From Out of the Top Hat: A Blog from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum

Part of the power of Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln comes from screenwriter Tony Kushner’s skill at navigating the line between history and fiction.  He followed the example of James Agee, the novelist and film critic who wrote five half-hour teleplays on Lincoln for the CBS program “Omnibus” in 1952-1953.  Agee laid down the principle of “reasonable conjecture” to guide the dramatist in creating a gripping story that brought Lincoln alive on the screen.

Agee defined “reasonable conjecture” as speculation based on facts, but not fenced in by them.  Getting at the deepest truths about Lincoln required both dramatic license and dramatic discipline: familiarizing yourself with the available facts before rearranging them and supplementing them to make the story work.  Invented scenes and dialogue were justified if they contravened no known facts and tried to capture the life of Lincoln as he’d lived it.

In 1955, “Omnibus” aired “Mr. Lincoln,” a one-hour abridgement of Agee’s five films. (The hour is available on DVD from The Archive of American Television.)  The first scene shows the principle of “reasonable conjecture” in action.  It’s April 10, 1865, and we find ourselves inside the sun-drenched Washington, D.C., studio of photographer Alexander Gardner.  The film camera is focused on its ancestor, Gardner’s studio camera perched atop its tripod.

We see actor Royal Dano from the back as Gardner prepares his shot, joking about how the Appomattox surrender has made Lincoln do something for the first time: smile for a photographer.  Gradually the “Omnibus” camera zooms in on the studio camera, passing by Lincoln’s shoulder as Gardner instructs him to turn his head slightly to the right.  Gardner removes the lens cap, and we see what he sees: the ever so slight grin of contentment that the real Lincoln did allow Gardner to capture in the “cracked plate” photo of February 5, 1865.

This dialogue between Lincoln and Gardner is a fiction, but a fiction designed to expose a truth: the scores of photos we have of Lincoln miscommunicate his character.  They make him severe and solemn.  Long exposure times ruled out capturing his affability, not to speak of his hilarity.

By lingering on Gardner’s camera, and first showing Lincoln’s face as seen through the lens, Agee’s film addresses a second truth.  Photographs have decisively shaped our awareness of him.  Those of us born in Agee’s era (he died in 1955) almost certainly encountered Lincoln first through iconic images of wisdom, resilience, and patience, not through stories about his everyday human experiences.

It still takes a lot of convincing for many of us to believe that he ever missed the boat, gave up, lost his temper, or behaved as anything less than a perspicacious saint.  (Could he possibly have slapped his son Robert across the face, as Kushner’s script has it?  Never!  Could he have sunk into a depression so deep that he thought he had caused Ann Rutledge’s death, as Agee’s film has it?  Impossible!)

Spielberg’s Lincoln follows the lead of Agee’s “Mr. Lincoln” by introducing the star of the show from behind, and then moving the camera slowly past his shoulder before cutting to a front view of Lincoln sitting before us.  Daniel Day-Lewis is oddly situated, alone on a platform (perhaps a reviewing stand) as a few dozen soldiers mingle nearby before pushing off.

Lincoln bigger than life, if only on the billboard. (Photo by Richard Wightman Fox)

We expect Lincoln, perched on his wooden pedestal, to be the main speaker in this scene, but Kushner makes him the listener, as two young white soldiers and one black soldier recite portions of his year-old Gettysburg Address to him.  This exchange never happened.  But Kushner does double duty with it.  Lincoln is rattled by hearing his exact words spoken by the white soldiers.  He tries to make them stop, embarrassed by the memorized adulation.

Like Agee with the photograph, Kushner seems to be telling us viewers to let Lincoln come down from the pedestal we’ve placed him on.  We’re so busy venerating his image and his words that we’ve forgotten about the man.  It’s time to examine the actual emancipator.  As the black soldier finishes the recitation, speaking of “a new birth of freedom,” Lincoln is moved by his own words.  He hears the judgment in them.  He’s being challenged, not routinely praised.

Kushner shows he’ll also examine the man in relation to his wife.  The second Lincoln scene in his script mirrors the second scene in Agee’s.  They both put Mary and Abraham in a small, warmly lit White House room on an evening in 1865.  They’re relaxing together until conversation turns to an alarming dream Abraham has had.  Agee’s Lincoln recounts his (apocryphal) dead-president-in-the-White-House dream.  Kushner’s Lincoln tells the (factual) fast-moving-ship dream.  (See my post on “Lincoln’s Dreams, Authentic and Inauthentic,” Jan. 10, 2011, for the content of the dreams.)

Both authors invent a fictional tête-à-tête to disclose a basic truth about Abraham and Mary.  Each of them took dreams very seriously as hints of what might happen.  Kushner goes beyond the facts in tying the ship dream to the 13^th amendment (at least in Mary’s mind), but in doing so he brings out the common sensibility of two people usually thought of as opposites: crazy, impatient Mary, and rational, long-suffering Abraham.

Dreams helped Mary and Abraham establish their intimacy.  As she does in Kushner’s scene, Mary appears in real life to have taken on some of Abraham’s anxiety about his dreams.  Her readiness to absorb some of his worries let them feel close.  And that closeness gave him much-needed support as he got back to the daily grind of saving the union and advancing freedom for all.

