How Accurate is Spielberg's "Lincoln"?

As I posted in my review of the new movie, I found the film to be amazingly accurate by Hollywood standards.  So I was intrigued to see comments on the film by two noted Lincoln authors, Matthew Pinsker and Allen Guelzo.

Guelzo's comments highlight some of the many accurate pieces of the film, including the spirit of Lincoln himself.  He is troubled by the "talkiness" of the movie.  Pinsker appreciates the movie, but is troubled by some of its inaccuracies and its simplification of history.

Both are generally correct in their assessments as historians, but I feel like they don't quite understand the possibilities and limitations of film.  Contrary to Pinsker, I am impressed by the sophistication of the storyline, which actually produces a fairly complete, if not fully nuanced, picture of the political realities faced by Lincoln.  In fact, I think this attempt at showing a more sophisticated picture, including the burden of the office beyond simply trying to pass the 13th Amendment, is why the film clocks in at well over 2 hours long.

Certainly there are inaccuracies in the movie, beyond conveniences like having Lincoln explicitly spell out to the Cabinet his underlying rationale for using the 13th Amendment to solve problems caused by executive assumption of war powers.  The Peterson House scene has significant problems in my mind -- the room is too big, Lincoln is in the bed wrong, Lincoln is dressed wrong -- and there is evidence that Lincoln handled military death cases in an established routine different from the late night reading depicted in the movie. 

But the film is hugely successful at exploring the nature of these people and the extraordinary time in which they lived.  While Pinsker is right to point out the confrontation between Lincoln and son Robert, I would argue that the scene is an accurate portrayal of certain key historical attributes -- the uneasy relationship between father and son, Lincoln's occasional flashes of temper (while Lincoln was notoriously lax in disciplining the children, there were exceptions, such as mistreatment of animals, that kindled his anger), Lincoln's defensiveness of Mary, to name a few.

Abraham Lincoln's Cooper Union Address

Today marks the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's historic address at New York City's Cooper Institute. A few years ago, no less than Harold Holzer boldly claimed that this speech -- and perhaps a photograph by Matthew Brady taken during this visit -- made Lincoln president.

Holzer is likely right. Certainly, Lincoln at Cooper Union, his book examining the speech, its preparation, context, and consequences is one of the best recent books on Lincoln (and was a finalist for the 2005 Lincoln Prize). At length, Holzer details Lincoln's preparation for this speech. Lincoln began with a simple question: What did the founders' believe was the role of the federal government in regulating slavery? Many in the slavery debate claimed that the founders were on their side. Lincoln painstakingly studied records in the Illinois State Law Library to determine how the founders actually voted on the issue of regulating slavery in the American territories. He determined that the Republican Party position correlated with the votes of the vast majority of the founders. In his Cooper Union address, Lincoln carefully presented these findings and then argued consequences based on them.

The speech proved that Lincoln, who had built the beginnings of a national reputation as the man who challenged Stephen Douglas to seven fierce debates, had intellectual power. The Cooper Union address is not built on wit or homespun stories, but on thoughtful analysis. But if we simply marvel at it today, without recognizing the habitual preparation behind it, we are like those Eastern crowds -- amazed that the backwoods, frontier lawyer could make such a smart, polished speech, but expecting him to return to his coarse jokes and rough ways, even as he goes to the White House.

Perhaps more interesting, and less commented on, is that this speech capably demonstrates one of Lincoln's greatest attributes -- his dogged preparation -- that is glimpsed throughout his life, and likely made Lincoln a great president. In fairness, much effort has been exhausted on examining certain aspects of Lincoln's meticulous personality. Douglas Wilson, in his remarkable book Lincoln's Sword, shows how Lincoln carefully edited his words before delivery or publication. Allen Guelzo, in Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation (oddly, the book that bested Holzer's for the 2005 Lincoln Prize), shows how carefully Lincoln considered the issue of emancipation and how he delicately, but determinedly, shaped the issue over the first 15 months of his presidency. In my estimation, though, no one has demonstrated Lincoln's similar deliberate instincts in his role as commander-in-chief. The onetime militiaman studied textbooks on military strategy and viewed demonstrations of modern military weapons in order to better understand how much his army could accomplish. As he became more confident in his military thinking, Lincoln became more proactive, and more effective, in dealing with his generals.

