"These dead shall not have died in vain"

Rating: 10/10 (1 December 2012)

Stephen Spielberg did some meticulous research or maybe I should say that Doris Kearns Goodwin did some for him when she wrote her best seller Team Of Rivals about Lincoln and his Cabinet during the Civil War. Otherwise Lincoln the film wouldn't be a film destined to win a lot of awards next year. Spielberg had it all down, including the club foot that Thaddeus Stevens had.
By the time that 1865 rolled around a most war weary public just wanted an end and they could see it in sight with Grant battering Lee in Virginia and taking some heavy casualties every time out and Sherman coming up from Georgia through the Carolinas after Joe Johnston. However the man in the White House had a deeper concern, he wanted something out of the war, something lasting. Like an end to slavery once and for all.
So with the Confederates looking to salvage their Slaveocracy and sending peace commissioners and the Radical Republicans like Charles Sumner in the Senate and Thaddeus Stevens in the House wanting abolition once and for all, Lincoln steered a tricky course through public opinion to get the 13th amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery.
In a nutshell the film Lincoln is about one of the lines from his famous Gettysburg Address. Abraham Lincoln wanted to know in his heart that the people he memorialized, who lay beneath the soil at Gettysburg, died for a noble purpose. As he said on that occasion, "these dead shall not have died in vain".
Not everyone in politics is in it for anything noble however and the President of the United States had more in the way of patronage to make things happen that he wanted. God only knows for instance what Lyndon Johnson had to offer to bring a few votes along to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Not everyone voted for that strictly to memorialize the late John F. Kennedy. Lincoln was an old hand at that from his years in Illinois.
Daniel Day-Lewis and Sally Field make a splendid Abe and Mary Lincoln and Spielberg gave us enough of a view of the home life at the White House with the two surviving sons. Robert Lincoln who was more his mother's son than his father's except he inherited Lincoln's ability as a lawyer wanted very much to serve in the Civil War. But Mary Lincoln lost her two boys between Robert and Tad and did not want to lose her oldest in the war. So Robert unlike his father who studied law by candlelight and clerked, got a Harvard education instead. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Robert and young Gulliver McGrath plays the mischievous Thomas Todd 'Tad' Lincoln.
Of the supporting cast Thaddeus Stevens as played by Tommy Lee Jones is most memorable. Stevens who unofficially led the Radicals was a man way ahead of his time. His 'housekeeper' was a black woman with whom he had two daughters whom he could not marry because of miscegenation laws. He wanted full equality for all and did not care who knew it. Later on he led the effort to impeach Lincoln's successor Andrew Johnson who as Vice President-elect plays no role here as most Vice Presidents do. That whole story is told albeit with a different historical slant in the film Tennessee Johnson with Van Heflin as Johnson and Lionel Barrymore as Stevens.
I think the only question remaining is how many Oscars Lincoln will pick up next year.