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Movie Takes
Lincoln
Persuasive and eminently watchable — even if self-serving.
The first thing to be said about Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is what a brave idea it represents. It is that rarest of cinematic creatures, a movie about political processes (as opposed to political generalities and fine-sounding aspirations) which somehow manages to avoid the otherwise certain danger of boring its audience to death. The movie could have been made to remind us of Enoch Powell’s dictum that “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.” This is about the “happy juncture” Lincoln had arrived at before his sad end — which takes place off screen — and so ends up as a movie about another most rare thing, political success.
Yet all of Mr. Spielberg’s considerable powers as a showman, all of the claustrophobic interiors of his brilliant d.p., Janusz Kaminski, all of the facility with clever dialogue of his screen-writer, Tony Kushner, and all of the acting talent of Daniel Day-Lewis in the title role, may have been necessary to keep us from getting bogged down in back room horse-trading and deal-making involved in the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which outlawed slavery forever. The main thing is that they succeeded, though the result is curious and worthy more than it is noble and soaring in the manner now traditional for Hollywood representations of the 16th president. It also manages to produce a genuine emotional kick as well as a subtle apologia for the Obama presidency. We shall return to that presently.
Of the top talents involved, the most important is that of Mr. Day-Lewis, who makes his Lincoln completely believable without diminishing the mystique which has always made his character’s story such a favorite with the movies. I am rather a skeptic about the “method” acting that he seems to go in for, but it has certainly paid off in this case. Even the convoluted legal explanation of why Lincoln needs to pass the Amendment during the lame-duck session with Democratic support when he would find the task far easier if he waited for a more sympathetic Republican Congress two months hence briefly makes sense, coming from his mouth. Both the unaffected folksiness of his laughter and story-telling and the irritation it must have caused in many even of his political allies ring true. At one point Bruce McGill as Secretary of War Edwin Stanton interrupts the boss by saying, with palpable exasperation: “No, you’re not going to tell a story. I can’t bear to hear one.” The President falls into an easy, masculine camaraderie with his “Team of Rivals” (to cite the title of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book on which the screenplay was partially based), but we also find it easy to believe in his underlying loneliness and his deep sadness.
Sally Fields as Mary Todd Lincoln also does a fine job in making her character come alive, though her most important function is to suggest a particular and personal reason for that sadness: the death of their young son Willie, probably from typhoid fever, three years earlier and the marital strife which ensued from (among other things) her accusation that Lincoln’s grief for their child had been given insufficient expression. A thunderous quarrel between them on this subject is counterpointed and contrasted with a scene of domestic tranquility and affection as the two of them ride out together in the springtime and an open carriage, like a young couple courting, as an expression of joy and relief at the end of the war. Young Gulliver McGrath also helps to bring out the domestic Lincoln as Tad, Willie’s brother who survived his illness (though not, as it turned out, for long). But Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the Lincolns’ oldest son, Robert, who drops out of Harvard to take up a commission in the army in defiance of his parents’ wishes, is rather a distraction, in spite of his unfashionable plea on behalf of honor.
It appears to have been Mr. Spielberg’s decision to narrow the film’s focus from the epic scale suggested by the Civil War, which mostly takes place off-screen, to the more parochial-seeming struggle over Congressional passage of the 13th Amendment in January of 1865, when the outcome of the war was no longer in doubt. He has been helped to find the drama in the story by the bravura performance of Tommy Lee Jones as the “Radical Republican” leader in Congress, Thaddeus Stevens, whose egalitarian views really were radical for their time. When, in order to pass the Amendment, Stevens is required to repeat before the House, as if by rote, “I don’t hold with equality in all things, only equality before the law and nothing more,” the lie comes off as a noble one, as it is meant to do — the shining and redeeming example of under-handedness on the part of the forces of right and goodness by whose light a great many more, and more doubtful ones, are meant to be excused as essentially the same as the now-traditional Fabian tactics of today’s “progressive” tendency.
