Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln was one of his long-running projects. Earlier on, it was to be a more general biopic with Liam Neeson as the famed Abraham Lincoln. By the time it finally swung into proper production, however, Neeson dropped out and Daniel Day-Lewis took his place. Wisely, Spielberg also abandoned the idea of a film covering years, if not decades, of Lincoln’s life, a common mistake of biopics that results in unfocused, hole-ridden storylines. Instead he zeroed in on the president’s attempt to get the 13th Amendment passed in the House of Representatives.
The 13th Amendment was to end
slavery once and for all in the United States. It was the culmination of years
of policy development during the Civil War. Though he hated slavery, Lincoln
knew he could not abolish it and instead had supported the Republican Party’s views
of preventing its expansion into new territories. As the war progressed,
however, the Union Army and Federal government could not ignore the fact that
slave labor fueled the Confederacy, so runaway slaves were accepted as
“contraband” enemy property. By 1865 many now believed that slavery had to be
abolished, whether out of moral concerns or the pragmatic belief that it would
result in more strife down the road.
The 13th Amendment is opposed by various Democrats and some of the more conservative Republicans. A greater threat is a Confederate peace commission. If slavery’s continued existence in a restored Union ensures that a long, bloody war can finally end right now, many in the House will see the 13th as a guaranteed war to keep the body count going. Many historians disputed the central conflict of Lincoln, arguing that there was no way slavery could remain intact after the Civil War, even if the amendment initially failed to pass.
