{"id":4078,"date":"2013-02-21T10:28:48","date_gmt":"2013-02-21T15:28:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/?p=4078"},"modified":"2013-02-21T10:29:16","modified_gmt":"2013-02-21T15:29:16","slug":"how-the-lincoln-movie-invented-its-lobbying-scenes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/2013\/02\/21\/how-the-lincoln-movie-invented-its-lobbying-scenes\/","title":{"rendered":"How the “Lincoln” Movie Invented Its Lobbying Scenes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"SceneAlthough \u201cLincoln\u201d 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. \u00a0What students might find confusing about these figures, however, is that despite the fact that they were \u201creal\u201d men, the movie either totally invents or sometimes just thoroughly rearranges their actual activities. \u00a0Robert Latham<\/a> (John Hawkes), Richard Schell<\/a> (Tim Blake Nelson), and William N. Bilbo<\/a> (James Spader) were three nineteenth-century political figures authorized by Secretary of State William Henry Seward<\/a> in the winter of 1864-65 to help promote passage of what ultimately became the Thirteenth Amendment. \u00a0Historians typically describe these men as the \u201cSeward Lobby\u201d but disagree over exactly how they lobbied for the amendment and to what degree President Lincoln was involved with or aware of their activities. \u00a0The most in-depth study of the lobbying effort appeared in 1963 and is available in full-text at the Internet Archive. \u00a0See especially the first chapter (\u201cThe Seward Lobby and the Thirteenth Amendment\u201d) in\u00a0LaWanda and John H. Cox,\u00a0Politics, Principle, & Prejudice, 1865-66\u00a0<\/i>(1963)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What you will discover by reading this remarkable account is that Latham and Schell were in fact old friends of \u00a0Seward\u2019s and that Bilbo (James Spader) was a prominent southern attorney and businessman who had switched sides during the war and who was \u201cknown for his elaborate waistcoats, his long sideburns, and his elegant manners\u201d (Cox and Cox, p. 6). \u00a0Bilbo was prominent enough that he actually met with President Lincoln just after the 1864 election and corresponded with him later. \u00a0Yet the movie introduces these characters as seedy outsiders, completely unknown to the president and forced to rent rooms in a \u201csquirrel-infested attic,\u201d as James Spader puts it memorably (Scene 10), because Seward was keeping them on such a tight retainer. \u00a0That might be how lobbyists work today \u2013on retainer and often in secret\u2013 but it wasn\u2019t quite true then. \u00a0After passage of the amendment, Latham, a major Wall Street\u00a0investor\u00a0(who later went bankrupt following the Panic of 1873), replied indignantly to an attempt by Seward to reimburse the men for their expenses. \u00a0He wrote in a letter to Seward\u2019s son Frederick, \u201cA Gentleman called to have me give an acct of expenses. \u00a0Which amt to nothing,\u201d \u00a0adding, \u201cAt 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,\u201d (Cox and Cox, p. 24).<\/p>\n

Yet the Spielberg movie portrays the men in much different light \u2013as rough, political guns-for-hire who curse freely (Bilbo \/ Spader even says directly to President Lincoln at one point, \u201cWell, I\u2019ll be fucked.\u201d) and who spread bribes easily. \u00a0The movie makers invent a series of quick scenes involving fictional congressmen and the bribes that it takes to sway them. \u00a0The 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. \u00a0The movie actually has President Lincoln himself commenting cynically on this news by remarking, \u201cHe\u2019s selling himself cheap, ain\u2019t he?\u201d (Scene 13). \u00a0All of this is made up. \u00a0There 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<\/a> and he did not receive any post-war patronage appointment in the federal government. \u00a0Nor was he much recognizable in the character of Clay Hawkins. \u00a0In 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\u00a0habeas corpus<\/em>\u00a0or civil liberties \u2013an issue that was especially unpopular among Ohio Democrats. \u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Equally important from a strictly historical perspective, there\u2019s no evidence connecting the Seward lobbyists to Hutchins or any Democrat outside of the eastern states. \u00a0According 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\u00a0New York<\/em>World<\/em>)\u00a0<\/em>and the state\u2019s Democratic governor (Horatio Seymour) to send signals that would allow wavering lame duck Democrats to feel more confident about switching their votes.<\/p>\n

That is why in some ways the most telling example of \u201cartistic license,\u201d 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. \u00a0The movie has the two men racing to get Lincoln\u2019s response to reports of impending peace talks \u2013a leak that threatens to jeopardize the entire lobbying effort. \u00a0The 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. \u00a0It is a dramatic climax with political machinations and social justice converging in ways that illustrate the film\u2019s major insight about Lincoln \u2013that he understood how a flawed, messy democratic process can be bent toward \u00a0profoundly moral consequences. \u00a0However, in real life, Bilbo was in New York at the time of the vote. \u00a0There 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.<\/p>\n

(This post has been excerpted from a longer essay, \u201cWarning: Artists at Work,\u201d that appears in \u201cThe Unofficial Guide to Spielberg\u2019s Lincoln<\/a>\u201d which is part of the House Divided Project\u2019s new\u00a0Emancipation Digital Classroom<\/a>).<\/em><\/p>\n

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

Although \u201cLincoln\u201d 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. \u00a0What students might find confusing about these figures, however, is that despite the fact that they were \u201creal\u201d men, the movie either totally invents or sometimes […]<\/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-4078","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\/4078","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=4078"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4081,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4078\/revisions\/4081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}