Clausewitz taught us that war is an extension of politics. No apology, then, for including a review of Steven Spielberg’s new biopic Lincoln in Military History Monthly, even though the only battle scene is a short, visceral hand-to-hand struggle in mud and rain between Confederate soldiers and black Union men determined to kill them all in revenge for an earlier massacre of black prisoners.
It is a good way to open. For the subject of the film is a revolutionary war to remake America, and its central focus is the struggle to secure the passage of the Thirteen Amendment in January 1865, when the war was nearing its close, a provision designed to abolish slavery forever.
The Emancipation Proclamation of September 1862 had been an emergency war measure which Lincoln had enacted in his capacity as commander-in-chief. Its effect had been to radicalise the war by shutting off any possibility of compromise, encouraging slaves to flee the plantations, and paving the way for large-scale recruitment of black men into the Union Army.
But there could be no going back. Slavery had lead to secession and war; the fractured Union could only be reunited on a secure foundation if it was abolished. The possibility of Southern slave-owners mounting legal attempts to recover their ‘property’ after the war – much of that ‘property’ now comprising Union soldiers – was a transparent absurdity. It was to remove any possibility of this highly divisive development that Lincoln wanted the Thirteen Amendment passed.
Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance in the title role is stunning. The physical mannerisms, the folksy style, the brooding brilliance, the far-seeing vision and iron resolution of America’s greatest president are all there. The contrast with the squabbling, horse-trading, and petty-mindedness of the lesser men of the political class is sharply drawn. Yet Lincoln appears ‘warts and all’, his modus operandi very much that of the professional politician in its corruption and arm-twisting, his abolitionism sincere but pragmatic, and his relationships with black people made awkward by an apparently impassable racial barrier. The film is not an exercise in pure hagiography.
Dramatic intensity arises from the interaction of disparate forces – the free blacks, the radical abolitionists, the vacillators in the Lincoln cabinet, the conservative Republicans, the pro-slavery Democrats in Congress, even the Lincoln family with its inner domestic tensions – and from the fact that emissaries from the South are in play, offering the prospect of immediate peace before the Thirteenth Amendment is passed. The scene late in the film where Lincoln confronts Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens across the negotiating table aboard a paddle-steamer is one of the highlights. We see Stephens, a weasel-like racist, transfixed with horror and hatred as Lincoln calmly informs him that slavery is over.
The war is omnipresent throughout the film, but usually as a lurking presence off-stage. Apart from the brief opening battle scene, there are others depicting Grant’s headquarters, the Petersburg battlefield, and an army hospital. But most of the film is set in the White House, Congress, or somewhere in Washington. Yet the political battle that is waged is so intense, the issues so paramount and so central to the unprecedented slaughter that forms their backdrop, that this is surely a must-see film for serious students of military history.