that “for everybody’s goddamned sake, I should have clapped you in the madhouse!”  Some of that information (about the “madhouse”) derives from Elizabeth Keckley’s recollected accounts about Mary’s grief in 1862, but most of the vitriol in this exchange is imagined –again, possibly real but certainly not proven by any reliable record.

Nor is there any basis in the historical record for intertwining the story of Robert Lincoln’s late entry into the Union army with his father’s increasingly determined efforts to secure passage of the antislavery amendment.  Yet in one of the movie’s more audacious –and improbable– plot twists, scriptwriter Tony Kushner follows the explosive back-to-back family arguments of Scenes 29 and 30 with a revealing trip to the opera that suddenly provides a personal motivation for Lincoln’s new sense of urgency about the amendment’s passage.  The script identifies the opera as Gounod’s “Faust” at the Odd Fellows Hall with the president, his wife and Elizabeth Keckley in attendance.  In reality, the Lincolns had seen this popular opera with William Seward when it was showing at  Grover’s Theater during the previous month, in early December 1864.  There is no record of Elizabeth Keckley ever attending theater or opera with the Lincolns and it seems unlikely that she would have remained in the box with the presidential couple while they conversed.  Yet Scene 31 has Keckley overhearing how Mary Lincoln finally reconciled herself to the decision about her son’s enlistment.  She informs her husband crisply, “I believe you when you insist that amending the constitution and abolishing slavery will end this war.  And since you are sending my son into the war, woe unto you if you fail to pass the amendment.”  Lincoln at first demurs, claiming, “Seward doesn’t want me leaving big muddy footprints all over town.”  But Mary Lincoln is unyielding.  ”Seward can’t do it,” she claims.  ”You must.  Because if you fail to secure the necessary votes, woe unto you, sir.  You will answer to me.”

(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).

In the scene in Spielberg’s “Lincoln” which introduces the audience to Rep. Thaddeus Stevens (R, PA), the chairman of the House Committee of Ways and Means, the script describes the setting in Stevens’ Capitol Hill office as “redolent of politics, ideology (a bust of Robespierre, a print of Tom Paine), long occupancy and hard work” (p. 30).  For historians, such characterizations seem heavy-handed and somewhat out-of-date.  Older generations of scholars sometimes referred to the radicals as “Jacobins” (borrowing insulting language from the period) and fixated on the eminently quotable and always crusty Stevens, but in recent years, historians have tried to be more attentive to the complexities of wartime partisanship.  For example, the fictional character in the movie named Asa Vintner Litton (Stephen Spinella), described in the script as a lame duck radical Republican from Maryland, seems to be based on Rep. Henry Winter Davis.  Yet Davis, despite his radical reputation, had a complicated view about the antislavery amendment.  He had missed the June 1864 vote on the amendment (intentionally, according to historian Michael Vorenberg in his book, Final Freedom, p. 129) because he considered his omnibus reconstruction plan (the controversial Wade-Davis Bill, which Lincoln pocket-vetoed that summer) preferable to the separate measures for abolition and reconstruction that had been introduced by Rep. James Ashley (R, Ohio) and were being debated again in January 1865.  In the film, however, Rep. Litton is the embodiment of pure radicalism and believes more deeply in Ashley’s amendment than anybody else –even in some ways Ashley himself– calling it “abolition’s best legal prayer.”

The film plays fast-and-loose in such minor ways with radical figures, mainly for the sake of simplicity but also sometimes it appears just out of error.  ”Bluff” Wade is a character in the script identified as a Republican senator from Massachusetts who somewhat implausibly attends the House Republican strategy sessions in Stevens’s office.  Presumably, the intention was to make this figure Benjamin “Bluff” Wade, the Republican radical  (and Davis’s partner in his failed Reconstruction bill), who was born in Massachusetts but served as a Republican senator from Ohio.

