Mr. Spielberg Goes to Washington

This essay appeared in Lincoln, Congress, and Emancipation, ed. Paul Finkelman and Donald R. Kennon (Ohio University Press, 2016), pp. 236-58


Mr. Spielberg Goes to Washington[1]

By Matthew Pinsker

 

When Frank Nugent, the film critic for the New York Times, offered his glowing review of Frank Capra’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (1939), he observed tartly that the director had gone after “the greatest game of all, the Senate,” in a fashion which subjected “the Capitol’s bill-collectors to a deal of quizzing and to a scrutiny which is not always tender.” Nugent was wise enough, however, to see through Capra’s faux cynicism about the institution, commenting that the great director was “a believer in democracy” who had created an American cinematic masterpiece that was “a stirring and even inspiring testament to liberty and freedom.”[2]

 

If such a judgment seems almost trite today, it was not so back then.  In the wake of the movie’s release in late 1939, many politicos balked angrily at they considered to be over-the-top depictions of senatorial corruption.  Future vice president Alben W. Barkley (D, Kentucky) was shocked that a major Hollywood movie could show “the Senate as the biggest aggregation of nincompoops on record!”  Future Supreme Court justice and secretary of state James F. Byrnes (D, South Carolina) coolly informed the Christian Science Monitor that the film portrayed “exactly the kind of picture that dictators of totalitarian governments would like to have their subjects believe exists in a democracy.”[3]  The controversy even injected an element of drama into a stalled anti-trust bill –the Neely anti-block booking bill– which aimed to break up studio-owned movie theater chains.  Proponents of the measure started arguing in public soon after the movie’s October release that such legislation would make it possible to limit the distribution of an anti-American film like “Mr. Smith.”  Capra was appalled.  “Can you imagine that?” he exclaimed to a journalist, “With all those things they’ve got to do down there, with the neutrality bill, and social legislation, with war breaking loose in Europe … the whole majesty of the United States Senate has to move against one moving picture.  It’s amazing!”[4]

 

When Steven Spielberg released his “Lincoln” movie following the 2012 midterm elections, there were a few such dust-ups, but nothing like the kind of fierce resistance that Capra had experienced.[5]  This was true despite the fact that Spielberg was going after what might be called the second “greatest game of all” –the US House of Representatives—with his gritty account of the behind-the-scenes efforts to secure passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. To most critical observers, Spielberg appeared as Nugent had described Capra, an ardent “believer in democracy,” despite taking plenty of sharp jabs at Capitol Hill and the American political process.  Spielberg’s somewhat misnamed movie is really about the moral complexity of the legislative process with Abraham Lincoln as a not-so-innocent protagonist (Mr. Smith as Great Emancipator) who overcomes a contentious House chamber full of very Capra-esque characters. Yet “Lincoln” is an even darker movie than “Mr. Smith,” because President Lincoln engages in no gallant, Hollywood-style filibuster to save the day.  Instead, according to the film, he manages one of the noblest achievements in American legislative history through implicit bribery and explicit deception.

 

It is remarkable that more critics have not focused on that darkness at the center of the “Lincoln” movie, especially since it is a film that seems almost designed for classroom use.  Teachers at the secondary and undergraduate level will be showing clips from “Lincoln” for years to come.  For that reason alone, it deserves our toughest scrutiny, especially since almost all of the scenes involving political intrigue and corruption have been thoroughly fictionalized.

 

A film like Spielberg’s “Lincoln” must be considered a work of fiction even though it is inspired by historical events and adapted from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, a real work of history.[6]  The reason that the movie itself cannot be filed under “non-fiction” is because the figures involved in the production take significant artistic license in order to create an engaging drama.  They invent characters, dialogue, and scenes.  They rearrange chronology.  They borrow from various types of sources without documenting any of them.  They also take big interpretive leaps of faith based more on instinct than evidence.  Yet artists such as scriptwriter Tony Kushner, filmmaker Steven Spielberg or actors such as Daniel Day-Lewis, can appear almost as historians because they go to such great lengths to try to “get it right” by recreating period details.  The result, however, is confusing for many audiences –especially for students– who want to know exactly what is real and what is invented.  Although this essay does not claim to establish what really happened with regard to the Thirteenth Amendment, it does highlight the most revealing examples of artistic license within the “Lincoln” film, especially the ones concerning Lincoln’s role in the lobbying effort.

 

There is no denying that the film opens in the most artistic way possible –a cinematic version of the Lincoln Memorial with Daniel Day-Lewis as President Lincoln seated, not in a marble temple, but rather on a dark wooden platform in the cold, wet Washington Naval Yard.   We then overhear the president in conversation with a kind of Greek chorus of fictional soldiers (two black and two white) who gather around him and in the course of their politically charged conversations end up reciting portions of the Gettysburg Address.  That ten-sentence speech has long been a sacred national text, but it was not one that Americans were reciting to each other in January 1865.  There was not even yet an established single text for the address –the version quoted by the soldiers (the so-called “Bliss Copy” which appears on the wall of the Memorial) was not the one Lincoln actually delivered at Gettysburg.[7] The scene is almost totally implausible from a strictly historical perspective, but it does create a memorable and dramatic framework for the movie –especially when you realize that the film does not end with Lincoln’s assassination, but rather with a flashback to his Second Inaugural Address, the other text which graces the interior walls of the Lincoln Memorial.