A trio of dubious characters played as comic grotesques by James Spader, Tim Blake Nelson, and John Hawkes are responsible for most of the outright corruption we see, as they are licensed by Lincoln’s right hand man, David Strathairn’s William Seward, and later by Lincoln himself to offer patronage jobs in return for votes. But Lincoln himself is also guilty of duplicity and double-dealing, making promises he knows he can’t or won’t keep and palming off one of his supporters, Hal Holbrook’s Preston Blair, with a secret mission he has no intention of allowing to succeed. The price of Blair’s support is an agreement to negotiate peace with the South, and so he is sent to Richmond to retrieve representatives of the collapsing Confederate government, including Vice-President Alexander Stephens (Jackie Earle Haley). But Lincoln arranges it so that the Southern ambassadors do not reach him in time to make any sort of deal, short of unconditional surrender, while lying to his own party by denying the rumors of the envoys’ mission or even their existence as such, since confirmation of the rumors would also scupper the Amendment.
And this is where we return to the film’s relevance to today’s politics. Thaddeus Stevens is given the task of pronouncing the movie’s exquisite distillation: “The greatest measure of the 19th century,” he says, “was passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America.” Does that sound like any Presidents we know? Or at least like the language used by that President’s most fanatical and slavish admirers? For of course the unmistakable but unspoken corollary is: “… and that’s OK.” The end, because it was so transcendently the right thing to do, and because it was done from the purest of motives, must be supposed to justify almost any means. All manner of corruption, skullduggery and abuse of power are to be excused if their object is noble enough. I wonder if that is a message that Hollywood would have been quite so willing to promote four or five years ago, when George W. Bush was President?
At a crucial moment in the vote hunting, Lincoln turns imperious: “I am the President of the United States of America, clothed in immense power, and you will procure me these votes!” he says to his underlings. And they do! More than one commentator has seen these words as a message from the left to President Obama, who is seen as not being firm enough with today’s Republican rascals in Congress, now transmogrified into the reactionary equivalent of the apologists for slavery in their view. David Denby of The New Yorker puts it like this:
The movie is, among other things, a message to the President: it is not enough to make fine and noble speeches. In democratic politics, you have to get tough and dirty. You have to use patronage, personal persuasion, threats, whatever is at your command. Lincoln made it possible for you to be President, and now — in order to get policies, which you know are just, through the Congress — you have to imitate the crafty and manipulative things he did. End of message.
Without applauding the policy, I acknowledge that some such message may indeed have been in the back of such minds as those belonging to the very progressive Messrs. Spielberg and Kushner. But I also think of the following passage, taken from The Guardian, by another left-wing critic of the President, Glenn Greenwald, who believes that his conviction of his own all-justifying rectitude is too great, not too little:
Political leaders and political movements convinced of their own Goodness are usually those who need greater, not fewer, constraints in the exercise of power. That’s because — like religious True Believers — those who are convinced of their inherent moral superiority can find all manner to justify even the most corrupted acts on the ground that they are justified by the noble ends to which they are put, or are cleansed by the nobility of those perpetrating those acts. Political factions driven by self-flattering convictions of their own moral superiority — along with their leaders — are the ones most likely to abuse power.
Mr. Greenwald, whose particular beef with the administration has to do with its indiscriminate use of drone strikes to kill anyone the President thinks might have the remotest connection to Islamicist terrorism, thinks that the same moral arrogance was to be found at the heart of the George W. Bush administration. Then his fellow lefties thought it a very bad thing; now, as it comes from the Obama — or the Lincoln — administration, it is a very good thing. He objects, very honorably, to the hypocrisy. But maybe such moral certainty is neither bad nor good so much as it is a measure of the extent to which all politics today has been reduced, rhetorically at any rate, to a quasi-mythical struggle between good and evil. That is what seems a very bad thing to me.
