"thinking about Lincoln" Topic

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I wrote the post below when the film Lincoln was released in 2012. I thought some readers might find it of interest today. My purpose here was to take up the movie in the context of Richard Hofstadter's famous essay on Lincoln — an essay which is all that bright high-school students may ever learn about him. I have inserted links to the publisher's pages of the books cited.

The movie powerfully rebuts the portrait of Lincoln that bright high school and college students absorb directly or indirectly from Richard Hofstadter's incredibly influential essay "Abraham Lincoln and the Self-Made Myth," collected in The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It. Hofstadter depicted Lincoln as essentially indifferent to the wrongs of slavery and disparaged the Emancipation Proclamation as a glorified nullity.

Among other things, Hofstadter famously observed that the Proclamation "had all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading" and "did not in fact free any slaves." Eric Foner is Hofstadter's successor at Columbia. Foner accurately noted that Hofstadter pointedly juxtaposed Lincoln's 1858 speech in Chicago affirming the equality of man with his address the same year in pro-slavery Southern Illinois in which he insisted that he opposed "bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the black and white races."

Hofstadter's portrait of Lincoln cannot survive this film. It is a great vehicle for learning and teaching something true and important about Lincoln. To paraphrase Lincoln himself, all honor to Kushner for getting Lincoln's hatred of slavery right and making it the centerpiece of this film.

I had to read the Hofstadter book at Rice in the 1960s. It was very influential, and very misleading.