 

The movie then launches into its main narrative with a dream sequence.  In this case, the filmmakers have Abraham Lincoln describe an ominous-looking vision to Mary Lincoln, one that involves him standing alone on the deck of a ship. Yet this eerie dream derives from an account that appeared in the diary of Gideon Welles, who served as Lincoln’s secretary of navy.  Welles’s entry, dated April 14, 1865 (but written a few days afterward) described the president as telling his cabinet officers on the very day that he was assassinated about a recurring dream where “he seemed to be in some singular, indescribable vessel, and that he was moving with great rapidity [towards an indefinite shore].”  The president claimed to have had this dream before “nearly every great and important event of the War.”[8]  Tony Kushner’s script alters the language of this account somewhat and puts it into an exchange between husband and wife preceding a “revelation” about his intention to fight for passage of an amendment to abolish slavery during the January 1865 lame duck session of Congress.[9]  In this plot-setting scene, Mary Lincoln (Sally Fields) appears shocked by such news and argues vociferously against it, saying to her husband:

 

No one’s loved as much as you, no one’s ever been loved so much, by the people, you might do anything now. Don’t, don’t waste that power on an amendment bill that’s sure of defeat.[10]

 

In reality, however, Lincoln had already announced plans to push for a January vote on the abolition amendment –a measure that almost everyone expected to eventually.   Following his party’s landslide November election victories, the president’s annual message to Congress in early December 1864 had predicted in public and with great confidence that “the next Congress will pass the measure [abolishing slavery] if this does not.” Lincoln then bluntly suggested that since there was “only a question of time as to when the proposed amendment will go to the States” why “may we not agree that the sooner the better?”[11]  The tone of this passage is already triumphant.   Regardless, the president’s plan to push one more time for an abolition amendment in the outgoing 38th Congress was certainly not secret.  Yet the movie pretends that his wife and nearly everyone else in the capital was somehow unaware of all this and that many were opposed to it.  Here is how artistic license works in Hollywood movies.  Filmmakers strive to establish compelling conflicts at the outset of their work so that they can proceed to resolve them with a suspenseful plot that also reveals essential traits of the main characters along the way.  That’s just scriptwriting 101. History, of course, is messier.

 

Even though the movie runs quite long at 150 minutes, time constraints require numerous simplifications of this sort.  Consider the sweeping conflations regarding Civil War-era partisanship. There were deep divisions within the Republican Party during the 1860s that have traditionally been identified as a split between Radicals and Conservatives, but those factions were not arguing over abolition in January 1865 as the script repeatedly tries to maintain.  Key figures such as Secretary of State William Henry Seward, Republican Party elder statesman Francis Preston Blair, Sr., and Radical congressmen including James Ashley and Thaddeus Stevens may have despised each other (as the movie demonstrates), but by that point in the war they were all more or less in agreement that the Constitution had to be amended in order to eradicate the final underpinnings of the peculiar institution. This in itself was a pretty remarkable shift for some of these Republican politicians (Lincoln included) and was not at all apparent at the beginning of the conflict –but it was self-evident by 1865.[12]

 

Yet the film leaves a much different impression.  There’s no mention whatsoever about the president’s aggressive December 1864 message.  Instead, a determined Lincoln has to endure a series of mini-lectures and complaints from his stunned Republican colleagues during the first third of the film, once he starts “revealing” to them his plans for the abolition amendment. A skeptical Secretary Seward (David Strathairn) asks Lincoln pointedly, “since when has our party unanimously supported anything?”  Yet the correct answer to that question would have been the last time the abolition amendment had appeared in the House (June 1864) when the only Republican to vote against it was Rep. James Ashley, the sponsor, who did so on technical grounds so that he could bring it back later for reconsideration.[13]   The cabinet did once argue over the timing and merits of presidential emancipation, as the movie suggests in one very teachable scene, but that was in the summer of 1862, not in early 1865. And Montgomery Blair may well have been pushed out of the president’s cabinet in September 1864 as part of a deal with radicals, but Preston Blair (Hal Holbrook) surely never told Lincoln, as he does in the film: “Our Republicans ain’t abolitionist.”  By that point in the war, almost everybody in the Republican Party was an abolitionist.  Both Maryland and Missouri (Border States and key Blair strongholds) had already abolished slavery on their own initiative by early 1865. Yet Tony Kushner, the scriptwriter, has Blair sound almost like a Copperhead as he admonishes a beleaguered Lincoln: “We can’t tell our people they can vote yes on abolishing slavery unless at the same time we can tell ‘em that you’re seeking a negotiated peace.”[14]  That’s not only a false note coming from someone like Blair, but also it’s not even entirely clear that the elderly and perpetually controversial figure had any “people” left in the House now that his other son Frank (Francis Preston Blair, Jr.), a former congressman, was back in the Union army.  All of the so-called “Conservative Republicans” with speaking parts in this film and identified as being under Blair’s sway are fictional characters.

 

The conservative element of the Republican Party was not an obstacle to passage of the amendment.  Rather, the challenge for the amendment’s backers was to win over Democratic votes, presumably lame duck ones from the Lower North, as well as a few stray Border State Unionists who had never really identified as Republicans.  This was the great concern in January 1865 and one that fully engaged Lincoln.  He personally lobbied Border State congressmen such as James Rollins from Missouri, who had originally come to Washington in 1861 as a Constitutional Unionist.  Rollins had been reelected in 1862 by defeating a Radical Republican, but then had declined to run for reelection in 1864. The Missouri Unionist did not call himself a Republican during the war and had typically voted against Republican anti-slavery measures, including the abolition amendment in June 1864, but now, under these changing political circumstances, he appeared open to casting his ballot with the forces of history.[15] The story of Lincoln’s subsequent lobbying effort with Rollins is well known to historians, but strangely omitted from this movie.  Instead, the filmmakers create a fictional congressman from Missouri named Josiah “Beanpole” Burton, whom they explicitly label in the script as an “undecided” Republican.[16]  They then have some of his fictional constituents, a memorable couple named Mr. and Mrs. Jolly, visit the White House just as Lincoln and Seward are arguing about whether passage of the amendment was even possible during the lame duck session.  Skeptical of what he considers to be Lincoln’s unrealistic plans, the Seward character then artfully guides the Jolly’s through a conversation that exposes their latent racism, leaving viewers to appreciate just how daunting the prospect of black equality really was in 1865.  It’s a compelling scene, perhaps necessary to help educate a modern movie-going audience about the grim reality of nineteenth-century racial views, but it is the kind of fiction that does some real damage to the complexity of the historical record.

