The Lincoln Film: Not For The Masses, Really?

Painting from Frederick Douglass Series (1939) by African American Artist Jacob Lawrence. Copyright restricted. See http://www.jacobandgwenlawrence.org/artandlife04.html

Dear Students: Today is Thanksgiving.  I saw an early show of Lincoln at my local movie theatre in New Jersey.  I found it both overwhelming and breathe taking, and I was a little disappointed that those of you who had already seen it had done such an inadequate job of describing it. Obviously this is a corner of American history that is somewhat foreign to you. 

There are many things that struck me as extremely relevant to our current curriculum.  It helps in this case to read some of the better reviews, which may help to draw your attention to the more important historical features. I will make a folder of some of the links and place them among your course materials.

In regard to the first question I posed, that is whether it would be a reconciliationist, white supremacist or emancipationist version of the Civil War, it seemed to me that the film touched equally upon all three and ultimately did not resolve itself in favor of any of the three. In this sense, it was a fascinatingly wise contemplation on the legacy of the life of Abraham Lincoln, the conclusion of the Civil War and the passage of the 13th Amendment. But if I had to choose one, I would choose emancipationist in the sense that everything in the film pointed my thoughts to the future we actually live in, in which we have now a black president who is having as much trouble getting change through Congress as Lincoln had in having the 13th Amendment passed.

The film is about the difficulty of the political process as it occurs in a republic in which freedom of thought and word is a founding assumption.  In the scene near the end of the film in which Thaddeus Stevens and his mistress Lydia Davis are reading the 13th Amendment in bed, this is where D.W. Griffith's white Supremacist film The Birth of a Nation (1915) actually begins. Both Stevens and Davis are horribly caricatured in his film and portrayed as monsters determined to destroy the country and the white majority in favor of the mongrel ambitions of miscegenation and racial mixing. Lydia in particular is demonized.  It seems all the more fitting that Spielberg's film would end with Lydia humanized by the sensible acting of Epatha Merkinson, whom we have all known so many years from Law and Order.  I don't think the part is big enough for an actual nomination but I wish it were.

As for the reconciliationist perspective of a film such as Gone With The Wind (1939), the profound depth and tenderness of the mature relationship between Lincoln and his wife Mary seems to mock the trivial superficiality of such a treatment of the Civil War and hits consequences.  Abraham and Mary's contrast with Rhett and Scarlett couldn't be greater or more revealing.

What makes it such a great lesson for all of us is that it brings the legislation we have been studying vividly to life. I don't think you can come away from watching this film without becoming completely cognizant of what the 13th Amendment achieved (the abolition of slavery), or how it differed from the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation, as well as its limitations and ultimately the necessity for both the 14th (citizenship) and the 15th (the vote)Amendment. What is forecast as well, it seems to me, is that none of this legislation would finally succeed in transforming the former slaves into fully recognized and fully participant American citizens.

The portrayal of events takes for granted the omniscience of white supremacy at the time.  The very fact that Congressman Thaddeus Davis, who is in a relationship with a black woman to whom he takes the rough draft of the amendment to read to her in bed, is forced to renounce his own beliefs in racial equality on the floor of the congress in order to get the 13th amendment passed clarifies the hegemony of white supremacy at the time.  Nonetheless, it further embellishes one's enjoyment of these events if one knows what will follow--as you can easily find out by reading, first of all, the second chapter of W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (which you have already been assigned to do), not to mention as well the Reconstruction Wiki I assigned you.

Which brings me to the only disappointment I felt in this film and that is that there are no roles for blacks large enough to get your teeth into, not even that of Nancy Keckley who was Mary Lincoln's dressmaker and companion.  All of the black roles--in particular the soldier in the beginning who completes the recitation of the Gettysburg Address as he wanders off into the night--are lovely and beautiful but they are not allowed to take on important dramatic depth and substance. Perhaps it wouldn't be appropriate to this portion of the history, the month or so preceding the murder of Lincoln, and it seems petty in the end to quibble about this one shortcoming when so many other films in which black actors are featured have none of the pluses of this beautifully and densely written script, but it is hard to believe that this isn't an important consideration.  If it isn't important, why not have the densely written black character instead of not?

To which I have two perhaps contradictory answers.  First, part of the reason it is this way is because of the evils of the star system, and the fact that the name brand combination of the package takes precedence over whatever magic the script and the performance are able to produce. It's got to be an exciting package from the marketing point of view.  Nothing else matters.  Even so I can't imagine that this film will do particularly well at the box office but it should do very well indeed among the awards. 