For the sake of simplicity, the film also makes Thaddeus Stevens the central radical figure organizing the amendment’s passage, even more so than the measure’s sponsor, Ashley.  This is not how many historians characterize Stevens’s role.  He was an important figure, but probably not the central one in securing passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.  Stevens had only four index entries in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals (2005), a nearly 800-page book from which the screenplay was adapted.  Stevens plays a somewhat larger role in Michael Vorenberg’s more compact Final Freedom (2001) with seven index entries but even there he is clearly superseded by other figures such as Ashley and Senator Lyman Trumbull (R, IL), who is not even mentioned in the film.  The latest and most comprehensive study of wartime abolition policies –James Oakes’s Freedom National (2012)– contains a mere six index entries for Stevens.

By contrast, Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) has about 45 speaking parts in the Spielberg film, apparently second only to Abraham Lincoln(Scene 17).  He looms large as a counter-weight to the president  –Lincoln’s near opposite in both style and policy.  Their confrontation in the White House kitchen is one of the movie’s most pivotal scenes and also arguably one of its most historically implausible.  Besides the unlikely setting, scriptwriter Tony Kushner seems to be investing many older –and quite hostile– ideas about Stevens into this conversation which contrasts Lincoln’s calculated, pragmatic approach to Stevens’s rigid, ideological worldview.  He actually has Stevens / Jones saying at one point, in defense of his sweeping plans for revolutionizing the South,  ”Ah, shit on the people and what they want and what they are ready for!  I don’t give a goddamn about the people and what they want!  This is the face of someone who has fought long and hard for the good of the people without caring much for any of ‘em.”   Such lines (minus the cursing) would be perfectly at home in the captions of D.W. Griffith’s ground-breaking and controversial silent film, “Birth of A Nation” (1915).  Griffith’s film depicted Reconstruction as an utter failure in part because of the unyielding attitudes of radicals like Austin Stoneman (the character based upon Stevens).  In the kitchen debate between Lincoln and Stevens, scriptwriter Kushner seems to embrace elements of this view.  He told NPR, for instance, “The abuse of the South after they were defeated was a catastrophe, and helped lead to just unimaginable, untellable human suffering.”

Still, Kushner’s / Spielberg’s representation of Stevens contains important nuances that save Tommy Lee Jones’s performance from being merely emblematic of the so-called “Lost Cause.”   The gripping scene during the House debates where Stevens / Jones restricts himself to endorsing “equality before the law” and nothing more underscores the pragmatic considerations that often motivated Radicals, especially during this moment in the Civil War.  However, the scene is also full of small-bore examples of artistic license.  The excerpts from the House debates are not real quotations from the Congressional GlobeJanuary 5, 1865  or even apparently from the sometimes more descriptive newspaper accounts.  Instead, they appear to be a creative collage of materials pulled together by Tony Kushner from a variety of secondary sources.  Michael Vorenberg, for example, quotes Stevens announcing during a different debate  –as part of a concerted radical strategy during this period to avoid inflammatory questions about racial equality — that he “never held to that doctrine of negro equality … not equality in all things -simply before the laws, nothing else.”  That was on –ten days before the movie has Lincoln lecturing Stevens about pragmatism in the White House kitchen and three weeks before it has the congressman saying something similar on the floor of the House (Scene 28).  In the movie, Stevens / Jones supposedly states on January 27, 1865 that, “I don’t hold with equality in all things only with equality before the law and nothing more.”  This prompts Mary Lincoln in the House gallery to remark to her black dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley, “Who’d ever guessed that old nightmare capable of such control?”  To this, Keckley excuses herself angrily and leaves.  Yet there’s no evidence from any contemporary report or from Keckley’s own recollection that she and Mary Lincoln ever attended the House debates.  Instead, what the filmmakers have done here by rearranging events and by inventing selected details is to increase the drama and ultimately to attribute Stevens’s “conversion” to Lincoln’s intervention.  Historical accounts give Lincoln no such credit, nor do they present a narrative pulsating with such drama.

