Produced by AppleTV and released on President’s Day weekend, the documentary Lincoln’s Dilemma masquerades as a film about Abraham Lincoln. In reality, it’s ideological agitprop that distorts the man’s legacy and that of the entire antislavery movement. The film attacks the cult of the Lost Cause — always a boon. It puts slavery at the center of the Civil War, where it belongs. And it takes dead aim at Confederate deniers. But while it corrects past fallacies, Lincoln’s Dilemma asserts a new set of biases. It bills itself as an objective treatment that seeks to expand our understanding of how American slavery was destroyed. Instead, it bends the record of the past so as to serve its own dogmas. While claiming merely to deconstruct the mythology of the Great Emancipator, it in fact disseminates a warped mythology of its own. This isn’t history — this is propaganda.
The Civil War era is the most complex period of United States history. The filmmakers interview an impressive array of historians. Yet instead of giving the subject the comprehensive treatment it deserves, the documentary compresses the event into four short episodes. This results in a frustrating experience, as it dispatches nuanced topics in minutes. Erudite scholars are reduced to soundbites. Michael Burlingame, for example, who knows more about Lincoln than any living person, gets in just a few points. With such a star-studded cast, the series should have been 10 times as long. Yet despite its short length, it took me hours to wade through the film, as I had to stop every few seconds to catalog its errors, half-truths, and misreadings. In its zeal to strip its subject of his laurels, the series omits crucial information, twists certain facts, and collapses important distinctions. It’s rife with uncharitable readings, cynical interpretations, and unfair characterizations. It engages in opportunistic attacks on Lincoln, fails to provide context, and allows brazen half-truths to go unchallenged.
The filmmakers insist that the abolition of slavery was the work of more than one man. This is true. But it paints Lincoln as slow to emancipation, a “son of the South” who (while believing slavery was wrong) didn’t care enough about black people to take harsh measures against it. Only through war, suffering, and pressure from militants such as Frederick Douglass did his heart expand so as to see the necessity of striking at slavery. While this argument may confirm the bias of a liberal audience, it’s factually wrong. Consider a few examples.
To begin with, Lincoln wasn’t pro-South. The sight of enslaved people as a youth tormented him, the show admits, and while he empathized at times with slaveholders, his sympathies were with the enslaved. He spent the bulk of his energy attacking slavery with powerful, multifaceted arguments and trumpeting the natural equality of blacks and whites under the Declaration of Independence. In fact, in his new book The Black Man’s President, Burlingame calls Lincoln a racial egalitarian at heart and an extreme democrat a la Thomas Paine. But the film doesn’t let him say this. It also passes over Lincoln’s ties to revolutionaries, such as the German emigres of 1848, many of whom he commissioned as officers during the war, and to socialists such as Charles Dana, whom he made assistant secretary of war. While not a strict abolitionist, Lincoln was a strong antislavery politician. He viewed the movement, as most Northerners did, as part of a broader struggle against oppression. Frederick Douglass, while wishing for a more fiery candidate such as Charles Sumner, supported him in 1860 because he saw him as sufficiently radical. The show fails to emphasize this.
Instead, several of the documentary’s interviewees peddle the fiction that Lincoln didn’t intend at first to end slavery, merely to restore the Union. This is inaccurate. Lincoln’s dilemma wasn’t whether to abolish slavery, but how. From the Kansas-Nebraska Act onward, his raison d’etre, his North Star, was to build an antislavery coalition, win federal power, and use it to turn the nation toward abolition. The series hardly mentions the Republicans and their “cordon of freedom” strategy to choke slavery to death. Lincoln didn’t just “hope” for slavery’s ultimate demise, as one historian asserts to the camera. He worked for years to make it happen. When another insists that Lincoln didn’t set out at the beginning of the war to emancipate the enslaved directly, this is technically correct. But it buries the lead. Lincoln set out in 1854 precisely to end slavery through legislation, however indirect. His change as the war progressed, then, was one of strategy, not goal. Yes, his immediate objective after Fort Sumter was to bring the conflict to a swift resolution. But that was with an eye toward resuming the legal, peaceful plan to abolish the institution. In any case, he abandoned that plan after little more than a year into the war in favor of direct, full-blown emancipation, enforced under war powers by armed federal agents.