 

Still, by far the worst damage to the historical record comes from the film’s humorous but deeply cynical depiction of the lobbying effort orchestrated in the movie by an amusing trio of corrupt political hired guns.   Robert Latham (John Hawkes), Richard Schell (Tim Blake Nelson), and William N. Bilbo (James Spader) were real nineteenth-century political figures authorized by Secretary of State Seward in the winter of 1864-65 to help promote passage of what ultimately became the Thirteenth Amendment.  Historians typically describe these men (and sometimes a few others) as the “Seward Lobby” but disagree over exactly how they lobbied for the amendment and to what degree President Lincoln was aware of their activities.  Still, there’s no doubt that Latham and Schell were leading financiers and old friends of Seward’s and that Bilbo was a prominent southern attorney and businessman who had switched sides during the war.  Bilbo was mysterious but memorable, “known,” according to historians John and LaWanda Cox, “for his elaborate waistcoats, his long sideburns, and his elegant manners.”[17] Bilbo was also important enough that he had met with President Lincoln just after the 1864 election and then corresponded with him later (when he got arrested, no less, for being an alleged spy). While visiting the nation’s capital that winter, he roomed with a Democratic congressman.  When in Manhattan, he stayed in the city’s finest hotel.  Yet the movie introduces these characters as seedy outsiders, completely unknown to the president and forced to rent rooms in a “squirrel-infested attic,” as Bilbo (James Spader) puts it so memorably, because Seward was keeping them on such a tight retainer.[18]  Nothing could have been further from the truth.  These were well-connected men of affairs who had volunteered their services in the final effort to secure a constitutional revolution. After passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, Latham waxed indignantly when the secretary of state tried to have the men reimbursed for some of their expenditures.  He wrote to Seward’s son Frederick, “A Gentleman called to have me give an acct of expenses.  Which amt to nothing [emphasis added],” before generously offering that, “At any time that I can be of service to the Hon Sec of State or yourself I will do all I can but at my own expence,”[19]

 

The movie portrays the men in much different light –as very rough figures (Bilbo / Spader even says directly to President Lincoln at one point, “Well, I’ll be fucked.”) who spread bribes easily.  In fairness, however, this type of characterization does not just come out of thin air. Over the years, various historians have suggested that some kind of corruption was probably behind the amendment. Doris Kearns Goodwin did not write about the Seward Lobby in Team of Rivals, but she did claim in her work that Lincoln had made it perfectly “clear to his emissaries” that they could offer a range of “plum assignments, pardons, campaign contributions, and government jobs” for any Democratic members who would switch their votes.[20]  The only specific example, however, that Goodwin identifies for this type of quid pro quo corruption was Moses Odell, a New York Democrat, who became the naval officer for the port of New York soon after the war. Odell (not mentioned in the movie) did vote in favor of the amendment in January 1865, but it was surely not because of any last-minute patronage promise.  He had also voted for the abolition measure back in June 1864.  That is one reason why he was a lame duck.  Local Democrats had dumped him for repeatedly breaking ranks, especially over the all-important slavery question. More important for his job seeking prospects, however, was the fact that he had been the only House Democrat who had served on the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.  In that position, he had proven to be quite an ardent reformer, often willing to criticize Democratic generals, as well as someone who had become “warm personal friends” with then fellow committee member Senator Andrew Johnson (D, TN), the president who eventually appointed him in late 1865.[21]

 

The scholars who have focused most directly on corruption in the antislavery lobbying effort, such as the Coxes or Michael Vorenberg, have been far more cautious about drawing conclusions from the limited, mostly recollected evidence that remains.[22]  In truth, there are just a few second-hand and often decades old claims about shady patronage offers –none of which can be corroborated with contemporary evidence.  The only notable direct testimony for corruption comes from a letter in Seward’s papers, written by Robert Latham.  At one point, in early January, Latham wrote, “Money will certainly do it, if patriotism fails.”[23]  It’s a great line –one that really should have been in the movie—but the context of the letter suggests that Latham was probably joking.

 

Every lobbying scene in the film involves fictional congressmen and purely invented interactions.  None of it is real, not even recollected reality.  The best example of this imaginary corruption concerns Rep. Clay Hawkins of Ohio (Walton Goggins) who Bilbo (Spader) initially switches over to favor the amendment with the promise of a postmastership in Millersburg, Ohio following some memorably boozy hunting outings.  The movie has President Lincoln himself commenting on this news by remarking, “He’s selling himself cheap, ain’t he?”[24]  That line, in particular, seems unwarranted by the historical record. There was a single lame duck Democratic congressman from Ohio who switched his vote in favor of the antislavery amendment in January 1865 but his name was Wells A. Hutchins and he did not receive any post-war patronage appointment in the federal government.  Nor was he much recognizable in the character of Clay Hawkins.  In real life, Hutchins was a reasonably tough, independent-minded Democrat who had voted to support the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia in 1862 and who had backed the Lincoln Administration on several controversial issues during the war, including the suspension of habeas corpus or civil liberties –an issue that was especially unpopular among Ohio Democrats.[25]   Understanding this background helps explain why he was a lame duck in 1865 and why he was such a natural target for supporting the amendment. It had nothing to do with hunting, drinking or patronage.

 

There’s also no significant evidence connecting the Seward lobbyists to Hutchins or any Democrats outside of the Mid-Atlantic region.  According to LaWanda and John Cox, the lobbyists, especially Bilbo, spent most of their time in New York (not Washington) generally attempting to persuade influential Democratic newspapers (such as the New York World) and the state’s Democratic governor (Horatio Seymour) to send signals that would allow wavering lame duck Democrats in the region to feel more confident about switching their votes.[26]  In his more recent work on this subject, historian Leonard Richards agrees that the “main task” of the Seward Lobby “was to get support of the six New Yorkers” on Congressman Ashley’s list of persuadable Democratic lame ducks. Yet Richards is not even convinced they were pivotal in that limited effort.[27]

 

That is why perhaps the most telling example of artistic license in the whole film involves an amusing race between Bilbo (Spader) and White House aide John Hay (Joseph Cross) during the day of the final House vote on January 31, 1865.  The movie has the two figures running desperately to get Lincoln’s response to some damning reports of impending peace talks –a leak which the script claims would threaten to jeopardize the entire lobbying effort.  The younger Hay beats out the noticeably winded Bilbo, and then President Lincoln proceeds to draft an evasive reply that allows the final roll call to proceed and victory to be achieved.  It is a powerful climax with political machinations and social justice converging in ways that illustrate the film’s major insight about Lincoln –that he understood how to bend a flawed, messy democratic process toward moral consequences.  However, in real life, Bilbo was in New York at the time of the vote.  There was an evasive message from the president, but certainly no footrace from the Capitol and no significant presence in Washington at all by those Seward lobbyists during the final fight to win House passage of the amendment.  It turns out this dramatic moment is just another one of those fabled Hollywood chase scenes.