In April, Steven Spielberg announced Sally Field as his choice to play the president’s wife in Lincoln, the feature film coming in 2012 to a theater near you.   The director said he’d always wanted her for the part.  Why?  Because the two-time Oscar recipient could capture “all the fragility and complexity that was Mary Todd Lincoln.”

There’s no telling how much screen time Sally Field will actually get in the picture, based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals.  Goodwin’s story centers on Lincoln, his 1860 Republican presidential competitors (Edward Bates, Salmon Chase, and William Seward), and his Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.  But selecting Field to star opposite Daniel Day-Lewis, an “Abraham” with two Oscars of his own, suggests that Spielberg may intend more than a passing glance at Mary. 

Given Field’s stature in American popular culture, even a few scenes in such a high-profile venture will affect the image of Mrs. Lincoln for a long time to come.  Let’s hope that the screenplay by Pulitzer Prize-winner Tony Kushner, and Spielberg’s direction, will bring out the full “complexity” of Mary’s “fragility.” 

For all her temperamental swings and failures of judgment, this perpetually insecure soul — emotionally shredded, like her husband, by the death of their 11-year-old son Willie in early 1862, and badgered by Washington critics as a pathetic Western parvenu, if not also a closet secessionist — managed somehow to keep her husband’s health and the Union’s welfare hovering near the front of her mind. 

Too often her ups and downs are reduced to individual craziness, the product of her Todd family’s history of mental distress, aggravated by personal setbacks beginning when she was six with the loss of her mother.  A discombobulated Mary is easily positioned, after Willie’s death, as a spiritualist crank and a continuing burden on her long-suffering spouse.

Lincoln’s forbearance in the face of her tongue-lashings and manic shopping binges bolsters his image as a selfless saint, safely detached from her disorders.  But anyone who has ever been in a decades-long relationship will suspect this picture is one-sided.

Her splenetic displays, and his high-minded silence or forlorn withdrawal, were likely built into the relationship they’d created with one another.  The sparks were part of the substance.

The essential corrective to the portrayal of Mary as an out-of-control, self-aggrandizing deviant — the perfect foil for a charitable servant of the people — is to insist on her intimate ties with Abraham over 22 years of marriage.  In Springfield those ties included political as well as domestic intercourse.  In Washington, she gradually lost her political role, but her civic enthusiasm, and her ardor for her husband’s success and well-being, never waned. 

There’s no reason to think their “scenes,” as Mary labeled one of their White House spats, prevented them from enjoying, and needing, one another’s company.  There’s every reason to believe their angry standoffs were followed, at least some of the time, by eager reconciliation.  Their complexity as a couple helped shape her fragility as an individual.

Any depiction that takes Mrs. Lincoln as the nutty nuisance, the bothersome drag on the forgiving Mr. Lincoln, distorts their quarter-century of impassioned partnership.  So does any portrayal that misses Mary’s ongoing public engagement after Abraham stopped soliciting (or even listening to) her political judgments.

Goodwin’s engrossing Team of Rivals devotes only a few pages to Mary, but it gives Kushner and Spielberg all the evidence they’ll need to show that this long marriage kept being renewed by mutual fervor for politics and public service.

Mary and Abraham had both fallen for Henry Clay’s Whig politics long before they fell for each other.  They fell for each other in part because of their shared political vision.  Once in the national capital, she sought out new ways to exercise her political passions.  After Willie’s death, she poured herself all the more intensively into one of them: hospital work.  

As historian Michael Burlingame points out in his biography Abraham Lincoln:  A Life (vol. II, p. 495), “she won [occasional newspaper] praise for ‘the generous devotion with which she has tenderly cared for the sick and wounded soldiers.’”  Praise came from her husband too, writes Burlingame: “Lincoln gave her $1,000 out of his own pocket to buy Christmas turkeys for the hospitalized troops and helped her distribute them.”

One result of Mary’s inattention to publicity: no contemporary illustration of her hospital work exists. This 1861 scene of volunteers and visitors was probably less ghastly than what she usually saw.

Catherine Clinton (Mrs. Lincoln: A Life, p. 196) observes that Mary “visited the hospitals two or three times a week,” undeterred by what one newspaper called “the fear of contagion and the outcries of pestilence.”

In Team of Rivals (p. 457), Goodwin notes that Mary brought the men “baskets of fruit, food, and fresh flowers . . . to mask the pervasive stench of disinfectant and decay.”  She sat down beside them to write letters to their families.  One young man learned who she was only after the letter bearing her signature had been delivered. 

Urged by Lincoln secretary William Stoddard to curry general favor for her labors, Mary stuck with relative anonymity, having found, as Goodwin writes, “something more gratifying than public acknowledgment (p. 459).”  She got the reward of registering firsthand the soldiers’ devotion to her husband and their fidelity to the Union cause.

In Lincoln, Spielberg and Kushner have the rare chance to give us the Mary who made her husband proud alongside the Mary who made him fret.  The Lincolns collaborated in family building and public service.  She shored him up even as she weighed him down.  He let her find new purpose even as he left her aside, to embark on a presidential calling all his own.

A film centered on civilian leaders in wartime cannot attempt a full treatment of the Lincoln marriage.  But it can let Sally Field signal a fully human Mary, courageous as well as distraught.