Based largely on Doris Kearns Goodwin's monumental volume Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, the film follows Lincoln over the last four months of his presidency, as he simultaneously works to draw the Civil War to a close and secures congressional passage of the 13th Amendment. Steven Spielberg's new biopic, Lincoln, is probably the most ambitious Lincoln film in the history of its medium.
Much is left to context, and invariably, to imagination. We have no diaries with which to work, and obviously no film footage or recordings. How, then, can we access his mind, 150 years after the fact, when those closest to him found Lincoln so impenetrable in his own time? Relative to other presidents, he wrote comparatively few letters, and virtually none of a personal nature. Inscrutable and unknowable, he was, by his own admission, "rather inclined to silence." William Herndon, his law partner, worked beside him for 16 years but found him the most "shut-mouthed man who ever lived." Review: The Subtle Eloquence of 'Lincoln' "I wanted him to do it," Lincoln explained to a friend, "not say it." Still, he couldn't abide General Hunter's order. "You can not if you would, be blind to the signs of the times," he warned. Even as he disavowed abolition as a primary objective, Lincoln privately beseeched border state representatives to emancipate their slaves under generous terms, before the tide of war swept away the whole system under no terms at all. The year 1862 would see the president sign legislation banning the "peculiar institution" in Washington, DC and the western territories. It wasn't the first time that the president subordinated his personal antipathy toward slavery to placating the border states, and it wouldn't be the last. In May 1862, to the considerable frustration of anti-slavery stalwarts in his own party, Abraham Lincoln overturned an order issued by General David Hunter that would have freed every slave across vast swaths of the southern Atlantic coast.
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