About the Author
James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (54) | Leave a comment
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Jack in Wi| 11.29.12 @ 6:28AM
Lincoln had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the 13th amendment. The original 13th amemendment signed by Lincoln in 1861 would have preserved slavery in the existing slave states for perpetuity. Lincoln was always for sending the slaves out of the country, when they were out of slavery. He didn't think whites and blacks would make a go of it together. Maybe he was right. He was a tyrant who put thousands of people in dungeons in the North because they disagreed with him. He closed up hundreds of dissenting newspapers and put a lot of editors in prison. He printed fiat money like it was toilet paper. He gave us the first income tax and first draft. He threatened to imprison the Chief Justice of the US for standing up for basic Constitutional liberties.
Jack in Wi| 11.29.12 @ 6:41AM
Lincoln was the first of a long line of imperial presidents who have destroyed the original ideas of what this country was about. Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, FDR, Truman, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, the Bushes, Clinton and Obama are his decendents. They didn't sprout out of thin air. They got a lot of their inspiration from Lincoln. The country is bankrupt, the states have been marginalized, local governments are under the thumb of the Federal Government, Civil liberties have been destroyed and are still being destroyed. It all goes back to Lincoln and what he built The South should have been allowed to seceede. Slavery was their problem and they should have solved it themselves like was done in Brazil in 1888 and in the British Empire in 1833. Those abolitions were done peacefully. Lincoln left a third of the country in ashes and we are still paying the price for it. Their have been many peaceful secessions in many country's in the last few decades. Does anyone think we should go to war if a few states seceede?
Frank Drackman| 11.29.12 @ 8:18AM
Jack, and I'm someone who graduated from a HS named after a Confederate General( which narrows it down to about 5,000 possible schools, you stalkers)
When you reply to your own comment, it's like your jerking off in front of millions of people.
Which I've actually done, at the Toronto Sky Dome.
OK, it was more like 20,000 people, and I didn't get arrested, they have motel rooms 200 feet above Centerfield...
Frank "Lincoln was a Homo*" Drackman
*Have you seen Sally Field lately, don't blame him
C. Vernon Crisler | 11.29.12 @ 10:03AM
What, no attacks on Jews, Israel, Zionists, neocons? This must be a first for Jack.
Jack in Wi| 11.29.12 @ 12:25PM
Henry Jaffa and the Neocons love Lincoln. He was their kind of big government, big war kind of guy. That is another reason why Lincoln's crimes and foibles should be exposed and discussed.
C. Vernon Crisler | 11.29.12 @ 12:35PM
Jack, have you read anything by Jaffa? How about Strauss? Or do you just read DiLorenzo books, or old Ron Paul pamphlets?
Jack in Wi| 11.29.12 @ 1:00PM
I have read articles by Jaffa and can see he is the king of Lincoln worshippers. As for Strauss please, you just proved my point about Lincoln. Strauss is Mr Evil and the Mr. Neocon liar.
C. Vernon Crisler | 11.29.12 @ 1:20PM
Jaffa defends Lincoln against those who spout neoconfederate, Calhounist ideas. With regard to Strauss, you have no idea what you are talking about. You should listen to his lectures on Hegel.
Quartermaster| 11.29.12 @ 1:46PM
Jaffa does not suceed in defending Lincoln against the truth, however. Jaffa is simply a propagandist, but, then, you have so little attachment to the truth about the man you don't know propaganda from the truth.
Jaffa doesn't even produce good propaganda.
C. Vernon Crisler | 11.29.12 @ 4:32PM
And what exactly does Jaffa say that you disagree with?
AllAmericanAmerican| 11.29.12 @ 9:23PM
What's wrong with DiLorenzo's books? How about Lerone Bennett's "Forced Into Glory?"
JmsA| 11.30.12 @ 1:03AM
Oh, C'mon, didn't you know that Crisler is an expert on anything and everything under the Sun?