In short, I would argue (and this argument could be a book, so I'll be brief here) that Lincoln's preparation, which made his address at Cooper Union so important in his ascent to the presidency, was the same thing that had brought a frontier boy with little education from the backwoods of Kentucky and Indiana to the leadership of Illinois Republicans in 1860. This preparation also made Lincoln's presidency great, allowing him to lead effectively in the things he is most remembered for: saving the union, ending slavery, and his timeless words defending both those things.

The speech is well worth reading or re-reading. The full text is available in several places, including Holzer's book and countless collections of Lincoln speeches. It is also available online, courtesy of the Abraham Lincoln Association and the University of Michigan Library, in their full-text Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln.

New Lincoln Books This Week

There are a couple of Lincoln books being released this week, though neither of them should be classified  as new.  The first is the 50th anniversary edition of a classic book about the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, and the second is yet another collection of Lincoln quotations.

Releasing April 15

Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, 50th Anniversary Edition by Harry V. Jaffa (University of Chicago Press, 2009, paperback, 472 pages)

As the bicentennial celebration of Abraham Lincoln's birth continues, it can be difficult to imagine that the Abraham Lincoln currently being described had a different reputation even fifty years ago.  Where Lincoln is now seen as the master politician, who mastered both  issues and people and expressed his ideas eloquently, in the 1940s and 1950s he was seen as the unlikely frontier lawyer turned president.  He might be recognized for his common sense, but he was seen as a careful orator who conformed to the expectations of his audience, rather than as a shaper of ideas.

In this light, the Lincoln-Douglas debates took on a far different meaning in Lincoln's life story.  Rather than an example of Lincoln arguing significant ideas with the incumbent senator Stephen Douglas, the debates were often seen as an example of Lincoln the wily politician seeking to trap Douglas.  Such thinking led many writers of the time, including some famous Lincoln scholars, to suggest that the Civil War could have been avoided if Lincoln (and others) had just toned down their rhetoric, allowing cooler heads to prevail.

Jaffa's study of the debates confronted this attitude, suggesting that there were very real philosophical issues at the core of the debates.  As Merrill Peterson writes in his 1994 survey of the shifting interpretation of Lincoln through the years Lincoln in American Memory:

In 1959 a young student of classical political theory, Harry V. Jaffa,  not only assailed revisionism but restored the central importance of the natural rights doctrine of the Declaration of Independence -- "this grand pertinacity," as Charles Sumner had called it -- in Lincoln's politics.  His book Crisis of the House Divided focused on the issues in the Lincoln-Douglas debates.  Beveridge and Randall, it may be recalled, had dismissed the debates as little more than curious folklore and narrowed the differences between the candidates to the vanishing point.  Jaffa pronounced this treatment "shocking."  The issue between free soil and popular sovereignty in Kansas was crucial because the free states could not abandon their position "without losing the root of the conviction which was the foundation of their freedom."  That root was the Declaration of Independence, which Lincoln transformed from a charter of individual liberty into something "organic and sacramental -- a kind of political religion."  It was prophetic and progressive, looking to the realization of freedom and equality for all.  Jaffa came to this interpretation not through American history but through the study of Plato's Republic under the natural law theorist and scholar Leo Strauss, at the University of Chicago.

As might be guess from Peterson's description, Jaffa's book was highly controversial, both in its conclusions and in its philosophy, particularly in the 1960s.  However, it was also extremely influential, and in the years since most scholars have accepted Jaffa's underlying argument -- the Lincoln-Douglas debates were not just a show, but were quite substantive.

Jaffa's influence can be quite clearly traced to a more recent scholar like Allen Guelzo, whose writings focus on the development -- and especially the consistency -- of Lincoln's political philosophy.  This idea also informs the work of Harold Holzer, though Holzer also includes aspects of Lincoln's careful cultivation of his audience -- both are key parts to Holzer's argument in Lincoln at Cooper Union, for example.

