{"id":4071,"date":"2013-02-20T15:32:26","date_gmt":"2013-02-20T20:32:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/?p=4071"},"modified":"2013-02-20T15:32:26","modified_gmt":"2013-02-20T20:32:26","slug":"art-versus-history-in-the-lincoln-movie-opening","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/2013\/02\/20\/art-versus-history-in-the-lincoln-movie-opening\/","title":{"rendered":"Art Versus History in the Lincoln Movie Opening"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"SceneThe main narrative of Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” movie opens with a dream that Abraham Lincoln<\/a> describes to Mary Lincoln<\/a> in early January 1865. \u00a0This is historical in nature, but not true in every respect. \u00a0The 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<\/a>, who served as Lincoln\u2019s secretary of navy. \u00a0His 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 \u201che seemed to be in some singular, indescribable vessel, and that he was moving with great rapidity towards an indefinite shore.\u201d \u00a0He claimed that he had this dream before \u201cnearly every great and important event of the War.\u201d \u00a0Tony Kushner\u2019s script alters the language of this account and puts it into an exchange between husband and wife preceding a \u201crevelation\u201d about his intention to fight for passage of an amendment to abolish slavery during the January 1865 lame duck session of Congress. \u00a0Mary Lincoln (Sally Fields) acts shocked by this news and argues against it, saying to her husband:<\/p>\n

\u201cNo one\u2019s loved as much as you, no one\u2019s ever been loved so much, by\u00a0the people, you might do anything now. Don\u2019t, don\u2019t waste that power\u00a0on an amendment bill that\u2019s sure of defeat.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet in reality, Lincoln had already made public his plans to push for a January vote. \u00a0His annual message to Congress in\u00a0December 1864<\/a>\u00a0following landslide election victories for the Republican \/ Union party predicted with great confidence that \u201cthe next Congress will pass the measure [abolishing slavery] if this does not\u201d and so suggested that since there was \u201conly a question of time as to when the proposed amendment will go to the States\u201d why \u201cmay we not agree that the sooner the better?\u201d \u00a0The tone of this passage is almost taunting. \u00a0This is precisely how \u201cartistic license\u201d works in Hollywood movies. \u00a0Filmmakers 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. \u00a0History is messier. \u00a0So, 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 \u201cking of infinite space\u201d and uses very Lincolnian-sounding phrases such as \u201cflubdubs\u201d and \u201cshindy\u201d) the gist of the scene conflates and confuses some of the fundamental political realities of that moment.<\/p>\n

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 \u00a0object to these broad categories), but those factions were not arguing over abolition by January 1865 as the movie depicts in its opening scenes. \u00a0The early scenes that show figures such as Secretary of State William Henry Seward<\/a>, Republican Party elder statesman Francis Preston Blair, Sr.<\/a>, and Radical congressmen James Ashley and Thaddeus Stevens<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

First and most important, nobody would \u00a0have been surprised by the President\u2019s support for a January vote on the constitutional amendment. \u00a0He had already announced it publicly in December. \u00a0Second, 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. \u00a0The radicals, especially Stevens, wanted a social revolution in the South. \u00a0The 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. \u00a0But 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.<\/p>\n

\"SceneConsider this incongruity: \u00a0in the movie, Seward (David Strathairn) asks Lincoln, \u201csince when has our party unanimously supported anything?\u201d \u00a0and 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. \u00a0By the end of the war, Republicans supported the abolition of slavery \u2013it was a central plank of their party platform in the 1864 election and part of the basis for their landslide victories in November. \u00a0Border states such as Maryland and Missouri were already in the process of abolishing slavery on their own \u2013with full Republican support. Montgomery Blair had been \u201cpushed out\u201d of the president\u2019s cabinet in September 1864 as part of a deal with radicals \u2013as the movie suggests\u2013 but Preston Blair (Hal Holbrook) surely never told Lincoln, as he does in the film: \u201cWe can\u2019t tell our people they can vote yes on abolishing slavery unless at the same time we can tell \u2018em that you\u2019re seeking a negotiated peace.\u201d \u00a0It\u2019s not even entirely clear that the elderly and highly controversial Blair had any \u201cpeople\u201d left in the House now that his other son Frank (Francis Preston Blair, Jr.), a former congressman, was back in the Union army.<\/p>\n

More important, the so-called Conservative Republicans were not in any sense the obstacle to passage of the amendment. \u00a0The challenge for the amendment\u2019s backers was to win over Democratic votes, presumably lame duck Democratic votes \u2013not hold together Republicans (at least not on this question). Finally, it\u2019s 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). \u00a0Even their congressman \u2013\u201dBeanpole\u201d Burton\u2013 is fictional. \u00a0This is a perfectly fair use of artistic license, because the imaginary conversation reveals the complicated \u2013and quite real\u2013 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\u00a0James S. Rollins<\/a>, whom Lincoln did personally lobby to support this amendment. \u00a0Why Rollins gets omitted from the movie is difficult to explain.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

Images courtesy of Dreamworks<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The main narrative of Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” movie opens with a dream that Abraham Lincoln describes to Mary Lincoln in early January 1865. \u00a0This is historical in nature, but not true in every respect. \u00a0The story of Lincoln’s dream derives not from Mary Lincoln’s papers, but rather from an account that appears in the diary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,83,81,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-war-1861-1865","category-general-opinion","category-recent-news","category-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4071"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4076,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4071\/revisions\/4076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}