AllAmericanAmerican| 11.30.12 @ 8:27AM
Sorry my bad. :)
Jacobite| 11.29.12 @ 2:37PM
The author quotes Enoch Powell (probably the smartest man ever to serve in the House of Commons) but if you want real wisdom from Powell, find and read his "Rivers of Blood" speech. 100% correct in every prediction, yet banned from political discussion for 5o years. Kushner and Spielberg are both special-pleaders for non-Americans and non-normal Americans. And Day-Lewis's dad was a frikkin' Communist! Their view of the Civil War and Reconstruction sees the war as it was -- white vs. blacks. As anyone with a brain can see by now, Leftists simply hate normal, white, Christian humans, and will implement policies to subordinate whites' interests to those of non-whites at every opportunity. Read any decent history of Reconstruction, and it reads like the minutes of an EEOC meeting. And Reconstruction was the beginning of the affirmative-action idea, even though they simply equated white with Rebel and screwed all whites, without a lot of distracting mumbo-jumbo as in today's Civil Rights Acts.
Occam's Tool| 11.29.12 @ 7:46PM
Yes, the Rivers of Blood speech was prescient about the rise of Islam in Britain. It was not color that Enoch Powell was concerned about, but the ideology connected with certain people from certain areas.
Jeff R| 11.29.12 @ 8:28PM
What hackneyed drivel. I suppose nothing as exceptional and compelling as a civil war would have driven Lincoln to take some extraordinary measures to defeat the south and reunify the nation?
Jeff R| 11.29.12 @ 8:32PM
Wasn't posted to Jack in Wi. This guy's anti-Lincoln blather is so predictable... it's been spouted by countless others over the decades.
AllAmericanAmerican| 11.29.12 @ 9:37PM
Can you counter it?
aware| 11.29.12 @ 6:31AM
In the schools we are taught that Lincoln was a "great" president. Proving the Republic has never recovered from the blow he administered.
Frank Drackman| 11.29.12 @ 8:21AM
Umm, obviously the "Schools" you attended were above the Mason & Dixon Line.( its "Mason AND Dixon", not "Mason-Dixon", you'd know that if you had a Great Grandfather named Nathan Medford Forest Robert E. Jefferson Davis Lee Rosenbaum)
Frank "F Neil Young" Drackman
aware| 11.30.12 @ 5:53AM
Well, Frank, my great, great grandfather enlisted in April of '61. Swept the Valley with Jackson, then joined Lee at the Seven Days and stood in the Corn Field all day at Sharpsburg while 2/3s of his unit was blasted away. He was in every engagement the Army of Northern Virginia fought all the way to Appomattox.
On my mother's side that great, great garndfather was wounded 4 times at the apocalyptic Atlanta battles when he was 14 years old. And neither of them ever owned a single slave. I won't even go into uncles and cousins.
So needless to say which side of the Mason and Dixon my "education" came from. As we used to say, I was 18 before I knew Damned Yankees wasn't one word.
Jeff R| 11.30.12 @ 9:02AM
So, here we go. "Aware" is one of the last diehard Johnny Rebs.
"Why, dem damned Yank snakes dun us wrong. Yussir. We down south jus wanted to goes our own way... shred the Constitution 'cause old Dishonest Abe opposed the expansion of slavery. He jus wanted to keep it down south. But us ownin' men and abusin' 'em and beatin' 'em and hangin' 'em if they got uppity, well, that wasn't good enough for freedom-lovin' whites down in Dixie. No sur. We've got's to have our indy-pendence so's we keep our slaves and sees how we could spread that honrable insti-tution, say to dem slow wits in South America."
You sad, foolish man.
aware| 11.30.12 @ 4:18PM
Not a "Johnny Reb" and not a court jester like you either. What was the point of that childish post, Statist?
AllAmericanAmerican| 11.30.12 @ 5:20PM
Jeff did you know that when Lincoln was a state representative in Illinois that State had a law on the books preventing freed blacks from emigrating there?
