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 Cartography of Slavery

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/12/10/opinion/20101210_Disunion_SlaveryMap.html

This is the more interactive version provided by the NY Times. One of the most important maps of the Civil War was also one of the most visually striking: the United States Coast Survey’s map of the slaveholding states, which clearly illustrates the varying concentrations of slaves across the South.

Black Reconstruction--W.E.B. Du Bois

"Here is the real modern labor problem.  Here is the kernel of the problem of Religion and Democracy, of Humanitty.  Words and futile gestures avail nothing.  Out of the exploitation of the dark proletariat comes the Surplus Value filched from human beasts which, in cultured lands, the Machine and harnessed Power veil and conceal.  The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black." (16)

W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of hte Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880.  Atheneum (1935) 1973

Life Upon These Shores

https://www.facebook.com/note.php?saved&&note_id=10150758691840792

Dubois Concerning Black Music

Overwhelmingly the mass of writings on African American music have been written about music produced in the 20th century owing to the importance of the invention of recorded sound as a reliable object of study.   However most studies which include discussion of early African American music and its religious inflections will include some speculation on its relationship to slavery, Reconstruction and the semi-freedom of the Jim Crow Period.

In the further pursuit of materials related to Du Bois discussion of the development of the music of the slaves in Chapter 10 "Faith of Our Fathers" and in his final chapter on the Sorrow Songs in The Souls of Black Folk, the following crucial texts come highly recommended by me:

Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War. University of Illinois Press 1977.
Shane White and Graham White, The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons and Speech. Beacon Press 1992.
Robert Darden, People Get Ready! A New History of Black Gospel Music. Continuum 2004.
Michael W. Harris, The Rise of the Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church. Oxford University Press 1992.
Bernice Johnson Reagon, If You Don't Go, Don't Hinder Me: The African American Sacred Song Tradition. University of Nebraska Press 2001.
Eileen Southern, Readings in Black American Music. Second Edition, Norton Press 1983.

Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

"Since Europeans in every region were enslaved in Roman and early medieval times (to say nothing of Asia and Africa, and since Barbary corsairs continued to enslave white Europeans and Americans well into the nineteenth century) it seems highly probable that if we could go back far enough in time, we would discover that all of us reading these words are the descendants of both slaves and masters in some part of the world.  It was not until the seventeenth century that even New World slavery began to be overwhelmingly associated with people of black African descent—as opposed to Native Americans."

David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World Oxford UP 2006 (54)

Masterful work of one of the most brilliant historians of comparative slavery in the world. Briefly my teacher at Yale University, I am proud to say. 

Of The Dawn of Freedom

Trying to remember how I first came to Dubois.  I know it was after I went to Yale, and the year my own book came out (Black Macho and The Myth of the Superwoman) in 1979.   


Knowing so little then of Dubois and the Souls of Black Folk (a foundational work in the Afro American intellectual tradition)I guessed was what people meant when they said I was too ignorant to have written a book diagnosing the problems of black gender politics in the 1960s and 1970s.  


It is certainly true that when I wrote Black Macho, I knew virtually nothing of the Ivy League or the HBCUs, nor the many gifts they had shared with one another, black and white sisters and  brothers. But then I encountered Robert Stepto's book Beyond the Veil, which came out the same year as Black Macho.  This book was the beginning of a coherent and theoretical Afro American literary critical discourse for me and a lot of other people. He built his theory of an African American literary canon around "The Souls of Black Folk."

*****
"Of the Dawn of Freedom" is the title of the second chapter of W.E.B. Du Bois' celebrated masterpiece Souls of Black Folk.  Du Bois tells the story of Reconstruction as rarely heard in 1903, and at least as little known in 2011.  I have heard it said that Souls of Black Folk is too conventional and difficult text for our time but I find it difficult to imagine how one can be adequately introduced to the disappointments and horrors of Federal Reconstruction, particularly for the first time, in a better manner.

