Question: Build a movie plot around this: What did Abraham Lincoln fear would be discarded by the courts? War-time 1863 Emancipation Proclamation
Answer:
The opening scene is a brutal, muddy melee. At close quarters in that wet place, the men on whom the camera closes in are attacking one another with bayonets, swords, fists, or even by holding an enemy's face in the mud to drown him. Many of the combatants are black. A voice-over says that the rebels (Confederates, or rebs) "killed every negro soldier they captured at Poison Springs... so at Jenkins Ferry, we decided we weren't taking no reb prisoners." The camera cuts to show the speaker, a black soldier in an army camp talking to someone who after a few seconds is revealed to be President Abraham Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis). The soldier (Private Harold Green, Colman Domingo) and his comrade (Corporal Ira Clark, David Oyelowo) tell Lincoln their names, ranks, and where they're headed next (Wilmington). They're pleased that they're finally being paid as much as the white soldiers, but Clark complains about the lack of commissioned negro officers and sarcastically predicts that whites might be able to tolerate a negro colonel in 50 years -- and "in 100 years, the vote." A couple of white soldiers who heard Lincoln speak at Gettysburg come up; one repeats the beginning of the Gettysburg address and his friend recites the next lines. They're called away, but Corporal Clark finishes the speech as he walks off.In January 1865, the recently reelected Lincoln notes the imminence of the Civil War's end, wondering out loud what will become of the former slaves. He finds insufficiency, even hypocrisy, in his Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which had freed most slaves as a war measure but had not made slavery illegal. Only a constitutional amendment illegalizing slavery, he realizes, will spell its permanent end in America.Debate rages even within his own cabinet, but as Lincoln sees it, the passage of the constitutional amendment cannot wait until the end of the war, for Southern slaves who had been freed as a war measure might fall into forced servitude once again. In an interview with a white couple from Missouri,...