Did you know that US Grant famously said if he thought the war was about "freeing the n******" he would've resigned his commission and offered his sword to the other side?
Please, the "Lincoln Myth" is bad enough, but to pretend the people of the Union/North were all some kind of post-modern, post-racial, literal angels on earth who just loved them some black people is absolute nonsense.
Again, your last sentence proves further that you are the master of irony.
Jeff R| 11.29.12 @ 8:34PM
There wouldn't have been much of a republic had Lincoln not fought the civil war. Another utterly dopey comment, this time by "Aware." Aware of what? Your navel?
AllAmericanAmerican| 11.29.12 @ 9:36PM
This post wins for "best example of 'irony' on Amspec."
aware| 11.30.12 @ 5:40AM
The Republic DIDN'T survive Lincoln, dipshit, but EMPIRE did. Go ahead and worship your idol(like Crisler) but don't pretend to now be against Leviathan and its rampage since it is the natural result of Lincoln's bloody dictatorship. So enjoy the endless wars, shredded constitution, Shadow government, unlimited taxes, and most of all, the absolute primacy of the State.
Conservatives screaming "limited government" while worshiping a Statist like Lincoln are examples of cognitive dissonance walking.
Jeff R| 11.30.12 @ 8:51AM
That's right, Lincoln set the precedent, "aware." (what an oxymorn - "aware").
Yes, by not allowing secession (which I'd bet my bottom dollar you'd think was permissible ), Lincoln was a tyrant. By taking extraordinary means in an extraordianry situation (the survival of the republic), Lincoln, according to your reasoning, set the table for the statism that arose in 20th Century America.
What an uninformed, misinformed little mimic you are.
aware| 11.30.12 @ 4:38PM
He didn't "set the table" he set the precedence and established the primacy of the Federal "government", making the states the servant, exactly contradicting Madison's many promises and proving the anti Federalists right all along.
The only thing more pathetic and contemptible than the vapid political class of any age is the stupid squeakings of the little rat creatures who worship them. I'm sure you will make a fine minion at say the cattle cars or the camps. Then you'll show us a thing or two, right? Stinking fascist.
AllAmericanAmerican| 11.30.12 @ 5:27PM
Jeff have you ever heard of or read the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798? They were written by a guy who had intimate knowledge of just what the 9th and 10th Amendments meant. Maybe you should read up on them and then get back to us on whether our Founding fathers believed secession was permitted under the Constitution.
Unless you believe that the States which voluntarily entered the compact would have done so knowing they were never allowed to voluntarily leave.
In simple terms Jeff, what came first, the States or the Federal Government?
Jeff maybe you can tell us what you think this means, in your own words:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
axbucxdu| 12.2.12 @ 11:01PM
Love it. Only the intentionally blind can't see where it all completely broke down. Of course, Washington did suppress the Whiskey Rebellion so it seems the USG twas nothing but a racket from its start.
aware| 12.3.12 @ 5:38AM
How about we just quote the great "emancipator" and let his words contradict the spoon fed myth that passes for "history":
“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better… Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can may revolutionize and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit.”
From 1848 justifying Texas succeeding from Mexico. Like I said JeffR and Crisler, it's a wonder you don't choke when you say "Honest" Abe. Politicians are the lowest scum on earth except for those who try to deify them.
You two are rank Statists and crypto-fascists.
Appleby| 11.29.12 @ 7:16AM
If you want to read a more balanced and historic version of Lincoln and his times, plus a cracking good story, I suggest "Guns of the South" by Harry Turtledove. This is an "alternate history" story but is meticulously researched and all the research is detailed in an afterword in the book. My Dad heard this book read on NPR and bought a copy for himself and one for me. The "story" concerns a group of rabid Dutch apartheid supporters who use a very limited time machine to provide Robert E. Lee with AK-47s and other useful weapons. Otherwise very little is changed, although some of what the Yankees did is now done by the Rebs. The outcome, in which Lincoln lives on, will make you think.
