Dead White Men

Steven Spielberg's Lincoln is two-and-a-half hours of rhetorical one-upsmanship, passionate posturing, and good intentions from white men -- the film allows speaking roles to only a handful of women and people of color -- who legislate in abstract from those who will benefit.

Representatives talk plenty about how the 13th amendment will or won't impact their white male constitutents -- they favor the end of war but beyond that would not hope that African-Americans be given the same opportunity for success, trade, or business as they already fight to eke out amongst their lilly-headed brethren. Lincoln's secretery of state asks one farmer who is brought into Lincoln's study what he would hope the government might do regarding slavery once peace has been declared. His wife, in a rare display of matriarchy for the film, announces that he would much prefer to have less competition in his trade.

Lincoln wishes for the passage of the 13th ammendment, which abolished unwilling servitude (with the notable exception of prison labor), on supremely moral grounds. He believes that it must be his legacy to free the slaves. He deters a peace delegation from the Confederacy because he knows that they would not offer surrender, nor would they free their slaves. Many of his Lincoln's cabinet contemporaries call him mad -- not only because Peace is so widely wished for that in most hearts it hits closer than abolition (because these are white, landed gentry who have sons in the war, the war for them is more real than the horrors of Southern slavery, which they don't have to see or experience in an emotional way, rather only intellectually). And yet for Lincoln, he will send his son to war. He acknowledges that if he and his wife prevent their oldest from enlisting, he will hate them for the rest of their lives. And so he lets him go. For Lincoln, the intellectual and moral world trumps the emotional. His wife, whose character exudes emotion in an overly stereotypical portrayal of maternal hysteria, wonders why Lincoln must be caught in his head rather than swayed by feelings of grief. She cries on the floor while he threatens to throw her in the madhouse.

There is one scene that hints that Lincoln may be swayed to consider the emotions of another. Considering his daily litany of potentially pardonable cases, Lincoln comes across the case of a 16-year old boy who went AWOL and beat a horse. While talking to one of his staff members -- whom he awoke at 2 a.m. to discuss the minutiae -- Lincoln receives a nugget of advice that at once seems to portend an investigation into the emotions of black folk he may know. When Lincoln asks his staffmember what he thinks a suitable punishment for the young man should be, his staff replies, "Why don't we ask the horse?" What follows is a lingering medium-shot of Day-Lewis as he appears to experience a "eureka" moment. With such directorial attention focused on the man, it appears that he is considering asking slaves (in this extremely problematic allegory, the "horses," the victims of a dispute) what they think ought to be done in the dilemma of primacy between Peace and Abolition, or even what they imagine the fate of the Confederate leadership ought to be in the era of Reconstruction.

Lincoln's follow-up investigation never happens.

During his conversation with the woman of color who works for Mrs. Lincoln, Day-Lewis does not bend his character to ask what she may feel on the subject of the Ammendment. Indeed, she tells him off, and he does not appear to flinch. For Lincoln this is an intellectual crusade of historical importance rather than a question of how he may identify with an emotional appeal.

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How much to be accorded to this issue -- white men debated in the House for a month, putting one another down in haughty flourishes of grandeur. Thaddeus Stevens, played by Tommy Lee Jones, is the most dogmatic defender of "equality before God" rather than simply before the law -- in other words, he favored a more sweeping racial equality accorded to "radical Republicans." And his is the character most prone to putting down his elected compatriots by showing off his superior vocabulary. He enjoys flaunting his superior education more than anyone else. Ignorant of privelege, he reveals to Lincoln in their basement chat that he stopped caring a long time ago about his people. They elected him to make smart decisions for the rest of them. While Lincoln does not show his hand in this conversation, it appears that he too experiences his election as a vindication of his moral and intellectual superiority to make decisions on behalf of others.

The gerrymandered 3rd district of Maryland, which in 2012 threw out the Republican Roscoe Bartlett. In 186?, Lincoln bought off Democratic Representatives to vote for his amendment. Are we better off? Am I assuming my own moral high ground by arguing that if the guardians of good don't play by the rules, then they sully the impact of their victories by opening themselves up to perfectly legitimate cries of foul?

Liberalism, or leftism, based in force, will not establish a harmonious or equitable society. We have seen that with the 13th amendment and the lingering racism and discrimination which continue to plague this country. We may soon see the same as Democrats stack certain decks in their own favor.