Just look at the content of the advertising, the focus on the tortured face and figures of the stars--Daniel Day Lewis and Sally Fields--both wonderful but without their former reputations as actors, they would not be able to occupy these roles. Not as unknowns. Which also means the following.  First of all no black woman could be given a major role. Black actresses just aren't there yet. Not even Haile Berry. Not even Vanessa Williams.  Rather it would have to be a black male with a major name, and such a man (Denzel Washington or Sam Jackson or somebody like that) would never take the lesser role that such a part would likely be.  A major black male role would be in danger of completely derailing the subtle balance of the current script.  This film is not about the freedom or the equality of women or of blacks, but rather a moment still pregnant with that possibility.

At the same time, the racial equilibrium of this script speaks to the ongoing power of white supremacy in our culture, to the fact that we still don't know how to imagine what kind of moral and aesthetic hierarchy might actually follow.  That just like Lincoln and his most well intentioned contemporaries we still don't know quite how to incorporate the agency of actual black people (and former slaves) into the mainstream of the story we tell ourselves about the history of our country and our culture.

David Blight on Slavery and Reconstruction on YouTube

David Blight's "The Civil War and Reconstruction," an Open course offered via Yale University's website, via YouTube and via itunes unversity audio and visual files provides a compelling and detailed description of the events and the debates precipitated by the American Legacy of the Civil War and Slavery.  http://oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-119#sessions

His lectures bring back my fond days as a graduate student in American Studies at Yale University and the opportunity to hear the lectures of historians John Blassingame, Edmund Morgan and David Brion Davis among others.  Two years after the publication of my first book (in which slavery is discussed in some detail) in 1980 and 1981, I got my first real chance to study slavery and its consequences in a serious way in a world class library system--via access to primary sources, and the very best of secondary sources, and moreover to learn to know the difference.

Listening to his descriptions of the scholarship of Charles Beard as a progressive historian who saw slavery and the free north as two competing economic systems caused me to recollect that in 11th Grade at the New Lincoln School, we read Charles Beard and Walt Whitman as part of our core curriculum on American history and literature.

I couldn't quite get my fingers around this approach, was somewhat hurt and confused by it.  So much else was going on in my life and my body (I was 15) and there's a particular way in which your mind can wander when you are a teenager in a classroom.  and I remember being frustrated by the lack of talk about the slaves or even abolitionism.  My teacher that year was named Mac Carpenter.  I wish I had had Beisel and Moby Dick (a book I would learn to love some ten years later) instead but had been turned off by the idea that a book about a whale wouldn't be girly enough.  I had no idea who I was then.  

Nonetheless, I have continued to follow the fields of American slavery and abolitionism, as well as the new scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade with the maps and ship manifests.  I just love all that stuff.  My reading in these areas comes out of a true passion for the subject matter and the writing in this field, rather than as a necessity of my teaching.  It has been my good fortune for my study to have occurred during the period of the greatest development in this field of study.  Blight's lectures are a product of this development of study, highly listen-able, and providing as good a beginning as any to the field--knowledgeable regarding the latest transatlantic and colonial scholarship and yet (as he might say) firmly rooted in a deeply Americanist perspective.

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Knew him first by his book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which I encountered via my grad student (presently Professor of African American Studies at Lehman College) Anne Rice.  Then a few years later I shared a stage with him on D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation at the New School but it was a crowded program and I can't recall what he said at all.  I tried to talk about the music which was written for the movie.  I still had him pegged as someone who was much more interested in the contemporary consequences of the Civil War. 

The next time was my discovery that David Blight was a Professor of History at Yale University via this series of lectures on slavery and reconstruction offered as part of Open University online, based on a year long course as taught at Yale University in 2007. 

I fell in love with it not because I agreed with and celebrated each word, but rather because of its thoroughness, its simplicity and clarity, its fascination with the literature produced by former slave and white Americans, its intensity, its contextualization of abolitionism within the larger context of the myriad causes of Civil War.  His is not the African American perspective, which has been a major influence in slavery scholarship in the past few decades. And it isn’t the White Southern perspective either, which seems to me the focus of the Ken Burns’ documentary version of the Civil War and that of the Civil War re-enactors Blight describes in his book on the topic.  But rather this is finally an accessible Americanist and centrist re-telling of the many stories that make up this great war and its immediate consequences, especially in regard to the Reconstruction Era. 

His delivery is stunningly and entertainingly folksy at times but not Southern folksy, maybe rather mid-Western folksy to the degree that it becomes part of the content.  What better voice could one find to represent the collective madness that descended upon the American republic (as its borders spread West) mid-19^th century and resulted in the collective genocidal impulse Americans visited upon themselves in the form of its Civil War. 

I will attempt to make selections from specific lectures to sample in my classes and to illuminate the content of my courses on “Slavery and the Failure of Reconstruction” as a FIQWS and my World Humanities course 102.

The Birth of a Nation 1914

D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1914) is rightly notorious for its strident view of African American participation in Reconstruction. It is also a uniquely important and unforgetttable film in many ways. Viewing these films about it might be beyond the range of undergraduate interests but certainly more advanced students will find this helpful in understanding the mindset of the Jim Crow era as well as the emerging popular culture of America.