Frank Drackman| 11.29.12 @ 8:23AM
Umm, yeah, cause the South had Sooooooooooo much in common with South Africa, lets see, they were both in the South, both benefitted from cheap (OK, Free) slave labor, umm anyway,
THE SOUTH STILL LOSES
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Frank "I'm still pissed for blowing $30 on that shitty book" Drackman
Appleby| 11.29.12 @ 9:25AM
Not in this version, bubba. And besides that, the book makes clear that slavery was on the way out anyway, that Robert E. Lee was not in favour of slavery, and the Confederacy would be eliminating it more slowly and deliberately, but would be eliminating it.
Frank Drackman| 11.29.12 @ 11:13AM
Umm in the REAL South, i.e. those States with BCS Champions, we consider the end of Slavery "Losing".
Look at who's currently in the White House, if you git mah drift..
Frank "Colonel"Drackman
C. Vernon Crisler | 11.29.12 @ 10:09AM
You should read Harry Jaffa's book A New Birth of Freedom. From Wikipedia:
"According to Jaffa, Lincoln's task was to restore America's political faith, saving the Union from the historicism of the Confederacy. Jaffa considers the political philosophy of John C. Calhoun the backbone of the Confederacy's new constitution and its notion of human inequality. According to him, Calhoun believed that equality was only a prescriptive attribute on the part of the states, not a natural right of human persons. By extension, Calhoun believes that human equality is derived from the relationship between equal states and not equal persons. Jaffa therefore believes that Calhoun's understanding of equality differs greatly from the American Founders."
______
I think many of the commenters on this site are the heirs of Calhoun (and in some cases of John Wilkes Booth).
CJW| 11.29.12 @ 10:41AM
Gary Wills' "Lincoln at Gettysburg" is similar to Jaffa's in that he believes Lincoln's Gettysburg Adress was a re-affirmation of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal endowed by their Creator..."
But Wills has moved from the Right to the Left and now probably believes in affirmative action/quotas/set asides, etc.
C. Vernon Crisler | 11.29.12 @ 11:35AM
Wills' had a horribly misguided view of Lincoln and the Gettysburg address:
http://www.firstprinciplesjour.....&type=cbtp
Ned the Red| 11.29.12 @ 7:57AM
Did President Lincoln play lots of golf and have sex with the young interns?
Frank Drackman| 11.29.12 @ 11:15AM
don't know about the Golf, but he slept with a dude...
CJW| 11.29.12 @ 11:23AM
Speaking of Bubba, saw that Jennifer Flowers said Bubba called her in 2005. He wanted to "visit" and said he wold jog there wearing his hoodie, as in the old days.
Ned the Red| 11.29.12 @ 12:59PM
When slept, meant slept.
Occam's Tool| 11.29.12 @ 7:47PM
Much sleeping went on in those days between male attorneys, as I understand it....
Jim Adcox| 11.29.12 @ 8:41AM
WWLD?
The movie is a Valentine to King O and his power-grab of healthcare, liberty, and America. As I watched the film, I felt I was watching Classics Illustrated comic book history, tableaux upon tableaux. I also began to wonder, as the film trudged its way to the inevitable conclusion, "What Would Lincoln Do?" Based on what I saw, the answer became clear: whatever he wanted to do because, as Bowman notes, Lincoln declared (in film if not in life)"I am the President of the United States of America, clothed in immense power, and you will procure me these votes!" Soon the second clause of that sentence will fade away, and the comic book history lesson for the current constitutional scholar-in-charge will be completed: The first half of the above quotation is all King O wants/needs to continue his pursuit of absolute power and the end of this great constitutional republic.
