Lincoln 2012

Thaddeus Stevens: Trust? Gentlemen, you seem to have forgotten that our chosen career is politics.

Robert Latham: It's not illegal to bribe congressmen. They starve otherwise.

Abraham Lincoln: I am the President of the United States of America, clothed in immense power! You will procure me those votes!

Along with Amazing Grace, Lincoln is one of the few films which show the contradictions inherent in political life. Both tell the stories of righteous men battling to defeat the evil of slavery through peaceful, democratic and sometimes boring means. Where these two films differ is on the means used by the protagonists to achieve the death of slavery.

Lincoln, brought to life splendidly by Daniel Day Lewis, knows that he only has a very short time to bring the amendment to abolish slavery to the House of Representatives in the dying days of the war. I won’t go through the intimate details of the American political system with its Federal and State level legislatures and executive offices. He knows he needs 20 votes from the opposing Democratic Party in order to pass the amendment and he also knows that a large number of democrats have been voted out of power and are spending their last few months as members of Congress. He proceeds to buy these votes for the amendment.

The major theme of the film is: does the end justify the means? Lincoln bribes politicians, deceives the House of Representatives (an impeachable offense) and even seems willing to prolong the Civil War to guarantee the passage of the amendment. It is up to the individual viewer to decide if his dishonest, and illegal, actions were justified in order to abolish the evil of slavery in America.

All references come from IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443272/?ref_=nv_sr_5b

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