 

Another type of film tradition seems to lurk behind much of the “Lincoln” movie’s approach to the Radical Republicans and their ostensible leader, Thaddeus Stevens (R, PA).  The script describes the setting in Stevens’ Capitol Hill office as “redolent of politics, ideology (a bust of Robespierre, a print of Tom Paine), long occupancy and hard work.”[28]  Such characterizations would strike most historians as heavy-handed and utterly out-of-date.  Older generations of scholars sometimes referred to the radicals as “Jacobins,’ but in recent years, historians of the period have been more attentive to the complexities of wartime partisanship.  That scene in the office also establishes Thaddeus Stevens as the central radical figure organizing the amendment’s passage, even more so than the measure’s somewhat hapless sponsor, James Ashley.  This is not how most historians have characterized their respective roles.  As chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means, Stevens was undoubtedly an important figure, but probably not the central one in securing passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.  The chairman had only four index entries in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals (2005), a nearly 800-page book from which the screenplay was adapted.  Stevens plays a somewhat larger role in Michael Vorenberg’s more compact Final Freedom (2001) with seven index entries but even there he is clearly superseded by other figures such as Ashley and Senator Lyman Trumbull (R, IL), who is not even mentioned in the film.  The latest and most comprehensive study of wartime abolition policies –James Oakes’s Freedom National (2012)– contains a mere six index entries for Stevens.

 

By contrast, Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) has about 45 speaking parts in the Spielberg film, second only to Abraham Lincoln.  He looms large as a counter-weight to the president  –Lincoln’s near opposite in both style and policy.  Their confrontation in the White House kitchen following a reception upstairs organized by Mary Lincoln –and about exactly halfway through the script– proves to be one of the movie’s most gripping scenes.  Yet in that revealing encounter, Kushner seems to be investing many older and quite hostile ideas about Stevens into the film.  The scriptwriter contrasts Lincoln’s calculated, pragmatic approach with Stevens’s far more rigid, ideological worldview.  Nor is he subtle about where his sympathies lie.  He actually has Stevens (Jones) saying at one point, in defense of his sweeping plans for revolutionizing the South,  “Ah, shit on the people and what they want and what they are ready for!  I don’t give a goddamn about the people and what they want!  This is the face of someone who has fought long and hard for the good of the people without caring much for any of ‘em.”[29]   Such lines (minus the cursing) would be perfectly at home within the captions of D.W. Griffith’s groundbreaking and controversial silent film, “Birth of A Nation” (1915).  Griffith’s film depicted Reconstruction as an utter failure in part because of the unyielding attitudes of radicals like Austin Stoneman (the character based upon Stevens).  In the kitchen debate between Lincoln and Stevens, Kushner essentially embraces this view.  He has Lincoln commenting drily on Stevens’s outburst about the “people” by calling it, “the untempered version of Reconstruction,” and “not exactly” what he intends.  Nor does that comment appear to have been an accident.  Kushner pointedly informed one interviewer, after the movie’s release, “The abuse of the South after they were defeated was a catastrophe, and helped lead to just unimaginable, untellable human suffering.”[30]

 

Nonetheless, Spielberg’s “Lincoln” is no Lost Cause film.  Instead, the few Reconstruction-inspired stereotypes that might lurk within the script come across in the actual film more as accommodations to time constraints than as a result of any concerted political agenda.  Stevens is “untempered” because such views are just easier to establish than more complicated realities.  He is the boss of both radical congressman and senators, because it would be too difficult to flesh out characters like Benjamin “Bluff” Wade, identified in the script as “formidable Senator BLUFF WADE (R, MA), who’s never smiled.”[31]  Old Bluff provides some passing comic relief in the film, grousing with Stevens in the chairman’s office and then grimacing at Mrs. Lincoln during the White House reception, but otherwise the powerful radical from Ohio (not Massachusetts, his native state) gets no serious attention for his ambitious alternative to the abolition amendment, the so-called Wade-Davis bill, which Lincoln had pocket-vetoed the previous summer.  Curiously, there is no Congressman Henry Winter Davis in the film either.  Instead, the filmmakers present a fictional character named Asa Vintner Litton (Stephen Spinella), described in the script as a lame duck radical Republican from Maryland.  In the film, Litton appears as the embodiment of pure radicalism and believes more deeply in Ashley’s amendment than anybody else –even in some ways than Ashley himself– calling it “abolition’s best legal prayer.”[32]  Yet Henry Winter Davis, a radical lame duck from Maryland, was much more ambivalent about the amendment.  He had missed the June 1864 vote (intentionally, according to historian Michael Vorenberg) because he considered his omnibus reconstruction plan preferable to the separate measures for abolition and reconstruction that had been introduced by Ashley at the end of the first session and were now being debated again in January 1865.   Ultimately, Davis voted for the amendment in January, but the quirky and utterly fictional combination of Bluff Wade and Asa Linton offers none of these nuances of the historical record.[33]

 

There were more than time constraints, however, involved in the film’s simplistic explanation for how Lincoln finally won Stevens over to the more tempered approach for abolition. According to the movie, about two weeks after the White House reception, Stevens (Jones) finally decided to restrain himself and ended up endorsing a limited approach to civil right, at least while the outcome of the amendment vote was in jeopardy. He says repeatedly through gritted teeth, in the face of fierce race baiting from Copperhead leader Fernando Wood, “I don’t hold with equality in all things only with equality before the law and nothing more.”  This concession to pragmatism prompts Mary Lincoln (Fields) in the House gallery to remark to her black dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley (Gloria Reuben), “Who’d ever guessed that old nightmare capable of such control?”  To this, Keckley excuses herself angrily and leaves with tears welling in her eyes.[34]  It’s a compelling scene, but one full of artistic license.  The excerpts from the House debates are not real quotations from the Congressional Globe.   They appear instead to be a creative collage of materials pulled together by Tony Kushner from a variety of secondary sources.  Michael Vorenberg, for example, quotes Stevens earlier in that month claiming that he “never held to that doctrine of negro equality … not equality in all things -simply before the laws, nothing else.”  Yet that remark was made on January 5, 1865 –ten days before the kitchen scene.  And, in fact, Stevens and other radicals had made similar statements in the past.  Nor is there any evidence that Mary Lincoln ever attended those House debates.  Instead, what the filmmakers have done by rearranging events and inventing selected details is to attribute what looks like Stevens’s newfound pragmatism to Lincoln’s timely intervention.  That’s not historical fact, but it is critical to the plot.