C. Vernon Crisler | 11.29.12 @ 10:02AM
I haven't seen the movie, but it's not secret that Lincoln was a horsetrader. The idea of patronage and horsetrading in American politics was the way things were done. Compare Andrew Jackson. It wasn't until the end of the 19th century that "Progressives" oriented the country toward bureaucracy in place of patronage.
frino| 11.29.12 @ 11:24AM
Buying a ticket is givin Holly wood money dat means buyin da enmeees bullets for him. You folks beat up on poor folks for not havin impulse control and delayin gratfication-but looky what you do. dey be the enmee-dey saying just 51 Senate votes impeach Scalia. You be fools.
sweatyfederalist | 11.29.12 @ 11:46AM
I am not familiar with Jack's views on neocons (though I expect I would agree) but his historical critique of Lincoln in unimpeachable. And I suppose Crisler can still consider himself a "conservative" if he elevates centralized government over liberty and constitutional rule of law, much the way that fascism is plotted on the right/conservative side of the textbook political spectrum. But friends of liberty and enemies of progressivism need to call out Lincoln for the tyrant that he was.
Quartermaster| 11.29.12 @ 1:48PM
Yeppers. That's Crisler.
Occam's Tool| 11.29.12 @ 8:03PM
Lincoln saved this country from dissolution. Anyone who thinks that the Confederate States would not have disintegrated further in the absence of the war is foolish, and needs to read more Toombs.
And anyone who thinks that GB and France wouldn't have started attacking those newly independent states directly or through proxies and picking them off, is a fool.
Like I said, QM, you remind me of the profound intellectuations of the man who controlled the largest QM process in our nation's history, JCH Lee. Pompous, ignorant, and interfering with the nation's war effort, WWII was won despite him, not because of him.
On the other hand, you stand opposed to the efforts of the two best Quartermasters in our country's history, Haupt and Meigs.
AllAmericanAmerican| 11.29.12 @ 9:34PM
OT Lincoln did no such thing---he laid the foundation for the federal leviathan we have now. He effectively destroyed the 9th and 10th Amendments.
Anyway if GB or France had designs on attacking the CSA why didn't they launch an attack in the immediate aftermath of the WBTS, where upwards of 700,000 men were killed and probably triple that wounded when you throw in Lincoln's Total War on the women, children, and slaves in the South? GB actually considered backing the CSA and Napoleon III of France offered to mediate a peaceful settlement prior to a shot even being fired. I think it is a stretch to think GB or France or any other nation were considering an attack or invasion of the newly formed CSA. If anything they would have attacked the country immediately AFTER the war ended, when this country was arguably at it weakest point, militarily, since its founding.
JmsA| 11.30.12 @ 2:24AM
Good comments all around. Haven't seen the movie, and I'm not well versed enough to offer any comments on the political intricacies of the Civil War, as I have mostly focused on its military aspects. I did ask my nephew to give me his perspective about the depiction of Thaddeus Stevens (by Tommy Lee Jones), and he opined that at times, contrary to my description of the leader of the "Radical Republicans", Stevens seemed at times a bit indecisive as opposed to totally committed against the Confederacy. Given Hollywood's proclivities to change historical facts, as well as the fact that it is a Spielberg movie, a well known lefty, I cannot help but wonder if some liberties were in fact taken with said historical character, lest Republicans be given their due historical credit.
JmsA| 11.30.12 @ 2:12AM
The French under the leadership of Napoleon III, President of the Second Republic, were busy buttressing the reign of Maximilian I of Austria and the restoration of the Mexican Monarchy. They were also finalizing their colonization of Indochina. The Germans/Prussians, whose cadres had been embedded with the Union Army, were busy applying lessons learned during the U.S. Civil War, particularly regarding logistics as they prepared for the upcoming Franco-Prussian war. And the British were fighting the 2nd Taranaki War in New Zealand.
aware| 11.30.12 @ 6:01AM
Moltke considered the War Between the States to be a clash of armed mobs, with little to learn. And Stuart had a Prussian nobleman as chief of staff. This Prussian flew the Stars and Bars over his estate the rest of his life. Real history is never as clean as the victors write it.