Those old were different times, but if there is one stunning quality in the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln to me was his being a people's man. And this is not an old gift to pray for.
The last Lincoln's movie -what can I say?- could have been done in a different manner under the same style: this is my opinion. The period at the end of the Civil War had to be frentic and vibrating, so why not some action? Why not to take the audience to a roller coaster of giddy transition of scenes: one after another, get them out of breath!; why not a punch of brilliant eloquence in a shower of nerve, wrath and treason in the battlefield, the halls of power of in the slippery reality of one's own home?
Anyway, the movie is detailed around Lincoln. He seems to have being untidy -a terrible sin from which geniuses are forgiven-. Crumbs of cigar stub falling carelessly on to his lap or two slippers abandoned in the middle of the living room, next to the hearth, to randomness are two examples. Paul Johnson says, quoting Mary Todd, that Lincoln could do nothing at home whatsoever, other than reading and musing. In turn, Lincoln would comment on his second wife: "God had enough with one "d"; but in the Todd family, they need two". Naturally, Lincoln muses a lot in the film, but Mary Todd does not seem comparable to God in character: I did imagine her differently.
As my Argentinian friend would say, people "looked like cow dung" in those times: most powerful men, writing in most distinct pages of history, looking like shit. Those old were different times, of course, but one can guess that the curse of public image as a concept encoded in a 2-D screen was only an unforeseeable ghost in the long, long distance. Let's make here a first knock on the door.
And, because it might have been a timid knock, being the first one and all, let's knock a second time forthwith: Lincoln was a man void of power.
Now this needs some explanation. It was not that he, as the President, was not a powerful man. I guess he was. In the film once, only once, when anxious to convince voters to go for the 13th Amendment and put an end to slavery, he shouted to a dubious man: "I am the President of the United States of America: you will provide me with those votes". But the truth is that Lincoln never seemed to exert power that way. Instead, he sanctified the individual conscience of anyone. He never coaxed people like children, never bullshitted, never lied. One example is the lovely scene when, in the middle of the night, Lincoln went himself, alone apart from the driver, to the house of one of the Senators to ask for his vote. Lincoln listened, reasoned and left the issue for him to decide. (As a matter of fact, the Senator would vote against the Amendment later on). A second example is the argument with Mary about the enrollment of their 16 year-old son, Robert. It was a bitter moment for both, but Lincoln acknowledged the importance of his wife's position (did not void or overwhelmed it). Lincoln was void of power, as opposed as those pitiful bodies full of power that crawl on today's surface of Earth.
Lincoln was a people's man because he took his relationships to a confidential, intimate level. Took them to his heart. It is a gift, no doubt, a very powerful one. It has taken me a couple of decades to realize the true meaning of Giovanni Bosco's "whispering word". The saint, close to death (was about 70 years of age), said to another old and powerful Cardinal, barely murmuring: "You who are a poet and I, who am a musician, are going to change the world"... Ah! Now that I remember: when Marco Aurelio, close to death as well, put in Maximus' hands the Roman Empire, he asked him in Gladiator: "Maximus, let us whisper: talk to me about your home".
Lincoln talked personally un-boisterously to all, regardless their social position: politicians, Senators, telegraphists, his black house-keeper, young soldiers, etc. This is a third knock on the door, a ponderous and vigorous door if it is British! In the movie there are a few examples: his talk with Thaddeus Stevens in the kitchen of his residency is nice and reveals a determined and pragmatic mind; but the story he tells to two young telegraphists before dawn in the empty communications room is savage. After much consideration and with many doubts, Lincoln sent the wire to General Grant to retain Jefferson Davis and the other Southerns in Richmond and asked not to proceed to Washington before the Amendment was voted. (In fact, this movement proved to be fundamental to actually win the Bill). The three of them are there, alone. The President alone in a communications room with two boys! Before the story, before the wire, he was asking to one of them: "And you, what do you think?"... Ha, ha, ha. Compare to Captain Bligh! Compare to the captains of our times: "we are always available to listen to my subordinates", they crow... Knock, knock, knock.
Lincoln's story to the boys highlights another of his great virtues: a clear capacity to reason logically. His thinking was as crystalline as that of Euclides: "If two things are equal to the same thing, then are equal to themselves"... (The statement that we all are God's sons finally makes sense to me).
Lincoln was, therefore, a genuine man and, as all genuine man -and this is acknowledged in Wuthering Heights-, grieved. He really had a bad time. Paul Johnson recalls the words of his wife the night he was assassinated: the Amendment was passed and he was unusually joyful. As a summary: Lincoln was a man's people, genuine, intimate, logic, had a practical mind and was able to withstand annealing solitude... What a marvelous example during the voting session in Congress! Lincoln, the man who splashed the waters so badly, who was driven by a consuming desire to pass the Amendment, waited alone at home, with his little son and let the representatives of the men of America to finally decide. Alea jacta est!
Of course, clouds were seen in the horizon. Paul Johnson says that, even in G. Washington's times, it was already recognized that the true problem with slavery was what to do after it. Our hero seemed to have a much more ambiguous position about it. Johnson also says that in the ten years following the war, the fracture between the Congress and the President deepened. Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson lacked the president's gifts, I guess, because the situation went out of hands towards the extremist positions, which somehow set the preponderance of the winners over the South. What I see as the first example of "positive discrimination" followed, brooded corruption and, one thing leading to another, America enter in its Modern Times.
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