A year or two ago I attended a symposium on THE BIRTH OF A NATION at The New School where I was privileged to share the podium with the American historian of the Civil War in Popular Culture David Blight.  Not only that, the entire procedings together with beautifully edited selections of the entire length with the original music of The Birth of a Nation are available on Youtube for all to see: His talk, My talk.

I must say, I like my talk better.


Birth and Rebirth of a Nation Part I: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSqUDxzv3bE
Birth of a Nation Part II: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_YN6INiZ_Y&feature=related

Frances Benjamin Johnston--Sheridan's Ride

Frances Benjamin Johnston, Children in Kernstown. 1900, Library of Congress.

comparison w/James Bland, Carry Me Back to Old Virginny--Sheet Music Cover 1906.

A few years back at the annual meeting of the College Art Association at the Hilton Hotel in New York City, I came across a little lady whom as I recall was distributing from a table a set of illustrations related to the photography of Frances Benjamin Johnston.  As it turned out this was Geraldine Wojno Kiefer, Ph.D., and Assistant Professor of Art History and Art at Shenandoah University.  Perhaps the year was 2004.  I had just moved back to the New York area, was just beginning to probe the mysteries of the powerpoint application.  I was in the process of teaching then my Talking in Pictures course looking at the intersections of race, gender and American photography.  It was already clear that Johnston was a major figure in that world for a number of reasons.  First because of her historical pictures of students and faculty at historically black colleges, including Tuskegee and Hampton, as well as her major input as a woman photographer at the turn-of-the-century and her participation in photography exhibits at various world's fairs.

I have been browsing the PowerPoint's she gave me that day on and off since then, and picked them up again as the Hampton Album came up in its rightful place alongside Du Bois's Negro Exhibition at the Paris Exposition of 1900.  Using Johnston's work has been difficult for me for the simple reason that she was white, and African American photography is by definition something that only an African American can do.  Yet here was Johnston right in the middle of photography of historical black schools at the turn-of-the-century.  Obviously she was a racial voice (or as some prefer to say for some reason, "racialized"), but was she perhaps on the wrong side of things?  Most scholars I have read have concluded as much but I still am not sure whether the subjectivity of the photographer is among the most important things we can say about a photograph.  A photograph can be a work of original art but it isn't necessarily.  Even if and when it is a work of art, it is also a technological intervention.  And, significantly, it is a form of evidence.  

Especially Johnston's photographs were decidedly evidential in their conception and execution.  In order words, they were deliberately designed to function as evidence.  Helping to convince me of this is the study of Kiefer's PowerPoint presentations on Johnston's contribution to a photo-essay called "The Country of Sheridan's Ride" published in The Ladies Home Journal

It is composed of a centerfold layout of a series of pictures houses and landscapes along the route of General Philip Sheridan's 1864 ride to Winchester, along the Valley Turnpike between Winchester and Middletown in Virginia as part of a successful Union campaign in the Civil War.  

Johnston's photographs of the roads, lakes, toll bridges, landscapes, houses and children (many of them black) as they were in 1901, participating in a national campaign of memorializing the landscape of the Civil War, honoring the history and commodifying its recovery.  Kiefer worries that Johnston was helping to further mystify the racial significance of the Civil War in favor of a racist romanticism emphasizing the healing of relations between white Northerners and Southerners.  But the thing I notice about it, as well as much of the celebration of the conclusion of the war prior to 1910, was the focus was on Union victories and a Northern interpretation of events.  It seems to me that the David Blight reading of the cult of the Lost Cause is actually something that emerges as a distinct problem subsequent to the successes of Thomas Dixon's plays "The Leopard's Spots" and "The Klansman," and it really explodes with the hit of D.W. Griffith's collaboration with Dixon on The Birth of a Nation.

Left: Log House in Giles County, Photographs, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Va.

Right: Frances Benjamin Johnston, Photographs.  In The Ladies Home Journal, Vol. 18, No. 8 (July 1901), 17.

Left: Henry Fenn, Richmond. Wood Engraving.  Picturesque America in The Land We Live In, ed. William Cullen Bryant, Vol. I, New York: D. Appleton Company, 1872, 80.

Center: Harry Fenn, A Glimpse of Charlestown and Boy from the Town of St. Michael's Church. Wood engraving. Picturesque America. Vol I., 201.

Right: Frances Benjamin Johnston, The Children 1901.

Frances Benjamin Johnston Photos of Children, 1900.  Library of Congress.

Left: Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1st Toll Gate out of Winchester.

Center: Frances Benjamin Johnston, Snicker's Gap, Tollgate.  Along the Road.  At Stop at a Tollgate. Right: Town, Now Steven's City.  Tollgate Road. 1900.

