When the movie was released in 2012, many historians along with journalists wrote reviews of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln.
For example:
December 2012
by Kelsey McKernie
Excerpt:
Critics of the movie have pointed out that there were other events happening at the same time, which helped to push the 13th Amendment forward and end the war. Professor Eric Foner points out that “slavery died on the ground” as well as in the House, due to abolition efforts by feminist leaders like Susan B. Anthony, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the actions of free blacks themselves. However, the absence of such events is not really historical error, but rather a choice of focus. The movie is about Lincoln, and the politicians on both sides of the aisle who were directly involved in the process of passing the 13th Amendment and ending the war -- not about the actions of other involved parties, however important they might have actually been to the historical event. Their stories are not this movie’s to tell.
Another criticism, voiced by Kate Masur in her
New York Times review of the movie, is the passivity of black characters in the movie. It is true that free African Americans were actively involved in efforts to get the 13th Amendment passed, and the movie could probably have shown this a bit more without significantly veering off-course,
possibly by highlighting the role of Frederick Douglass, who does not appear in the movie, or by providing more context for black characters like Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Todd Lincoln's dressmaker and one of the leaders of the African American community in Washington. Once again, however, this is not exactly an issue of historical accuracy (at least insofar as omissions are not errors) but of storytelling.
Ronald White, author of A. Lincoln: A Biography, tells NPR's Linda Wertheimer that if a ninth-grader were to write a school paper based on the film, she'd find that its "dramatic core" is basically on target.
On Kate Maser's New York Times op-ed, which criticized the film for keeping black people quietly in the background
"I think that's a point well taken. And what the audience doesn't fully understand, in the final scene — almost the final scene — where suddenly African-Americans arrive in the balcony as the final vote is to be taken, that one of those is Charles Douglass, the son of Frederick Douglass. Charles had fought in the famous Massachusetts 54th; he will write to his father after that climactic vote: 'Oh, Father, how wonderful it is. People were cheering, they were crying tears of joy.' So that had the potential for more black agency, but it doesn't come to full fruition in the film."
On whether freeing the slaves was the prime motive of Abraham Lincoln, as the film suggests
"I think we still don't understand, sadly, although historians have been telling us this for a generation — that slavery really was a cause of the war. However, Lincoln did start the war to save the Union; he did not start the war originally to free the slaves. But that became a purpose for him when he realized that he could no longer move forward without a true understanding of liberty and union. He ran in 1864 for re-election on the slogan 'Liberty and Union,' and so it becomes the second purpose of the Civil War."
