Spielberg's Lincoln told how slavery was abolished

Person: Steven Spielberg
Lived: b. 1946
Field: Film
From: American

The story

Steven Spielberg's Lincoln was built on a screenplay by the playwright Tony Kushner, loosely based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's 2005 biography Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. Rather than tell Lincoln's whole life, it focused on the final four months, and above all on January 1865, when Lincoln fought to push the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, through the House of Representatives before the Civil War ended.

Lincoln was filmed in Richmond, Virginia, from October to December 2011, with Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln, Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln and Tommy Lee Jones in a leading supporting role. It premiered at the New York Film Festival in October 2012 and opened in American cinemas that November. Critics praised it for turning the slow work of persuasion and vote-counting into gripping drama. It earned more than 250 million dollars worldwide and twelve Academy Award nominations, winning Best Actor, Day-Lewis's third in the category, and Best Production Design.

The film reached classrooms as well as cinemas. After Spielberg received letters from teachers who wanted to use it in their lessons, DVDs of the film and a teaching guide, Stand Tall: Live Like Lincoln, were donated to more than 37,100 secondary schools across the United States. Historians debated some of its details, but many praised the care taken over historical authenticity, and it gave a wide modern audience a vivid account of how the Constitution was changed to end slavery.

On 19 November 2013 the National Archives and Records Administration honoured Spielberg with its Records of Achievement Award. He was presented with facsimiles of two versions of the 13th Amendment: one passed by Congress in 1861 but never ratified, and the 1865 version signed by Lincoln that abolished slavery.

The two documents, four years apart, framed the story the film told: how Congress and a determined president finally used the amendment process to end slavery in the United States.