Double Spread Layout in Ladies Home Journal, 1901.  Nostalgia for Sheridan's Ride in the Civil War, romanticizing the victory of the Union over the Confederacy in the Old South.  

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow--PBS Series

The first two parts of The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow are 60 minutes each. A lot of information is communicated in a fairly efficient manner. If you had seen DW Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) (the entire film can be viewed at video.google.com or read the two books -- The Klansman (1903) and The Leopard's Spots (1901) by Thomas Dixon upon which the plot of the The Birth of a Nation was based-- you will recognize many of the images and substantial portions of the narrative, except that Griffith simply reversed antagonist with victim, making blacks the antagonists and whites the victims who then bravely bring the "Negro rebellion" under control. It is just crazy but it is a skillfully made film, in fact innovative in the genre at the time and there were no lack fo racist audiences who were eager to see it in 1915. It didn't help at all that the president then, Woodrow Wilson, had it screened it at the White House and then endorsed the film in a statement that was then included in the film.

The odd thing about The Birth of a Nation, which presents itself as being about the Civil War and Reconstruction, is that it is actually about events related to the political ascendancy of Jim Crow taking place at the turn of the century and in the early 20th century.  In this we see a characteristic danger in historical film dramas (from Gone With the Wind to JFK), which is that they almost always reveal a lot more about the time in which they were made than about the period represented.

But the important thing about paying attention to this now is to see what happens when people get confident enough to believe that the situation is settled and that nothing can overturn the progress that has been made. In a country of our size and history, that probably won't ever be true. So I think one should be careful and humble.

I am hoping we can find time to schedule some portion of a screening of The Rise and Fall. The book by Richard Wormser (St. Martin's Press 2003) has some interesting illustrations, as does the dvd (which can be purchased via California Newsreel) and the PBS website.

As somebody who is interested in tracking the history of images in photography and film for what the surviving fragments can tell us about events and people, it is irritating beyond belief to encounter again and again this dumbed down techno-wizardry which will use the ocean lapping up on the beach or the side of a boat as a perpetual stand-in for the slave trade, or any vaguely old vaguely humble group of blacks in a photograph to stand in for a group of slaves, or ex-slaves or migrants to the North, as the case may warrant. The photographers are never identified even when they are known. The situation in which the photograph is known is never talked about.

They call them stock images or stock footage.  It happens all the time in films and other uses of photographs and I never was bothered about it at all until I became a student of African American history and culture, so I would suppose it happens with images of people in every society now.  The way images are used in a technological society is designed to eventually make it impossible to track their genealogy of creation and use.  

Photographic and filmic images rarely come with provenances in the way that art images are expected to have, and when they do, it is a deep dark secret difficult to obtain and impossible to make public.

In the Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, I recognize a fair number of photographs that are used.  

In particular one photographer who did very special work, Julian Dimock.  Soon after the turn of the century, he and his father, a writer of travel literature, went on a trip to Columbia, South Carolina and Beaufort, North Carolina and took a number of pictures of the people in the black communities there immediately following the downfall of the Republican Party and the forcing out of office of all black office holders.  

The Souls of Black Folk was published right before their trip.  The resulting photographs, are a perfect accompaniment to Du Bois's text. These photographs were taken in Beaufort, North Carolina (an isolated region of the state) and Columbia, South Carolina of  black men, women and children following the so-called "Wilmington Massacre" portrayed strikingly by the African American writer Charles Chesnutt in the novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901) in which white racists physically prevented black registered voters from voting in local elections and also forcibly ejected local black office holders from office.  

The people look poor and a little shabby but their dignity and coherence is striking. In particular, most of the photographs were of children who make the best photographic subjects in all circumstances. Dimocks' pictures had been hidden away in the Museum of Natural History for decades when somebody there decided to publish them in a book so that we could see what this community looked liked given the extraordinary political pressures of the time. Several of these photographs are used in the documentary The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, without any mention of their origin.  Probably the reason why it took so long for Dimock to be presented in such a monograph is partly because the lack of popularity in our time for photographs of black people taken by white photographers, particularly in this period of Jim Crow history.  

Included in Dimock's collection was a photograph of Robert Smalls, a native Beaufortian whose life is described in Gullah Statesman: Robert Smalls from Slavery to Congress, 1839-1915.  Smalls had served five terms as a U.S. congressman but by 1904 when Dimock took his picture such offices were no longer viable for blacks because of Jim Crow laws. 

This shuffling of unidentified images is a technique which has existed for a long time, but which has become associated in my mind with Ken Burns' approach to documentary as popularized in his series on The Civil War.  The historical critique of his documentary on The Civil War is more highly developed than the criticism of his many other documentaries, as demonstrated in Robert Brent Toplins' Ken Burns's The Civil War: Historians Respond (Oxford University Press 1996).