Image of the Day

• Lincoln publicly voiced support for the Fugitive Slave Law,
which made every American citizen—North and South—
responsible for catching runaway slaves.
***
Contrary to popular belief, Lincoln’s famous Emancipation
Proclamation did not “free” a single Black person from chattel slavery—
not one. When it looked like the Union was losing the war, Lincoln
“freed” slaves in the South so that they could fight against their masters. In
that same document he made sure that slavery was not disturbed where it
existed in the North!
These are hardly the acts of a Saviour or of a Salvation Army. But
they are truths that dirty the image of Lincoln, whom Spielberg is posing
as America’s very own Christ figure—the man who died for the racial sins
of a nation.
Spielberg is intent on hiding these important facts, portraying his
subject as the avuncular oracle of racial kindness. But Spielberg is not so
charitable with the Black characters that appear throughout his wartime
fairytale. It opens with a combat scene, but the first death we see is a
Black man stabbed in the chest with a bayonet—Spielberg preserves an
honored Hollywood tradition that Blacks must be the first to die.
President Lincoln is then shown in the midst of a Union camp
earnestly listening to the battlefield accounts of two Black soldiers.
Spielberg puts them with the Second Kansas Colored Regiment, an actual
Black military unit, though their encounter with the President is totally
fictional. What is troubling is that one of the soldiers describes a combat
event in which, he says, his colored unit “killed them all”—every last one
of them. This is a description of a war atrocity—not a battle in which the
enemy was beaten badly—and it is Spielberg’s way of making the Black
race responsible for the extreme brutality of America’s deadliest war
(750,000 dead). The Jenkins Ferry battle was indeed brutal and bloody, but
if an order were given to “kill them all” it would have had to come from
the White leader of the “colored” unit.
Spielberg’s other Black soldier presses the President for equality in
an unrealistically brash dialogue that would have earned him time in a