Lincoln Through the Eyes of L

 

Serendipity struck again today.  It happens to me so often, I wonder if I’m some kind of paranormal wonder.  More likely, I am just more aware of it than most.

I had just left the neighborhood Cineplex and turned on the car radio.  It was tuned to a popular urban station, the one on which “Fly Jock” Tom Joyner, as he calls himself, broadcasts each weekday morning.

“All black people should get into the new Lincoln movie for free!”

Laughter burst through the speakers and I laughed along.  It was another one of J. Anthony Brown’s outrageous and purely comedic outbursts. Brown is a comedian who mans a microphone on The Tom Joyner Morning Show.

My head was swimming from the 2 hour and 30 minute experience of Stephen Spielberg’s latest biopic based on the book written be renowned historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.

I thought to myself, “If Rush Limbaugh had made that exact statement, substituting “white people” instead of black,  a media shit storm would befall us faster than I could get the car parked in front of my house.

Many white people have a problem with the unevenness of that truth.  It is one of the legacies of the era brought to a kind of close in that spring of 1865, when Lincoln managed to force the 13th Amendment to the Constitution through the House of Representatives, abolishing slavery in the United States forever.

The movie is riveting.  I know that for myself, but even more from the theater-full of senior citizens like me, who usually have to leave for a pit stop mid-movie.  I didn’t, and not one other person did either.

First, there is the mega-talented Daniel Day Lewis.  When I heard for the first time that he was playing Lincoln, I wondered why Hollywood couldn’t have found an American actor to fill the part.  I left the theater with no reservations.  Daniel Day Lewis was Abraham Lincoln.  The high-pitched voice.  The ever-present sense of humor.The penchant for long periods of contemplation.  The love of telling stories as a means to make his points.  The stooped-shouldered gait. 

As a movie buff and the mother of an actor, I sometimes have trouble with the phenomenon known as the “suspension of disbelief.”  That is especially true when I watch my son in a production.  But this time, it took less than two minutes on screen for the actor to begin looking more like Abraham Lincoln to me than many actual photographs of Lincoln himself did.

Lincoln is the vehicle for one outstanding performance by an actor after another.  Sally Field, of all people, portrayed the hard-boiled and tortured Mary Todd Lincoln with a grit and intensity never seen before, even in Norma Rae.  The normally brilliant David Straithairn is exceptional as Secretary of State William Seward. Hollywood heavyweights Tommy Lee Jones and James Spader as Radical Republican stalwart Thaddeus Stevens and hard-drinking lobbyist for the 13th Amendment, respectively, bring a feisty comedic element to the raucous and nasty politics of the time.

This movie is so convincing on so many levels – makeup, costuming, piles of dead soldiers in mass graves – I sat in awe at the complexity of the presidential and congressional politics that drove that War Between the States, as Southerners prefer to call it.  And when the vote was counted and the 13th Amendment was passed in that man-filled chamber -- where for the first time Negroes were allowed to sit in the gallery --  and Mary Lincoln’s personal maid listened while U.S. Congressmen referred to her and her people as “niggers,” I couldn’t  stop the tears from pushing past my eyes.

The Civil War was about so much more than the abolition of slavery.  Conservatives were Democrats.  Abolitionists were Republicans.  The military endured the White House and Congress, just as it does today.  And for the most part, those ragtag legions of Confederate soldiers had no idea why they were fighting.  In the Ken Burns documentary about the Civil War a story is told about a Rebel soldier who was asked by a Union officer why he was fighting.  He answered, “Because you are here.” 

Southerners are often heard saying they were never pro-slavery as a separate concept.  What the war was about to them was the protection of “their way of life.”  Like the average American today, very few understood enough about the economy of the agrarian South to know how indispensible slavery was to it.  The morality of slavery was generally an afterthought in the entire affair. 

I came away understanding a lot more about the struggle it took to wrench away the African-American as “property” from the Southern planters.  To them, it was as unacceptable as the government seizing their lands.  I will never understand how those planters and their beneficiaries could regard their slaves the way they did their mules or other work animals.  I don’t know what a person has to tell himself or herself to make it okay to disregard the humanness of the women who cooked for them, clothed them, wet-nursed their children and sometimes “comforted” them in the dark.

What I do understand is that Abraham Lincoln was a politician first.  He was flawed in his character, as are we all.  He showed favoritism to his youngest son and had little time for his oldest one.  But there was a basic morality that informed his day-to-day decisions in those tumultuous few months of his second term.  And he was very brave.