One final footnote to the presentation of Thaddeus Stevens concerns the filmmakers’ curious decision to place him in bed with his mixed-race housekeeper, Lydia Hamilton Smith, near the very end of the film.  This is a reference to widely held suspicion (among contemporaries and historians) that Stevens had a romantic relationship with Smith who stayed with him both in Lancaster and in Washington.  Stevens himself never publicly acknowledged this relationship –nor did Smith. They were buried in separate graveyards (Stevens famously in an integrated cemetery in 1868; Smith, who often passed as white, revealingly, was buried in a segregated Catholic cemetery in Lancaster many years later). It may well have been true that they were lovers, but by injecting this issue into the movie, the filmmakers risk leaving the impression for some viewers that the “secret” reason for Stevens’s egalitarianism was his desire to legitimate his romance across racial lines.  This type of simplistic connection would appall most historians, but the awkward nature of the revelation (Scene 43) makes it plausible as an interpretation.

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

Alexander Stephens

It was bound to happen sooner or later.  Last week, sadly, we discovered that there was a forged document in the House Divided research engine.  David Gerleman from the Papers of Abraham Lincoln contacted us to point out that a letter supposedly written by Abraham Lincoln to Georgia politician (and future Confederate Vice President) Alexander Stephens, dated January 19, 1860, was a known Lincoln forgery.  The letter (since removed) was full of memorable and sometimes unLincolnian statements about the sectional crisis and ended with the line:  “This is the longest letter I ever dictated or wrote.”  Since Lincoln was not in the habit of dictating anything at all (especially in those pre-presidential days), this was a document that should have set off warning bells.  But it was published as part of a pamphlet that had been produced during the centennial of Lincoln’s birth in 1909 and even now remains in wide circulation on the Internet and elsewhere.  A recent scholarly article in the Tulane Law Review by John Inazu (“The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly” 2010) even began by quoting from it.  Yet there was no such exchange with Stephens. For a full discussion of the problems with the alleged January 19, 1860 document, see the article, “Four Spurious Lincoln Letters” in the Bulletin of the Abraham Lincoln Association 21 (Dec. 1930): 5-9, available online here). You can view the text of the forged document at the Internet Archive (where we apparently found it) inside a pamphlet edited by noted Lincoln collector Judd Stewart and entitled,  Some Lincoln Correspondence with Southern Leaders Before the Outbreak of the Civil War (1909).   Stewart was one of the so-called “Big Five” of early Lincoln collectors and was careless enough to fall victim to these types of scams (his collection, stripped of several other faked items, is now housed at the Huntington Library in California).  During the decades after Lincoln’s assassination, there was practically a land office business in Lincoln forgeries, and their ripple effects are still being felt today.  I exposed one of these problems in 1999 when actor Warren Beatty and journalist Jonathan Alter used a phony Lincoln quotation about the evils of big corporations that had originally been ginned up during the Populist era and continues to be quoted and re-quoted today despite numerous debunkings.  History News Network reprinted the piece in 2005 when author Kevin Phillips and historian Paul Kennedy both made the same mistake of admiring a Lincoln who sounded suspiciously like William Jennings Bryan.  What’s the lesson in all this for teachers and students?  Check your sources.  We never should have used a 1909 pamphlet for a Lincoln document when the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (8 vols., 1953; 1974, 1990) is the current gold standard in Lincoln’s writings (though the online Papers of Abraham Lincoln, where Gerleman works, will soon become the new AAA-rated repository for all things Lincolniana).  And always remember, when a story or document seems too “good” to be true … it just very well might be.

News coverage of Civil War events continued to run high this past week as the nation remembers the 150^th anniversary of the beginning of the conflict. The main event this week in history was Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration as president on March 4, 1861.

William C. Kashatus of the Philadelphia Inquirer provided a thoughtful overview of Lincoln’s first inaugural entitled “Speech that Launched the Lincoln Presidency.” The address, which was just 35 minutes, reflected the “balanced rhetoric of a shrewd politician,” according to Kashatus. Although Lincoln has become known as the “Great Emancipator,” his primary goal was to ensure that the Union was perpetual and vowed not to “interfere with slavery in the Sates where it existed.” Lincoln was both “firm and compassionate” in his first speech as president, and ended with an impassioned plea to his “dissatisfied fellow countrymen:”

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic cords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angles of our nature.”

