[Voiceover] A bombardment of
the largest fleet the navy has ever assembled.
[Adam Smith] The first thing to say about Spielberg's Lincoln film is that it is a
phenomenally good
piece of cinema. It’s a phenomenally good film.
I would urge people to go and see it. I’d then urge them to go and read a
history book about the American Civil War.
[Lincoln] Euclid’s first Common Notion is this: things which are equal to the same thing
are equal to each other. [Smith] I mean I've spent
ten years or more studying, researching writing about
politics during the American Civil War and about Lincoln in particular,
and to an incredible extent I was watching Daniel Day-lewis and I was
watching the Lincoln that I'd read about, the Lincoln whose
letters I'd touched, I was watching him come to life. I think Daniel
Day-Lewis’s performance of Lincoln is extraordinary.
[Lincoln] In his book - hmm,
Euclid says this is self-evident.
This is not a big, sprawling biopic of
Lincoln's life. The film actually concentrates on only about three or four
weeks
in January 1865, with a few flashbacks and a few flashes forward,
and that's the period when Lincoln's white house and people around him were
pushing
Congress to pass the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution. That's
the amendment that finally
abolished slavery, and so on one level the film is like a 19th-century version
of The West Wing.
It's about the president trying to scare up votes for a measure, you need a
two-thirds majority for
a congressional amendment to pass at the House of Representatives, and in the end
this was achieved, and as depicted in the film, it was achieved
to the cheering and to the tears of
abolitionists, black people, people who’d been campaigning for the end of
slavery in the United States for decades.
[Film] You ought to be treated equally before the law.
[Smith] what draws me to him as a historian - I'm writing
a biography of Lincoln at the moment - what draws me to him
is this sense that Lincoln achieved all that
and rose to that position of such power and such prominence
without ever, you feel, succumbing to
the vice of arrogance.
He wasn’t a humble man, he knew
he had the common touch but he wasn't of the common people.
Yet he always had a sense of humility in the face of what he would call
“providence”,
he always had a sense that his
leadership was in a wider context in which there were forces beyond his own
control, and that makes me, I think, quite an appealing figure
to spend time with and to study. You know it's amazing, there are supposedly
being more
books written about Abraham Lincoln in the English language than anyone else
other than Jesus, and
yet there are still things about him that we as historians still argue fiercely
over, because
the evidence isn’t there or the evidence is contrary.
Even in the spring of 1865 when the film is set,
what you certainly don't see in the film is that Lincoln
had a meeting in which he continued to push
for the colonisation of freed
African-American slaves. In other words their resettlement
outside the bounds at the United States. Now this needs to be explained carefully.
Lincoln wasn't talking about forced
deportation and I don't think hr can possibly have imagined that
colonisation would be a solution for all of the
nearly five million African-American people in the United States at that time,
but
what it does show is that this
clear moral choice was coupled with much less
clear-cut choices about what would happen post-emancipation.
Lincoln is shown in the film as talking about perhaps
giving the vote to some freed men, and that is historically true, Lincoln did.
But what was fascinating about Lincoln is that the same man who could talk about giving
the vote to African-Americans
could also talk about colonisation.
What I'll try to do in my biography
is to see Lincoln as I think he should be seen,
as someone who was remarkably in tune with popular opinion,
whose racial views were sometimes quite abhorrent
by our standards in the 21st-century, whose understanding of the problem
of black people, the problem of slavery
was often remarkably limited and incomplete
but who learnt an extraordinary amount in an extraordinary
short time, and that seems to me to be a more right way of understanding him, a more
human way
of understanding him, actually. A way of projecting Lincoln not as an icon,
not as the great emancipator, but as
a very intelligent and reflective and articulate human being
who was dealing with extraordinary dilemmas, extraordinary pressures,
in one of the most, the most, dramatic
crises in the Western world and in the 19th-century.