 

According to the movie’s narrative, Friday, January 27, 1865 was an action-packed and pivotal day.  It was the day of Thaddeus Stevens’s surprisingly controlled performance in the House. It was a day marked by Abraham Lincoln’s bitter argument with his oldest son and then his subsequent clash with his wife Mary after he revealed that he had finally decided to allow their eldest son Robert to join the Union army.  That decision then leads Mary Lincoln, after her bitter outburst, to suddenly change her mind about the abolition amendment.  She informs her husband while they are attending theatre that night that if the amendment will truly help end the war, then she wants him to do whatever it takes to make it happen.  Upon returning to the White House from that very theatre outing, Lincoln also has a timely encounter with one of the few black characters in the film, dressmaker Keckley, who also urges the president to provide greater leadership in the fight for the antislavery amendment.  All of those “events” are fictional, but they prove essential for explaining the film’s point-of-view –namely, that Lincoln interjected himself at the end of the battle for the constitutional amendment in a way that proved decisive.

 

The next several scenes subsequently show Lincoln in urgent action.  He meets for the first time with the Seward lobbyists and helps plot their final, hardball strategy.  He cajoles support for the amendment by himself and with Secretary Seward.  Then finally on the night of Sunday, January 29, 1865, he presides over an intense strategy session in the White House with Rep. James Ashley, Preston and Montgomery Blair, Secretary of State Seward and aides John Nicolay and John Hay.  This is one of the key scenes featured in the movie’s trailer, showing an angry, forceful Lincoln demanding action by shouting, “Now, now, now!” and memorably declaring, “I am the President of the United States, clothed in immense power!”[35]

 

Ironically, this un-Lincolnian sounding statement is one of the few quotations in the movie that has roots in a real primary source.  Rep. John B. Alley (R, MA) claimed more than twenty years after the fact that he had heard from some unnamed person that during the battle for the amendment the president had called into his office a pair of unidentified congressmen in order to tell them that only two more votes were needed for passage and that they “must be procured.”  Then Alley’s recollection provided a lengthy verbatim quotation of 86 words, which he attributed to Lincoln, and which culminated with the ringing phrase, “I am President of the United States, clothed with immense power” (note that the script silently changes “clothed with” to “clothed in” –a more fitting usage).  Yet this quotation cannot be taken seriously.  Alley was recalling events from two decades past that he had apparently heard about second- or even third-hand.  There are no names, no dates, and the only specific detail –two votes short of the required two-thirds majority– seems suspiciously like the final vote tally.[36]  Regardless, nobody can be trusted to remember verbatim quotations of such length.  Yet Doris Kearns Goodwin quotes the entire passage in her book, Team of Rivals and it appears it was from this account that Kushner got the raw material for his script, which he then embroidered by placing it at the very end of the lobbying effort and in a meeting with several of the movie’s principal characters, not simply two unnamed congressmen.[37]

 

The vote for what ultimately became the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution did occur on January 31, 1865 and the “Lincoln” filmmakers work diligently to recreate that moment in its full historical grandeur.  But they also employ here, as elsewhere, various types of artistic license.  None of the floor exchanges from the movie actually match with the official accounts in the Congressional Globe.  Instead, the movie takes as its dramatic centerpiece the behind-the-scenes story of President Lincoln’s evasive reply about impending peace talks  –a minor deception or “lawyer’s dodge” as the script labels it—but one that helps smooth the way toward final passage.  This was a real story, but one that comes mostly from a recollection made shortly after the war by Rep. Ashley.[38]   According to Ashley, prior to the final vote, he had sent Lincoln a dire warning that rumors of peace talks were interfering with the likelihood of their success.  He wrote:

 

Dear Sir, The report is in circulation in the House that Peace Commissioners are on their way or are in the city, and is being used against us.  If it is true, I fear we shall loose [sic] the bill.  Please authorize me to contradict it, if not true.  Respectfully, J.M. Ashley.

 

This was a reference to confederate envoys who were at that moment on their way to Hampton Roads, Virginia, where in a few days, they would have an unprecedented meeting with President Lincoln. On the reverse side of Ashley’s note, Lincoln decided to acknowledge none of this, but instead wrote:

So far as I know, there are no peace Commissioners in the City, or likely to be in it.

Jan. 31, 1865.  A. Lincoln

 

The filmmakers present this exchange in the most dramatic fashion possible, having Democratic leader George Pendleton (D, Ohio) disrupt the morning’s proceedings, allegedly waving “affidavits from loyal citizens” confirming the existence of secret peace talks.  This creates some considerable chaos on the floor of the House that leads fictional “conservative” Republican Aaron Haddam to indicate (after receiving a critical nod from Preston Blair, perched conveniently in the gallery) that the “conservative faction of border and western Republicans” could not support an amendment “if a peace offer is being held hostage to its success.”[39]  What follows is that mad footrace from the Capitol to the White House described earlier, the one that involved Lincoln’s aides and the Seward lobbyists, who have now somehow magically appeared from their hotel rooms in New York City.

 

At the White House, the drama only intensifies as John Hay, the president’s young assistant private secretary, heatedly warns him against “making false representation” to Congress. Lincoln, however, crafts his deceptive answer and hands the note to Bilbo (Spader), the seasoned lobbyist, ignoring the warnings from Hay about this “impeachable” action.  Bilbo subsequently delivers the message to Rep. Ashley who reads it with a flourish to the entire House.   There is no record of any of this in the official proceedings, nor does it match with Ashley’s post-war description of how he shared the note with colleagues.  Bilbo was not even in Washington at the time, and there was almost certainly no footrace.  Nor does any contemporary account have Preston Blair in the gallery giving directions to conservative congressmen.  Aaron Haddam is a fictional character, listed as a Republican from Kentucky, with no obvious historical counterpart.  All of these details are included in the film merely for dramatic effect.

