Abraham Lincoln ‘somehow’ became the great redeemer

Abraham Lincoln, in Walt Whitman’s celebrated phrase, contained multitudes. M.E. Synon showed yesterday quite how many there might have been. There is evidence of prejudice, callousness and corruption. Yet there is also the 13th amendment (1865): the basis, whatever the wider context of its adoption, of Lincoln’s right to be called the Great Emancipator.

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is a film of a book: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin, a blockbuster that paints a little more of the good Lincoln than the bad, but which accepts Lincoln’s complexity freely by describing a determined politician at work. Daniel Day-Lewis’s often mesmerising, twinkling Lincoln is not wholly angelic. He promises, and then prevaricates. He charms, and then deceives. He schemes, bribes and threatens in pursuit of his cause. The film hints at Lincoln’s darker shades; but never goes further than showing him to be as devious as a moderately sized basket of snakes.