2017 Lincoln Prize

[David Lockmiller]

(02-14-2017 03:28 PM)RJNorton Wrote:  Scott, many thanks for posting this! James Conroy is a member here and made several posts in this thread that Linda began.

Congratulations to both winners!

Congratulations to James Conroy, co-winner of 2017 Lincoln Prize for his book Lincoln’s White House: The People’s House in Wartime.

On May 7, 2014 James Conroy made a posting on the thread to which Roger refers:
In many ways, I admired Spielberg's film and Daniel Day Lewis's brilliant performance, but the film took more than a little artistic license with the peace conference. The three Southern peace envoys were nothing like the evil comic book characters portrayed in the film. Contrary to Spielberg's portrayal, on their way to see Lincoln, they were not confronted at the Union lines by grim Northern soldiers as if they were emissaries from Satan. They were moderate, accomplished, well-meaning men, and they were greeted at the lines by cheers and jubilation on both sides. All three of them took politically unpopular positions in Richmond in an effort to find a peaceful end to the war.

On August 20, 2014, I made a posting to this thread which began as follows:
There was a posting today on this thread and I went back to see the previous posts. The subject of Reconstruction has come up on a recent different thread and that's what caught my interest in your book thread.

You state from above that "the film took more than a little artistic license with the peace conference." Are you aware of any other portions of the film in which "the film took more than a little artistic license?

That same day, Mr. Conroy made the following post in response to the extremely long post that I had made that day:
David:

Yours is the most interesting critique of the Spielberg film that I have read, despite your having decided to look no further than the trailer. I was enormously impressed by the performances of Daniel Day Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, Sally Field, and others, and also by the look and feel of the film, all of which are worth the price of admission, but its accuracy disappointed me. Spielberg is quite right. Popular film and popular history are different things; but the past can be brought to life without changing it, as readers and reviewers have been kind enough to say about Our One Common Country: Abraham Lincoln and the Hampton Roads Peace Conference of 1865 (see http://www.jamesbconroy.com), which addresses the same subjects as the film. (The overlap, by the way, was entirely accidental. I started working on the book three years before the film appeared.)

Apart from the points noted in my previous post, the film's many flaws, in my opinion, range from Mary Lincoln's portrayal as a politically talented feminist, to a depiction of Francis Preston Blair as the virtual puppeteer of the Republican conservatives in the United States Senate, to specific facts like the location of the Hampton Roads peace conference, to trivial details like the name of the servant who accompanied Blair on his peacemaking trip to Richmond. Most unfortunate of all is what seems to me to be the anachronistic portrayal of Lincoln and other mid-nineteenth century Republicans as if they were twenty-first century Democrats. Lincoln, Thaddeus Stevens, and William Seward were products of their times. They freely articulated racial views, for example, that would quite properly end the career of any politician who expressed them in 2014. They were among the greatest men of their day, but men of their day they were. It does them no honor to present them to the public as if they thought, spoke and acted in 1865 like motivational speakers addressing a Hollywood fundraiser in 2014.

In my opinion, "Lincoln" is a beautifully acted, evocatively presented film, and in many ways an admirable work of art, but the true story of the Hampton Roads Peace Conference and the startling, counter-intuitive roles that men like Ulysses S. Grant, Jefferson Davis, and Abraham Lincoln played in it are cinematic enough without the embellishments and artistic license that permeate the movie.

I reread late last night all of the posts made on this thread. There was a statement made by Mr. Conroy that I had not recalled very well and which I thought very strange in reading this portion of his post once again:
“Most unfortunate of all is what seems to me to be the anachronistic portrayal of Lincoln and other mid-nineteenth century Republicans as if they were twenty-first century Democrats. Lincoln, Thaddeus Stevens, and William Seward were products of their times. They freely articulated racial views, for example, that would quite properly end the career of any politician who expressed them in 2014. They were among the greatest men of their day, but men of their day they were. It does them no honor to present them to the public as if they thought, spoke and acted in 1865 like motivational speakers addressing a Hollywood fundraiser in 2014.”

I am a regular reader of the New York Times online. Recently, there have been a number of stories in the New York Times that have been critical of Abraham Lincoln to which I have made a number of comment responses in the form of counter arguments defending President Abraham Lincoln (for many of these stories to which I objected, comments by readers were not permitted). But my main point is that hundreds of thousands of New York Times readers learn about Lincoln by reading only these stories, and not any of the legitimate critical comments made by other readers in response. There was even one recent episode of Charlie Rose with which I strongly disagreed with the statements by the interviewee regarding Lincoln. (There is no way to criticize a Charlie Rose episode.)

I do not know whether the other participants of this Lincoln Discussion Symposium are aware but I understand that the historical theme of the new National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington D.C. is critical of Abraham Lincoln.