For this 50th anniversary edition, Jaffa has written a new introduction.  I would imagine, though I have not seen the text, that it will comment on the controversies of the 1960s and also the recent controversies that arose from Thomas DiLorenzo and his ilk after Jaffa published a sequel, A New Birth of Freedom, in 2000.  While I have never read the book, I certainly know its reputation; it belongs in any serious Lincoln library.

The Words of Abraham Lincoln edited by Larry Shapiro (Newmarket Press, 2009, paperback, 128 pages)

On the other end of the spectrum is a book that will appeal to a much larger audience, a collection of Lincoln quotations, selected by History Book Club editorial director Larry Shapiro, who also penned an introduction.  According to the publisher information, all of the quotes are drawn from Lincoln's speeches and writings (probably The Collected Works), which at least should minimize the likelihood of doubtful Lincoln "quotations" being included.

Unlike other similar books, this one is actually part of an ongoing -- and small -- series of quotation books Newmarket has published over the last 20+ years, featuring such people as Martin Luther King, Albert Schweitzer, Desmond Tutu, and Ghandi.  As such, it probably is not a bad volume.  

New Lincoln Books This Week

February has arrived, so the publishers have pulled out all the stops with the Lincoln and Lincoln-related titles. Among the many new books this week, here are a few of the bigger titles.

Releasing in January

Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction by Allen C. Guelzo (Oxford University Press, US, 2009, paperback, 160 pages)

I found conflicting release dates for this book, so I've waited to write about it until this week. Among the recent spate of Lincoln biographies released have been three short biographies for adults by highly respected authors: this one by Guelzo and two released in December, one of comparable length by former senator George McGovern and an astounding one, if only for its length of only 96 pages, by James McPherson. For decades, it has been assumed that it was impossible to write a solid biography of Lincoln in around 250 pages or less. (In fact, for many years, it seemed that it was impossible to write a good biography in one volume, given prominent multi-volume biographies by writers like Carl Sandburg.) In 2002, Harvard professor William Gienapp released Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America, a concise 256 pages long, that was very well regarded by scholars and reviewers. (Personally, I was pretty underwhelmed by the effort, which seemed pretty thin to me.)

Now we have three prominent attempts to write a truly brief, but erudite, biography of Lincoln. Of these, this seems to me the most likely to be successful. McPherson and McGovern are first-time Lincoln authors, despite McPherson's career as a Civil War scholar. On the other hand, Guelzo has written an excellent full one-volume biography of Lincoln already -- Abraham Lincoln, Redeemer President. Since that book, Guelzo has focused exclusively on Lincoln with an excellent book on Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, another on the Lincoln-Douglas debates and a new book on Lincoln's philosophy. If a good short biography of Lincoln is possible, Guelzo seems up to the task.

On February 3

Lincoln's Men: The President and His Private Secretaries by Daniel Mark Epstein (Collins, 2009, hardcover, 272 pages)

Daniel Epstein now offers his third Lincoln book in the last four years -- a sign of the pace this popular author maintains. All of his Lincoln books consider specific relationships of Lincoln -- the first was a parallel biography of someone who Lincoln probably never met, Walt Whitman; the second was a biography of the marriage of Abraham and Mary Lincoln. In this book (not to be confused with a previous Lincoln's Men by William C. Davis about Lincoln's relationship with the Union soldiers) Epstein traces the relationship Lincoln had with his personal secretaries in the White House.

It is difficult to overstate the depth of Lincoln's relationship with his secretaries, particularly John Nicolay and John Hay. They slept in the White House and were virtually always in the executive office; they acted as gatekeepers to Lincoln's office, they handled Lincoln's correspondence, and sometimes they even carried out missions to serve as Lincoln's eyes and ears outside the White House. They wrote on Lincoln's behalf, sometimes in his name, sometimes in anonymous articles for Union newspapers. Years after Lincoln's death, these two men would co-write a 10-volume biography of Lincoln that focused largely on his presidential years.

This book focuses on Nicolay and Hay, although it appears to also have significant material about William Stoddard, an assistant secretary who joined the team midway through the administration. Having glanced at Epstein's previous books, it will likely be a fluid narrative of these relationships. I can only hope that it does this too often overlooked topic justice.

