“How the people love my husband. They flock to see him by the thousands,” Mary Todd Lincoln (Sally Field) tells Rep. Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) midway through Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln after Stevens, who investigated her spending on the White House as Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, arrives there for a reception. “They will never love you as they love my husband. How hard for you to know that. But how important to remember it.” Her opinion of the relative position of the two men guides the film, a tremendous depiction of what it takes to pass epochal legislation marred by lapses into sentiment and Spielbergian self-indulgence.

Lincoln is at its most clear-eyed, and its most-effective, when the movie tackles the question of how to muster votes, and bipartisan votes at that, for the end of slavery, a section of the film dominated by Stevens and Secretary of State William Seward (David Straitharn). The two men begin the movie in very different positions, Stevens as a life-long advocate for the end of slavery and racial equality, Seward unconvinced of the Amendment’s viability or necessity. “Since when has our party unanimously supported anything?” he asks his president, particularly given the prospect of the South suing for peace. “Why tarnish that luster with a battle in the House?” But Lincoln makes himself clear: he will have the Amendment in January of 1865, even if it means buying off lame duck Democrats who need employment when they leave their offices in March. “If procuring votes with jobs is what you intend, I’ll procure from Albany the skulking men who are suited to this shady work,” Seward tells Lincoln, resigned to his task.

Those skulking men are W.N. Bilbo (James Spader) and Robert Latham (John Hawkes), and with their arrival on screen, both Seward and Lincoln are invigorated. After assessing their prospects, Bilbo explains that he and Latham will ignore Democrats of the “Kind that hates Niggers, hates God for making Niggers. We’ve abandoned these 39 to the Devil who possesses them,” and focus instead on rather more craven men like Clay Hutchins (Walton Goggins, capping off a tremendous year). Seward takes it on himself to figure out what each man is worth. “A first-term Congressman who couldn’t earn reelection,” he says of one rather greedy Democrat. “I deemed it unseemly and bargained him down to Postmaster.” Hutchins, standing in for that persuadable Democratic minority, explains the dilemma he faces: the 13th Amendment is being presented as the only way to end the Civil War by weakening the Confederacy, but Lincoln’s case for it is being weakened by rumors of a peace delegation from the South, seeking an accord–but only if they can preserve slavery. “If my neighbors hear I voted yes to Nigger freedom and no to peace, they’ll kill me,” Hutchins says. His view is shared by more sophisticated men like Preston Brooks (Hal Holbrook), who is desperate to avert the arrival of another fighting season. “I went to Richmond to talk to traitors,” he tells Lincoln after his meeting with the Confederates. “To smile at and talk to traitors. Because in two months, it will be spring.”

While Lincoln delays the commissioners and the actual offer of a peace deal to keep the necessity of the 13th Amendment alive in Washington, aided at the last minute on the day of the vote by Bilbo and Latham transversing Washington at a dead sprint, in the House it is up to Stevens to strike the delicate balance to hold his fragile party together. A man of firey temperment–Stevens at one point addresses Democratic leader Fernando Wood as “you perfectly named obstructive object”–Stevens is forced to make a moral compromise, telling the House that, contrary to his lifelong advocacy, “I don’t hold with equality in all things, just equality before the law, nothing more.” It’s a painful moment, that rhetorical scaling back, and a recognition of the rhetorical compromise needed to move legal equality forward, leaving the work of cultural change separate. “Who would have guessed that old nightmare could show such control?” Mrs. Lincoln, watching with her maid Elizabeth Keckley (Gloria Reuben) from the House Gallery. “He might make a politician some day.” After Stevens speech, one of his Radical Republican allies tells Stevens that he betrayed their cause. “You’ve lead the battle for race equality for 30 years…You refused to say that all humans are human.” “I want the Amendment to pass so the Constitution’s first and only mention of slavery is its abolition,” Stevens responds to them. “So no, it seems there’s nothing I won’t say.”
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