 

Yet these details matter, because the film asserts throughout that peace and abolition were two aspirations that appeared to be in utter collision to almost everybody at that time except Lincoln.  At one point, Seward (Strathairn) actually tells the president, “It’s either the amendment or this Confederate peace, you cannot have both.”[40]  That is arguably the central premise of the movie, and helps explain why the now-obscure February 3, 1865 encounter with Confederate envoys Alexander Stephens, John A. Campbell and Robert M.T. Hunter at Hampton Roads plays such an unexpectedly large role in the narrative.  That encounter was a real event; the only time in the war that Lincoln and Secretary Seward met with Confederate politicians to discuss the possibility of ending the conflict. The five men sat together for a couple of hours on board the steamboat River Queen in Union-controlled waters near Fortress Monroe.  Nothing came of their meeting, however, and the war itself ended in a matter of weeks anyway, following Confederate army surrenders in the field.  Moreover, no transcript exists for the Hampton Roads conversations, but former Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens famously wrote about the episode in his post-war reminiscences.  Stephens made some pretty wild claims about Lincoln’s alleged concessions that seem totally out of character for the president. Partly for this reason, many Civil War historians dismiss the Hampton Roads talks as little more than a sideshow –one of several improbable and failed efforts undertaken in the last year of the war to end the conflict.  These varied efforts appear so improbable in retrospect because both Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln had become implacable in their positions by that point.  Lincoln had clearly established his preconditions for peace from July 18, 1864 forward –an end to the rebellion, the restoration of the union, and the abandonment of slavery.  Those three conditions never changed in the final year of the conflict, making true peace talks impossible. Yet other historians have been more willing to take the Hampton Roads conference seriously.  Doris Kearns Goodwin takes the conference quite seriously in Team of Rivals (2005), which probably helps explain its importance to the movie.  The film, however, takes liberties with the narrative of this final peace effort that Goodwin does not.[41]

 

The movie has Lincoln meeting with Preston Blair and his children at the Blair House in early January, reluctantly agreeing to authorize the elder Blair to undertake a secret trip to Richmond in exchange for the family’s support for the antislavery amendment.  This January deal is what essentially results in the February meeting at Hampton Roads. In reality, Blair and Lincoln had met alone at the White House in December to discuss the proposed journey.  At that time, Lincoln authorized a pass for Blair to travel into enemy lines, yet it’s not at all clear what the two men agreed upon in terms of peace talks.  What we do know is that the elder statesman began his journey on January 3, 1865, arriving in Richmond by January 12, and that once in front of Davis, he proceeded to outline a wild scheme to end hostilities by initiating a joint expedition of former Confederate and Union troops into Mexico in order to remove the French occupation and restore the Monroe Doctrine.  This was not any kind of plan ever endorsed by President Lincoln. Davis also rejected most of Blair’s ideas outright, but he did agree to try to open talks for ending hostilities between what he termed the “two countries.”   Blair returned to Washington on January 16 and met with Lincoln on January 18, 1865.  The president agreed merely that the administration would receive envoys willing to secure peace for “our one common country.”  Three days later, Blair then brought this message back to Richmond.  Davis subsequently met with Alexander Stephens on January 27 and appointed him and former Supreme Court justice Campbell and Senator Hunter, as his personal envoys.  Some historians consider this a pretty good sign that Davis wasn’t serious himself about these potential talks, since all three men had become highly critical of his leadership.  It appeared instead that he was trying to show up his critics by demonstrating once and for all that they would come back with nothing from the unyielding Union leader.  Regardless of the motives of the respective presidents, however, the Confederate envoys traveled toward Union lines on January 29 and met with General Grant on January 30 before they eventually spent the morning of February 3 with Lincoln and Seward.[42]

 

The movie accelerates and rearranges this timeline pretty ruthlessly.  It ignores the fact that Blair took two trips to Richmond that occupied most of the month of January, and instead depicts him reporting back to Lincoln on or about January 10, 1865 with news that Davis had already appointed his three peace commissioners.  Lincoln then agrees to proceed with the talks if Blair (Holbrook) lobbies for his antislavery amendment.  Blair objects to the “horsetrading,” but accepts the condition.  The next day, Seward (Strathairn) reveals to Lincoln that he has found out about this deal with Blair and that he resents it bitterly.  That’s when he confronts Lincoln with the stark choice:  abolition or peace.[43] Yet once again, this type of simplistic contrast is only made evident to the movie audience by the rearranging and omitting of a host of details.

 

The movie also ducks the biggest historical controversy over Stephens’s post-war account of Hampton Roads –one that definitely undermines a key element of the Spielberg message.  According to the former Confederate vice president, Lincoln offered to allow southern states to reenter the union by ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment “prospectively,” suggesting that they could take up to five more years to put it into effect.[44]  Stephens also claimed that Lincoln proposed Union payments of up to $400 million for the South to abandon slavery. Campbell and Hunter also asserted after the war that Lincoln had offered at least some kind of compensation in their talks on February 3d.  There is no corroboration for Stephens’s outlandish claim about prospective ratification (which would be utterly unconstitutional), but there is contemporary evidence that Lincoln did consider in effect paying southern states to end the war and abandon slavery.  He actually drafted such a proposal and presented it to his cabinet on February 5, 1865, which unanimously opposed it.  Lincoln then dropped the plan.  Whether or not he was serious remains an open question.  But it is revealing that this idea does not appear in the “Lincoln” movie at all.  Doris Kearns Goodwin addresses it in Team of Rivals (2005), but here is a good illustration of the difference between works of history and historical fiction.  The former are almost always more complicated, and, in some ways, less satisfying.[45]

 