1864: Lincoln at the Gates of History by Charles Bracelen Flood (Simon & Schuster, 2009, hardcover, 544 pages)

Flood, whose most recent book was on the relationship between Union generals Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, considers the tumultuous year of 1864 for Lincoln. At the beginning of the year, Lincoln was under tremendous pressure not to run for reelection; by the middle of the year, it seemed obvious that the Union effort was bogged down and casualty rates were growing at an alarming rate, leading even Lincoln himself to think that he would lose the fall election and the Union would perish. By year's end, or course, Lincoln has been overwhelmingly reelected and the Confederacy appears crippled.

In some ways, this seems like David McCullough's recent book 1776, which attempted to show the up-and-down fortunes of the Americans during the Revolutionary War. And, like McCullough, Flood is a strong writer who weaves his characters into a generally gripping tale. So this should be a best-selling history book. Unlike that tale, Lincoln's life is more tragic than the revolution, by the end of 1864, Lincoln's assassination is less than four months away, which I'm sure tempers Flood's retelling of the year's dramatic events.

I have mixed feelings about this book based on previous books by Flood that I've read. His Lee: The Last Years is a gripping account of Robert E. Lee's brief post-war career. But Grant and Sherman: The Friendship That Won the Civil War was only okay -- solid narrative history, but I'm not sure Flood really adequately developed the promise of his subtitle; in fairness, it could have been titled "Grant and Sherman: The Friendship That Saved Sherman's Postwar Reputation and Career," but I don't really buy that the friendship won the war from Flood's book.

TV Review: "The Real Abraham Lincoln" (National Geographic documentary)

Last night, National Geographic Channel premiered their new one-hour "docudrama" about Lincoln, called "The Real Abraham Lincoln." (National Geographic has several programs called "The Real..." -- last night they followed "The Real Abraham Lincoln" with "The Real George Washington.") The program attempts to bring Lincoln to life by using an actor to portray him in several reconstructed scenes and offering occasional first-person narration.

Overall, the program is disappointing. One hour, less commercials, is too little time to present Lincoln's full cradle-to-grave biography. There were erratic jumps, complete with several misaligned images/dramatizations that did not mesh with the biographical narration. Worse, there were several misrepresentations in the film. Not only were the scenes with Lincoln dramatized, but the first-person narration was not constructed from Lincoln's own words. And to my ear they failed to sound much like Lincoln's own voice, offering too much detail about certain things in the wrong ways in the interest of quick personal disclosure. (While such personal disclosure is common on reality television, it was a very rare thing with Lincoln.)

Unlike some dramatizations, the actor playing Lincoln is very similar facially, and sometimes looks eerily like Lincoln must have in close-up. However, this impact is quickly lessened by the inadequate use of these dramatizations. In most of them, Lincoln appears alone on screen, or at most, in one scene, with a photographer and photographer's assistant. Lincoln walks alone through the Gettysburg National Cemetery. Lincoln rides alone on a train. Lincoln rides alone on horseback. Lincoln stands alone and looks out the window. The more I read about Lincoln's life, the clearer it becomes that he rarely had time to himself without people around him. Dramatizing the business and noise around Lincoln, from the war effort, to the public, to his family would have been interesting -- evidently it also would have been too expensive for this production.

By now, it feels like I'm picking on the documentary. And I haven't even mentioned the specific historical errors that creep into the narration, such as the locomotive steam engine appearing in Lincoln's life a good ten years too early and the later rather absurd suggestion that the north won the Civil War because they used their superior (and growing) railroad mileage effectively. Given that the Confederacy proved much more adept at using the railroad to move men and supplies quickly, this is certainly a dubious claim.

In the film, three authors/scholars are interviewed: K. M. Kostyal (who evidently writes young adult books for National Geographic), Richard Norton Smith, and Allan Guelzo. Of these, only Guelzo comes across very well, despite some clear quick edits in his comments. By the end, it seemed like listening to him talk for an hour (less commercials) would have been more helpful than this "docudrama."