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 21^st 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 18^th 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