This chapter is a work of poetry at the same time that reading it can leave no doubt as to what the problems were, why Reconstruction failed. Du Bois makes it clear, it failed because it did not go nearly far enough.  It did not go nearly far enough because of bitterness and racism that loomed over the newly freed slaves in the wake of the Civil War.

The chapter begins and ends with exactly the same sentence as if to represent a hopeless and circular process: "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line . . ."  It's a famous line often taken out of context and used to represent the importance and the depth of the entire book, as though this prediction in 1903 was the most important thing about the book, when in fact what the book communicates about the world that preceded 1903 is much more important than what it can tell us about the future.

But also the beauty of the book is first revealed in the poetry of this chapter in the passages in which Du Bois attempts to capture the misery and hopelessness of the former slaves, a picture he evokes from imagination since he was not yet born when the Civil War occured in the early 1860s.

Quotations from Chapter 2, Of The Dawn of Freedom--

***The war had naught to do with slaves, cried Congress, the President, and the Nation; and yet no sooner had the armies, East and West, penetrated Virginia and Tennessee than fugitive slaves appeared within the lines. They came at night, when the flickering camp-fires shone like vast unsteady stars along the black horizon; old men and thin, with gray and tufted hair; women, with frightened eyes, dragging whimpering hungry children; men and girls, stalwart and gaunt, --a horde of starving vagabonds, homeless, helpless, and pitiable, in their dark distress.

***Then the long-headed man with care-chiselled face who sat in the White House saw the inevitable, and emancipated the slaves of rebels on New Year's, 1863.  A month later Congress called earnestly for the Negro soldiers whom the act of July, 1862, had half grudgingly allowed to enlist.  Thus the barriers were levelled and the deed was done. The stream of fugitives swelled to a flood, and anxious army officers kept inquiring "What must be done with the slaves, arriving almost daily? Are we to find food and shelter for women and children?"

***Some see all significance in the grim front of the destroyer, and some in the bitter sufferers of the Lost Cause. But me neither soldier nor fugitive speaks with so deep a meaning as that dark human cloud that clung like remorse on the rear of those swift columns, swelling at times to half their size, almost engulfing and choking them.  In vain were they ordered back, in vain were bridges hewn from beneath their feet; on they trudged and writhed and surged, until they rolled into Savannah, a starved and naked horde of tens of thousands.  There too came the characteristic military remedy: 

'The islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice-fields about the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. John's River, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of Negroes now made free by act of war." So read the celebrated 'Field-order Number Fifteen.'

The purposes of the Freedman's Bureau:

****Forthwith nine assistant commissioners were appointed.  They were to hasten to their fields of work; seek gradually to close relief establishments, and make the destitute self-supporting; act as courts of law where there were no courts, or where Negroes were not recognized in them as free; establish the institution of marriage among ex-slaves, and keep records; see that freedmen were free to choose their employers, and help in making fair contracts for them . . . 

See lecture by Professor David Blight on Reconstruction at Yale University at the following link:


http://academicearth.org/lectures/black-reconstruction-economics-of-land-and-labor

Map of Slavery United States

Map of Slavery on the Eve of the Civil War.  Taken from The New York Times. 

Picturing US History: Online Teaching Resource

An interactive resource for teaching history with visual evidence, http://www.picturinghistory.gc.cuny.edu includes a wonderfully lengthy list of links to American visual and cultural history online. The riches that are available here are constantly expanding. Most major universities now have such a portal gathering together and constantly adding the growing list of visual culture resources. This is our very own home grown CUNY resource at the Graduate Center. I strongly suggest drawing upon its riches as often as possible.

The latest edition is a website of the work of the important American artist Winslow Homer. There has been increasing interest in Winslow Homer, not only for his wonderful work portraying important episodes in American history, such as the Civil War and its aftermath, but also because he did such extraordinary paintings of African American and Afro-Caribbean subjects.