This insight also helps explain the matter of the final roll call vote on January 31, 1865.  It was an unusual affair by any account.  The House galleries were crowded, anticipation was high and the celebration afterward was unprecedented.  Newspapers and magazines all took note of the revolutionary nature of the moment.  Even the Congressional Globe invested this particular roll call with special drama, recording as it rarely did, outbursts of “considerable applause” when certain lame duck Democratic members, such as Rep. James English (D, CT), voted “ay” for the amendment.[46] Yet “Lincoln” movie ignores this fact.  Instead, two fictional congressmen from Connecticut cast the very first movie votes on the amendment –both nays.  This was a mistake on multiple levels. Nineteenth-century House roll call votes proceeded in alphabetical order by congressman (not by state) and the entire four-man Connecticut delegation voted in favor of abolition.  Such discrepancies might seem trivial, but modern-day Connecticut congressman Joe Courtney (D, CT) was enraged enough to demand a public apology from Steven Spielberg and to request a correction for the DVD edition of the movie.  New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd then sided with the congressman with a tough op-ed headlined, “The Oscar for Best Fabrication.”[47]  More important, this flap played out right in the middle of Academic Award season, and while it lacked the intensity of the original backlash against Capra’s “Mr. Smith,” it may well have impacted the relatively disappointing results for the film (only Daniel Day-Lewis received an Oscar).

 

When “Lincoln” scriptwriter Tony Kushner responded in public to the criticism from Congressman Courtney, he used the occasion to outline his theory about how to distinguish history from historical drama.  “Here’s my rule,” he wrote, “Ask yourself, ‘Did this thing happen?’ If the answer is yes, then it’s historical. Then ask, ‘Did this thing happen precisely this way?’ If the answer is yes, then it’s history; if the answer is no, not precisely this way, then it’s historical drama.”[48]

 

The problem with this line of defense is that it’s so simple-minded in its description of history.  Historians are not really capable of deciding how things happened “precisely.”  They argue over matters large and small, almost endlessly, because their method is totally dependent on evidence –and evidence changes. Historians routinely find new evidence, even for topics as familiar as Lincoln and the Civil War.  Sometimes they discover new ways of looking at old evidence.  Once in awhile, sadly, they lose evidence.  But it’s all about telling stories with the evidence –at least for historians.  For dramatists, the story-telling is accomplished in other ways, usually with the artistry of plot and character. They are not bound, as historians, by the rules of evidence.  That is the fundamental difference between history and historical fiction and no amount of getting some things “right” can make up for inventing or rearranging other things.  But it’s not clear that Kushner acknowledges this reality.  He seems to think that he was true to the historical evidence in the “Lincoln” movie. In his response to Rep. Courtney, Kushner offered a sweeping defense of his script as historical in nature:

 

The Thirteenth Amendment passed by a two-vote margin in the House in January 1865 because President Lincoln decided to push it through, using persuasion and patronage to switch the votes of lame-duck Democrats, all the while fending off a serious offer to negotiate peace from the South. None of the key moments of that story—the overarching story our film tells—are altered.[49]

 

Yet as this essay demonstrates, Kushner and Spielberg altered many “key moments” in this profoundly important historical story.  Pointing them out does not condemn the movie, certainly not as drama, but it serves as a reminder to students (and perhaps future filmmakers) that when you read or invoke the phrase, “Based on a true story,” that means it’s not a true story and should neither be judged –nor defended– as one.

 

This is something that Steven Spielberg himself once seemed only too happy to acknowledge.  In November 2012, he was invited to deliver the Dedication Day address at the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg.  Speaking on the 149th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, Spielberg was eloquent and quite profound on the differences between history and historical fiction.  “One of the jobs of art is to go to the impossible places that other disciplines like history must avoid,” he said explicitly, calling films like his, “an illusion,” “a fantasy,” and “a dream,” before adding, rightly, that nevertheless, “dreams matter.”  He noted with some poignancy that “among the reasons I wanted to make this film” was because he had hoped almost “impossibly to bring Lincoln back from his sleep of one and a half centuries, even if only for two and a half hours, and even if only in a cinematic dream.”[50]

 

The challenge for educators is that some of Spielberg’s historical dreams have a nightmarish quality.  It’s not just that Bluff Wade was a senator from Ohio instead of Massachusetts, or that Thaddeus Stevens delivered some remarks on January 5 instead of January 27.  It’s not even about who know what when regarding Lincoln’s intentions to push for an antislavery amendment. It’s about integrity.  Spielberg’s cinematic tour of Civil War Washington is dramatic because it is so full of corruption, intrigue and deception.  More important, it’s a movie that describes how Abraham Lincoln navigated this ethical morass through a series of increasingly dark compromises.  According to Spielberg’s vision, Lincoln had to deceptive and condon forms of corruption in order to succeed. That may have been so, but the record doesn’t really support it.  When Daniel Day-Lewis comments acidly that, “He’s selling himself cheap, ain’t he?” about the bribing of a fictional congressman, that particular dream really does matter if American students end up believing it was President Lincoln who said that.  Great filmmakers like Capra and Spielberg should never have to be tender about whatever political games they go after, but in doing so they must realize they are teaching powerful –and sometimes disturbing– lessons about democracy and leadership.

 

[1] A version of this essay was delivered as a talk at the 2014 US Capitol Historical Society Symposium and sections of this text have also appeared online at the “Unofficial Teacher’s Guide to Spielberg’s Lincoln,” http://housedivided.dickinson.edu/sites/emancipation/2013/02/14/warning-artists-at-work/

[2] Frank S. Nugent, “The Screen in Review,” New York Times, October 20, 1939.

[3] Barkley and Byrnes both quoted in Richard L. Strout, “Congress’s Response to ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’,” Christian Science Monitor, October 17, 1939, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma97/halnon/capra/smithrev.html. The Neely bill never became law.

[4] Quoted in Joseph McBridge, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (orig. pub. Simon & Schuster, 1992; Jackson Mississippi, 2011), 422.

[5] For a summary of the critical reaction to the movie, especially among historians, see “Historians React To the ‘Lincoln’ Movie,” Unofficial Teacher’s Guide to Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” http://housedivided.dickinson.edu/sites/emancipation/2013/02/07/historians-react-to-the-lincoln-movie/

[6] Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York, 2005).

[7] See Matthew Pinsker, “Lincoln’s Gettysburg Addresses,” Google Cultural Institute, https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/exhibit/lincoln-s-gettysburg-addresses/wReow-98

[8] Diary entry, April 14, 1865, The Civil War Diary of Gideon Welles: Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy, edited by William E. Gienapp and Erica L. Gienapp, (Urbana, 2014), 623.

