Go see “Lincoln.” Not because I own stock in its production company, not because it is an Oscar magnet, not because I am a Republican, but go see this film. It will show the true character of our greatest president at his best in the worst time in our national history. The Civil War brought to the surface what historians have called the snake under the table on which the Constitution was drafted. Slavery had been a global institution for centuries before some American radicals sat down to author a document whose worst part ordered the return of runaway slaves found in any of the 13 new states. The Bible seemed to allow it to the Israelites, as Confederates argued all during the war.
Slavery was an economic necessity to the South, or so most people thought. Necessity means cotton producing plantations without it could not affordably harvest the crop from which came the clothing and other fabrics used on the several continents where American companies sold their goods. Few argued that it was remotely humane or pleasant. But because it had always been around, like war, for instance, people assumed that it was moral. The Constitution made it legal.
But abolitionists like the minuscule Quakers said the time had come to take a moral step up from when George Washington took his oath of office in 1789. So around the world, governments began to outlaw it. Insurrectionist John Brown and a small party seized the munitions depot at Harpers Ferry, Va. with the hope of a popular slave revolt. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and when she met Lincoln, he said, “So you’re the little woman who gave me this big war.”
The film centers on Lincoln’s effort to amend the Constitution to make slavery anywhere in the U.S. illegal. It’s an eye-opener for many Americans who think the president is an emperor or king who can merely order something to have it done. Another part of our founding document directs that legislation originate in either of the two houses of Congress before the president can sign or veto it. Getting two rival parties in our legislature to agree on anything even noncontroversial takes a great deal of skill and luck. Laws have to benefit the senators or representatives for them to sign on, and they know they can hold out until something useful for their district or for themselves is offered to them. President Kennedy observed a few months in office how little power a president really has.
The horse trading done by Lincoln and his legislative aides to get the 13th amendment passed might scandalize the naïve. It comprises the heart of the movie, which has only one battle scene. It has still battlefield scenes of carnage and death. But the dickering and parrying to win over pro-slavery Democratic legislators and to keep Republican ones, with promises of benefices like postmaster positions and judgeships, were the currency of the bargaining. Impatient abolitionists like the wily radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens, a Pennsylvania congressman, and Horace Greeley, a rabid journalist (you know them), kept pushing him to honor his campaign promise to eliminate the hated institution. He would have liked to, but he knew that to get the bill through Congress, he had to gain enough votes by satisfying wildly disparate wants. His Emancipation Proclamation was only a temporary war-time initiative that would have lost effect at war’s end.
We today make some of the same simplistic demands on the Oval Office regardless of which party occupies it. As though the president were a king, we stand perplexed about why he does not just jack up taxes on the rich or gouge the many social programs like Medicaid that benefit poor people whom we are positive suffer because they refuse to work. He has all that power, we think. Why doesn’t he just make up his mind and decree these things?
We the electorate are the reason. While a majority voted for Obama, those same voters elected a majority of congressional Republicans, meaning that they/we wanted a liberal president but a conservative legislature. In theory this is supposed to somehow deliver largesse to us locally but parsimony when it comes to those anti-poverty programs needed, we think, far from where we live, even if our own South Jersey congressional districts have affluence cheek by jowl with poverty areas. It’s illogical, like driving with one foot on the gas and the other on the brake.
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