"Lincoln" legal mistake

[Jim Page]

I finally watched Lincoln. I’ve read most of what’s been posted on this forum about this movie. I guess it won’t hurt to post what I think of it.

Good movie; a story well told by folks who cared what they did. A lot of time and treasure went into the making of it. Many viewers resented the fact that it took too much of their time, in their estimation, and required them to use their brains. Well, they’ll survive.

Some folks think that the fact that slavery in this country had to be abolished by law is itself offensive. I’m no Constitutional scholar, but I don’t believe that document explicitly mentions slavery at all; it doesn’t permit it or forbid it. It gingerly touches on operational aspects of slavery in a few places, dealing with population counts, the slave trade and slaves escaping from one state to another, and that’s about it.

Lincoln and those who worked with him forced the law into the situation and the document and made slavery illegal, forcing the United States to be “a more perfect union.”

This movie, as much as anything else, showed the actions of the elderly. As the young died on the battlefields, the old, careful in how they stepped, fearful they might fall or fail, strove to bring meaning to horror. Lincoln is the story of how some of the old fought their Civil War.

That was time well spent, at least for me, and I learned from the film.

--Jim