[9] Tony Kushner, “Lincoln,” p. 8; the final script is available online via the Internet Archive, http://web.archive.org/web/20130120042546/http://www.dreamworkspicturesawards.com/SSPublicationScriptLincoln12.20.2011.pdf

[10] Kushner, “Lincoln,” 9.

[11] Annual Message to Congress, December 6, 1864, Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: 1953), 8: 149.

[12] The most sophisticated recent portrayal of Republican divisions over abolition and reconstruction comes from James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 (New York, 2013).

[13] Kushner, 12.  On this point, see Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (Cambridge, UK, 2001), 138-9.

[14] Kushner, 22.

[15] On Rollins, see Leonard L. Richards, Who Freed the Slaves? The Fight Over the Thirteenth Amendment (Chicago, 2015), 151.  On the Rollins-Lincoln relationship, see David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York, 1995), 554.

[16] Kushner, 17.

[17] LaWanda and John H. Cox, Politics, Principle & Prejudice, 1865-66: Dilemma of Reconstruction America (New York, 1963), 6.  Bilbo’s letter to Lincoln, thanking him for help after his arrest in New York, was not featured in the movie, but is available online:  William N. Bilbo to Abraham Lincoln, January 26, 1865, Abraham Lincoln Papers at Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/mss/mal/mal1/402/4026800/001.jpg

[18] Kushner, 33.

[19] Cox and Cox, 24.

[20] Goodwin, 687.

[21] Leonard L. Richards describes Odell’s politics succinctly in Who Freed The Slaves?, see pages180-2.  For a good description of Odell’s connections to Andrew Johnson, see New York Times, “Our Federal Relations; Changes in the Government Blue Book,” September 1, 1865. Johnson named Odell as naval officer with a recess appointment in the summer of 1865, but the former congressman did not last long in the job.  He suffered from throat cancer and died in June 1866.

[22] Cox and Cox, 28.  Vorenberg, 204.

[23] Cox and Cox, 17.

[24] Kushner, “Lincoln,” 47.

[25] For a good, short profile of Hutchins, a relatively obscure nineteenth-century congressman, see Nelson Wiley Evans and Emmons B. Stivers, A History of Adams County, Ohio (West Union, OH, 1900), 314-6 (via Google Books).

[26] Cox and Cox, 19-25.

[27] Richards, 210.  According to Richards, the Seward Lobby should really be identified as Bilbo, Emanuel B. Hart, Latham and George O. Jones.

[28] Kushner, 30.

[29] Kushner, 59.

[30] “Kushner’s ‘Lincoln’ is Strange, But Also Savvy,” NPR, November 15, 2012, http://www.npr.org/2012/11/15/165146361/kushners-lincoln-is-strange-but-also-savvy

[31] Kushner, 30.

[32] Kushner, 31.

[33] For a careful analysis of Davis’s complicated views on the abolition amendment, see Vorenberg, 129.

[34] Kushner, 78-9.

[35] Kushner, 99.

[36] John B. Alley in Allen Thordike Rice, ed., Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln By Distinguished Men of His Time (New York, 1886), 586.  Michael Vorenberg has a good dissection of this shaky recollection in Final Freedom, 198.

[37] Goodwin, 687.  Kushner, 97-9.

[38] Kushner, 104.  James M. Ashley to William H. Herndon, November 23, 1866 in Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln (Urbana, IL, 1998), 413-4.  Ashley included a copy of his correspondence with Lincoln in his message to Herndon, claiming John G. Nicolay had delivered it.  However, Elizabeth Peabody, a noted educator from Massachusetts, visited the White House in early February 1865 and heard a slightly different version of the story from President Lincoln, who told her about the notes after she complimented him on the passage of the amendment.  See Elizabeth Peabody to Horace Mann, Jr., [February 1865] in Arlin Turner, “Elizabeth Peabody Visits Lincoln, February 1865,”  New England Quarterly 48 (March 1975), 119-20.

[39] Kushner, 101.

[40] Kushner, 49.

[41] For a good representation of how most historians dismiss the Hampton Roads peace talks, see James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1988), 812-4.  Goodwin spends more space on Hampton Roads than on the actual fight for the amendment but neither gets more than a handful of pages; see Team of Rivals, 690-6.  A more thorough revisionist account of the failed peace talks, which argues for their importance, comes from William C. Harris, “The Hampton Roads Peace Conference: A Final Test of Lincoln’s Presidential Leadership,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 21 (Winter 2000), 30-61.  See also James B. Conroy, Our One Common Country: Abraham Lincoln and the Hampton Roads Peace Conference of 1865 (Guilford, CT, 2014).

[42] Harris provides the best chronology of the Blair role in his article, “The Hampton Roads Peace Conference.”

[43] Kushner, 41-9.

[44] Alexander H. Stephens, A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States  (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1870), 2: 614.

[45] For the possibility of compensation, see Stephens, 2; 617; Draft resolution, February 5, 1865 in Collected Works, 8: 260-1; Goodwin, 694-6.  In his article, Harris carefully analyzes the other lesser-known recollected accounts of the meeting from Campbell and Hunter.  Neither Lincoln nor Seward produced an account of the conversations.

[46] Congressional Globe 2d Session, January 31, 1865, p. 531

[47] Lyneka Little, “Congressman Says ‘Lincoln’ Got Connecticut’s Slavery Vote Wrong,” Wall Street Journal, February 7, 2013.  Maureen Dowd, “The Oscar For Best Fabrication,” New York Times, February 16, 2013.  It’s worth noting, however, that Congressman Courtney appeared to be utterly unaware that James English had switched his vote between June 1864 and January 1865.  In other words, the historical fiction of the movie captured something truthful about Connecticut’s divisions over abolition that attempts to “correct the record” were distorting.

[48] Christopher John Farley, “Tony Kushner Fires Back at Congressman’s ‘Lincoln’ Criticism,” Wall Street Journal, February 8, 2013.

[49] “Kusher Fires Back,” Wall Street Journal, February 8, 2013.

[50] Steven Spielberg, Dedication Day Address, November 19, 2012, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.