The filmmakers emphasize the agency of black people, how they struggled for freedom by resisting enslavers, escaping north, advocating for abolition, and, ultimately, fighting in the U.S. Army and Navy. (Oddly, though, the show doesn’t mention the Christian roots of this resistance — the black church is nowhere to be found.) We must learn and trumpet these neglected stories. But the film goes further. It asserts, in subliminal ways, the argument that the enslaved destroyed bondage on their own, without the political and military actions of the federal government. This thesis suffers an obvious problem. If the slaves freed themselves, why didn’t they do it sooner? The operative view of slavery at work here contains a contradiction: On the one hand, the institution is portrayed as a totalitarian regime built on torture, theft, and rape. On the other, it’s depicted as somehow also weak enough that, when war came, enslaved people self-emancipated without much aid, let alone the massive sacrifice by Union troops, black and white. Yes, there were astonishing stories of escape by people such as Robert Smalls and Anthony Burns (a personal hero of mine.) Hundreds of thousands of enslaved people fled to refugee camps. But these exceptions proved the rule. The fact is that of the 4 million enslaved, the vast majority couldn’t claim their freedom until Lincoln’s bayonets arrived. This was the logic behind making Juneteenth a federal holiday, after all: It commemorates the day in 1865 when the boys in blue finally got to Texas and enforced emancipation.
“I have only been an instrument,” Lincoln told a lieutenant in the U.S. Colored Cavalry in 1865 (a quote left out of the series). “The logic and moral power of [William Lloyd] Garrison, and the antislavery people of the country and the army have done all.” James Oakes says at one point that when it comes to the antislavery movement, instead of either-or, we should think in terms of convergence: a joining together of diverse actors who all played a necessary, vital part that no one else could do for them. The film says it wants to describe this confluence, but it doesn’t do so.
Too often, then, the film frames issues in terms of either-or, not both-and (while claiming the opposite). Either Lincoln freed the slaves with the stroke of his pen, or the enslaved did it themselves. If we credit the Army with a major role, it somehow takes away from the agency of black people. If we elevate Douglass, we do it at Lincoln’s expense. Zero sum. And that’s because the film’s really an extension of the 1619 Project of the New York Times. In this narrative, black people fought slavery and racism mostly alone. To acknowledge that the American Revolution gave birth to a biracial antislavery movement, let alone that there were white people who fought and died alongside black people for freedom and equality during the Second American Revolution, would collapse the argument of the film and the regnant ideology it carries water for. Hence why figures such as John Brown, Thaddeus Stevens, and Robert Gould Shaw are left out.
This also explains the failure of Lincoln’s Dilemma to explain the president’s assassination. It omits his speech in April 1865, in which he endorsed voting rights for black people who served in Union forces or were educated. When John Wilkes Booth heard this call for black citizenship, he declared it would be the president’s last public utterance. He made good on that promise, turning Lincoln into a martyr for civil rights. Yet, inexplicably, Lincoln’s Dilemma, a documentary about Abraham Lincoln, doesn’t explore the motivations of the man who ended his life.
What’s astounding in all this is that the film enlists the contributions of three historians who have publicly opposed the 1619 Project — Sean Wilentz, Oakes, and James McPherson. I’m sure they had no idea they were being impressed into service for a historical narrative they’ve denounced. The contributions they make are sound, but they’re subverted by other scholars, and the editorial decisions of the directors are clearly against them. The movie takes the authority of anti-1619 scholars and uses it to underwrite the very blinkered historical reading they’ve opposed.
The historical stage of the 19th century was immense. Lincoln’s Dilemma takes steps to broaden its cast of characters. But the definitive documentary about all who struggled in the Civil War for freedom and the nation remains to be told. At best, it’s a missed opportunity — when again will a filmmaker assemble such a pantheon of historians?
At one point in the documentary, we see a crowd gathered in 2020 in front of a copy of the Emancipation Memorial in Boston, debating whether to take it down. The president “doesn’t deserve this platform,” a woman insists. But the more you learn, the more you realize that fallible as he was, he earned his place in history. He suffered into wisdom and paid for the pursuit of freedom with his life. Douglass and Lincoln, a scholar says at one point, came to have a healthy respect for each other. Maybe more: The black leader told Lincoln that his second inaugural address was a “sacred effort,” one literary genius to another. I’d put them on that pedestal together, and the whole host who helped. There’s room enough for all.
Nick Coccoma is a Boston writer and critic who’s been published in New Politics, Critics at Large, and Full-Stop. Follow him on Substack at the Similitude and @NickCoccoma.