David Jackson of the USA Today reported on a proclamation by President Obama in honor of Lincoln’s first inaugural. The President said that the “rugged rail-splitter” and “humble lawyer” helped heal the bloody divisions of Civil War through “simple eloquence and humble leadership marked by profound wisdom.”

“The Oval,” the USA Today’s project tracking the Obama presidency, also offered a concise take on the first inauguration.

Patrick Teegarden, contributing to the Colorado Statesman’s sesquicentennial column, wrote an article describing how “Lincoln’s Inaugural Addresses spearheaded our journey towards equality and freedom.”

Doug Kendall, Founder and President of the Constitutional Accountability Center, authored an interesting article entitled “Remembering the Civil War in the Tea Party Age.” As he discusses the debate about whether the Confederacy fought mainly over slavery or states’ rights, he points out that the Tea Party-infused politicians have been making arguments in favor of nullification and secession, as if the Confederacy had prevailed on its’ states rights’ platform. He says that we should celebrate the Constitution of our time, not “yearn for days long past when our Constitution, and our Union, were far less perfect.”

Andrew Glass of Politico provided a brief article commemorating Lincoln’s second inaugural address. Calling it one of Lincoln’s most powerful speeches, the magnanimous address was made even more powerful by his assassination, which occurred little more than a month after he delivered it.

In related news, Robert Redford is the director of The Conspirator (pictured above), a new movie about the plot to assassinate Lincoln to be released on April 15, 2011.

Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest

The Sons of Confederate Veterans’ recent proposal for a Mississippi state-issued license plate in honor Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was also an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan, has become the issue of considerable national attention. This controversy has been heightened with the refusal of Governor Haley Barbour to publicly denounce the group’s proposal.

Forrest is a controversial figure in American history; praised by some as a military genius and vilified by others for leading an 1864 massacre of black Union troops at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, and for his position as the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan following the war.

When he was asked about his stance, Governor Barbour replied: “I don’t go around denouncing people. That’s not going to happen. I don’t even denounce the news media.” He went on to add; “I know there’s not a chance it’ll become law.”

On Penn State’s blog of the Civil War Era, Sean Trainor, weighed in with a passionate response. “This should not be, and it cannot be,” he said, “We cannot allow [the] approval… of remembering so odious, so miserable, so unforgivable a figure as Nathan Bedford Forrest.” Trainor characterizes Forrest as a man who earned his fortune in slave trade, who led a massacre of surrendered African-American troops, and the person who ended his “illustrious personal history” as the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

He went on to say: “Forrest’s memory is… offensive… to all Americans. No amount of military ‘genius,’ no feat or maneuver on a battlefield near or far will make Forrest anything more than what he was: a grim manifestation of America’s most hateful legacy and the author of countless sorrows.”

Bloggers who defend the Sons of Confederate Veterans have shared their opinions in defense of the proposal. In a blog posted on “The Confederate American” website entitled “Nathan Bedford Forrest: Civil Rights Pioneer,” supporters express the belief that Forrest’s name has been unjustly tarnished by the evolving impressions of the Ku Klux Klan and false accusations about his actual involvement.

“As usual, the NAACP and the news media are attempting to shape opinions rather than impartially relay facts.” These supporters state that Forrest distanced himself from the Klan once it became a purely racial organization, and went on to embrace a “radical” doctrine that was “light years” ahead of other measures of the day, even in the North. They support this with quotes from a speech that Forrest is said to have made to a prominent civil rights group at the time.

“The good name of General Nathan Bedford Forrest should not be allowed to be falsely demeaned by those with a leftist ‘politically correct’ agenda. On the contrary, he must be remembered as a civil rights pioneer who tried his best to head off the over 100 years of racial strife that followed the War Between the States.”