“What did the ten fingers say to the South?”
Steven Spielberg is in full Amistad mode in Lincoln, and if nothing else, it’s nice to have his take on history once again unhoofed from a magical pony. It’s been a few years since ’97, so you may have forgotten how much the Speelzman enjoys him some semi-arcane historical political maneuvering as it relates to the legality of slavery. But boy does he! It fascinates him! For Spielberg, this is actually a good thing. On the rare occasion that Spielberg actually gets criticized these days, it’s usually on account of being a gooey hokey schmaltzy cheeseball. Nothing wrong with that, not everyone’s going to make films as subtle as Sofia Coppola, and thank God, but the biggest problem with cheesy hokum is that it can feel impersonal, like a director’s just telling the audience what they want to hear. And that becomes too broad, lacks personality, starts to feel like it was aimed at a composite of a person instead of a person, glossing over those little details and idiosyncrasies that give people, and movies, their individual charm. The best (and most surprising) thing about Lincoln is that it lets Spielberg indulge his more esoteric side, and it makes you remember that, oh right! This Steven Spielberg, he’s an actual person, and not just a series of focus-tested camera tricks, a chimera built of horse magic, child-like wonder and John Williams scores.
Rather than a broad biopic, Lincoln focuses on the final days of the Civil War, when Abe was trying to force the 13th amendment through a constipated House. Now, here’s where it gets complicated. Lincoln had already sort of freed the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation. The problem with that – as Daniel Day-Lincoln explains during a meeting of his advisors – is that the emancipation was a war powers act, resting on the legal assumption that the president has the right to seize property from enemy nations. That assumption was in turn problematic because for one, it de facto legitimized the notion that slaves were property, and for another, it supported the Confederacy’s disputed notion that the Confederacy was a sovereign nation. Not to mention that the emancipation didn’t apply to the border states or territory already reclaimed by the Union, and once the South was part of the Union again, as everyone hoped it would be, the emancipation did nothing to outlaw slavery there. The emancipation was mostly a big F-you to the South that only freed about 50,000 of the country’s four million slaves. Furthermore, many border staters’ and northerners’ only interest in outlawing slavery was as a way to crush the South’s will† and end the war. If Lincoln didn’t get slavery outlawed before the end of the war, he worried that it’d never be resolved. With the 13th Amendment already through the Senate, Lincoln is the story of Abraham Lincoln horse-trading and cajoling the House to pass an amendment it had already rejected less than a year earlier.
