Spielberg's Lincoln: An Ambitious Pastiche directed by Steven Spielberg

Abstract

Steven Spielberg's Lincoln is a film geared to the tastes of another time and place. Charged with the herculean task of considering the legacy of "the Great Emancipator," the film is a marathon of rhetoric-laden vignettes that would surely have satisfied the elocution-hungry crowds that gathered for the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The film is not so much a Lincoln biopic as an ensemble-led lesson in crafting legislation in the nineteenth-century United States. While one would perhaps expect a split focus between the public and private personae of Lincoln (and there is plenty of that), it is clear from the onset that the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is, in fact, the central character of this narrative. One of the film's virtues is that it shows that while the end of slavery was all but assured, the legal status of formerly enslaved persons was by no means certain when the Civil War ended. If the war measures Lincoln took to emancipate slaves were not confirmed by a constitutional amendment, emancipation (at least in a de jure sense) could be repealed with a single act of peacetime legislation. The future of former slaves, and those who still remained in slavery as in the border states, would have been uncertain.