The
Speakers from Illinois
Predications
Mud oozed blood
and hid dead faces. Bayonets slit
throats and their butts cracked skulls.
Carnage flashed through rain as though nature were guiding the battle. Rebel soldiers fell with their bigoted convictions
intact. The battle scene scored for the
Union Army. History was unabridged, but
biased as told in Spielberg’s Lincoln.
The opening
scene reminds us of the war’s horrible costs.
It shadows the three long years of fighting already endured. The simple way men fought two centuries ago
was captured. Tactics whose odds favored
death much more than today. Men are seen
scrapping and punching, the hand-to-hand pedestrian approach to combat that
passed as official, commissioned, Civil War.
The scene filled in those years from 1861 through 1864 when the nation divided
and offered the black man freedom on the end of a gun. Abe is meeting the troops just before the
battle of Wilmington, North Carolina in the winter of ’65. Black soldiers explain how they have earned
the white’s respect by fighting, but still make 3.00 less in pay. He says in a few years they could be ranking
officers. In fifty years they might
reach the rank of Colonel and in a hundred years they might be able to vote.
Hindsight
The fifteenth
Amendment was ratified February 3, 1870.
The “Reconstruction Amendment” prohibited governments in the United
States from denying citizens the right to vote on the basis of race. Lincoln was a crafty one. He had no hand in writing that amendment, but
his previous legislation shaped the words posthumously.
The opening
scene closes with the president listening to a white Union soldier parrot his
1863 Gettysburg address verbatim. The film proceeds though the months leading up
to Lincoln’s assassination. And I would
think of Obama from time to time, our first black Commander in Chief 143 years
later. Our president has often quoted
Lincoln. But it occurred to me that the
way Obama initially went about securing affordable healthcare for millions had parallels
to how Lincoln went freeing the slaves.
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 was a product of his
constitutional authority as commander in chief.
It was not a law passed by congress and only freed slaves in states that
were in rebellion. The ruling did not
apply to the so called “border states,” states that did not declare their
secession before April, 1861. Delaware,
West Virginia, Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky were not free until the passing
of the thirteenth Amendment in December of 1865.
Political
poetics
Lincoln
wrestles with the smooth passage of the amendment. He knows the law, perhaps too well, from his
years as an Illinois lawyer. He
capitulates and avoids portraying the tyrant that men like Booth thought he
was. He can’t free the slaves too
fast. Lincoln’s methods are measured carefuly
and the legality of each clause is weighed.
The need to uphold his oath to “protect and defend” the constitution
bears down on him. It influences his
decision back when such integrity still hung in the balance.
When the
kitchen got too hot Abe would lighten the mood.
He’d tell stories; tales gathered from experiences as a lawyer and
voracious reader. He told a story about
Ethan Allen. After leading the capture
of Fort Ticonderoga in 1775 Allen met with King George III in England. He excused himself to use the WC (water
closet). In the facilities he noticed a portrait
of George Washington. Later the King
George asked Allen whether he noticed the portrait. He asked Mr. Allen if he found the placement
of Washington in poor taste. Ethan
replied, “not at all, nothing would make a British soldier shit so quick as the
sight of General Washington.
Whether the
anecdote actually happened is not clear.
Daniel Day Lewis’s Lincoln delivers the stories with wit. The credibility of them is not to be
questioned. They fall into that category
of intentionally unanswered elements that I am left with after many Spielberg
movies. His constituents bought it, and
his intent to lighten the mood succeeded.
Through January of 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment gets past the senate
and stalls on the House floor. It is
voted on twice in the film and defeated.
Not a line of dialogue
was heard. Lee’s surrender to Grant at
Appomattox Courthouse April 9, 1865 was shown but not told. A writer could see the value in this. The war ended. A scene shows the president on horseback cantoring
though the carnage of Richmond, the last battle of the war. An estimated 600, 000 young men were killed
in four years.
The stage is
set
“Death to
tyrants” is tucked discreetly in history.
It is never uttered until the fat lady has sung. The phrase won’t come to mind until all the
king’s horses have been fed to his men.
Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s theater on April 14 is a
footnote. The killing took place on Good
Friday; an irony I doubt history has missed.
140 years later our first black president is echoing his words. Obama’s “emancipation” of millions of
uninsured Americans originally drew from the same prudence Lincoln exercised to
posthumously pass the Thirteenth Amendment.
Republicans and
the tea parties may think Obama is as much of a tyrant as the democrats thought
Lincoln was. “King Abraham Africanist”
is a quote from the movie that lodged itself insidiously in my mind. It spoke of the sympathy Lincoln and his
supporters had for the black man. It
echoed the vehement resentment felt for that sympathy. It said how the South would fall if their
chief source of production was suddenly taken away.
Bootlegging
time
Prohibitions
don’t work and the antagonistic feeling they cause may not be worth the fight. In an
1840 speech to the Illinois House of Representatives Senator Lincoln said
“Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within
itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control
a man’s appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not
crimes. A Prohibition Law strikes a blow
at the very principles upon which our government was founded.” Lincoln knew the score. He could reason that prohibiting anything, up
to and including the unpaid servitude of human beings, could possibly irreparably
sever the union.
The pressure
was on Lincoln as he began his second term.
He made his decisions and implementations of mandates cautiously. Like Obama, who is beginning his second term,
his administration veered towards appeasement by compromise. In the film, Lincoln says that if he passed on
any opportunity to end the war he would be a hated man. He held out and risked being unpopular. If getting the black man lasting freedom from
involuntary servitude was the end result, he would weather angry clouds of
resentment. Now, at the beginning of the
21st century, after presidents from Roosevelt to Clinton tried to
reform health care, the young man from Illinois succeeded. Obama’s approval rating dropped, again and
again. It rose with the killing of Bin
Laden, but then fell again.
The issue for
Obama was affordable health care and laws preventing insurance companies from
denying coverage due to pre-existing conditions. The
issue for Lincoln was slavery. By 1861
the majority of the union’s states and territories were free. Each issue was contested; each had monetary
loss at stake. In Lincoln’s case the
time was right. Abolition of slavery had
been an issue in America since the Quaker’s efforts in the late 18th
century.
However, in the
case of health care reform, the timing may have been wrong. I saw what Obama intended when he addressed
the nation in 2009. I saw how he saw health care reform looked
like a vital part to dealing with two wars and a sagging economy, much of which
can be attributed to his predecessor.
His plan came with a hefty price tag.
But then, most things that benefit posterity do.
MB Moshe
©2013
