To make a monetary contribution to the Abraham Lincoln institute to fund next years symposium. You can see any board member of the ali to make a donation. We are wearing these badges. Or, you can visit our website to donate. Toonline lincolninstitute. Org, and you can look for the date of our next symposium. Wish you a safe ride home, whether your journey as long or short, and look forward to seeing you next year. We will reassemble across the street at 5 30. Thank you all for coming. [applause] you dont have to invite me. Earlier this month, fords theater hosted a symposium on the life and legacy of president Abraham Lincoln. Coming up on American History tv, we will hear from Sidney Blumental, the author of a selfmade man. Then remarks from edna greene medford. Later, we will hear from the author of mary lincoln, southern girl, northern woman. Cspans washington journal, live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. Coming up thursday morning, sarah warbalo, legal director for the human rights campaign, and tim schultz, president of First Amendment partnership will discuss religious freedom laws in several states and the pushback from opponents who view laws as discriminatory. Then alex rogers with the National Journal will be on to talk about the gop president ial candidates efforts to woo unbound delegates, a process that could determine whether republicans will need to go past a first ballot at a president ial nominating convention for the first time in more than 70 years. Be sure to watch washington journal beginning live at 7 00 a. M. Eastern thursday morning. Join the discussion. Next, author and former political adviser Sidney Blumental talks about his book. He spoke at fords theater in washington. Sidney blumental, our first speaker, is a native of chicago, a ba degree and write for i alternative newspapers. He has been here since 1985. A journalist with the washington post, covering president s with reporting. He was bureau chief and contributed for the guardian and served as Senior Editor at new republic. He served as assistant and Senior Adviser to bill clinton from 1997 to 2001. His jobs included advising the president on communications and Public Policy and researching information inle immedia lned. After leaving the white house, he wrote the clinton wars, 2003 about his time in president ial service. The book has praised for its insight into the political process. Our speaker was a political consultant for the Emmy Award Winning series tanner 88. As the son of illinois, it might be hope that he would at some point turn his attention to lincoln. He will and his lincoln life will be multivolume will examine the origins of lincolns personality and slave reviews, intellectual dimensions, awkward efforts with the opposite sex, lincolns reading, fierce ambition and other interesting feature of the extraordinary 16th president. The first volume was published may 10th of this year. Im sure its a coincidence thats john wilkesbooths birthday. Sidney grew up in illinois. He practices journalism and worked at the white house and set his hand to chronicle the history he experienced. Im not sure he cant go better. Sidney has played lincoln last summer as a matter of fact i saw Sidney Blumentals lincoln on stone hill farm in virginia. I was president and can attest he was most president ial. Had a stovepipe hat to prove it. We have an interesting and wellrounded speaker. Ladies and gentlemen, Sidney Blumental. [ applause ] thank you. I appreciate those kind comments. I especially appreciate terrys guidance in my scholarship. He is a wonderful scholar and has won an written an Award Winning book on john wilkes booth. Im honored to be here at the Abraham Lincoln institute to be able to speak about my new book and honored to speak before you. I hope that there will be time for questions. If there arent, you can always come up to me afterwards. There will be a panel in the afternoon. I will be happy to answer any questions. In an age of antipolitics, i am here to speak of a career politician, a party stallworth and partisan who conducted his own Permanent Campaign for elected office from the age of 23 onward when he was not serving his corporate clients. After the founders was the greatest revolutionary figure in American History. Perhaps its a good thing Abraham Lincoln is not available to run for office this year. Especially in the party he helped to found. Though he was familiar with being the target of negative attacks, as a religious infidel, an aristocrat, corrupt, unpatriotic, tie ran cal, possibly black, and a proponent of ma south nation, abraham as a notorious campaign pamphlet dubbed him, but the charge against him from beginning to end was that he was a vulgar village politician. As the New York Herald described him in 1860. When lincoln was 28 years old, he tried out the word politician as an accusation against his opponents. He rose on the floor of the legislature in defense of the state bank which he proposed to fund vast public works. The politician he said by unholy means is endeavoring to blow up a storm that he may ride upon and direct. Mr. Chairman, although lincoln could would have said cheerman in his kentucky voice, this movement is exclusively the work of politicians, a set of men who have interests aside from the interests of the people. And who to say the most of them are taken as a mass at least one long step removed from honest men. And then he added, i say this with a greater freedom because being a politician myself none can regard it as personal. A politician myself, this was one of young lincolns earliest selfdescriptions. After lincolns assassination in this very place, lincoln underwent a transfigure rags. Elevated into a saint and a martyr. Cannonized and romanticized through his death he became unrecognizable from how he was known in life. But as William Henry seward, lincolns secretary of state, among the most cunning politicians of his time, remarked about the framers of the constitution, the saints were not sages and the sages were not saints. Seward had an understanding of hamilton long before the musical. Together, lincoln and seward played by the rules of the day and vindicated their principals. It was how they got the 13th amendment abolishing savory. Thats not folklore. Lincolns life as a politician has been rediscovered in every era. When david donald, the lincoln biographer, wrote lincoln reconsidered in 1956, calling one chapter a lincoln politician describing his background as a wig party stallworth, it was regarded as something of a revelation. Richard current, the lincoln scholar, followed in 1958 with the lincoln nobody knows, entitling one chapter, the ma massachusetm master politician. Since then many historians have plumed this area, not to mention steven spielberg. But there is much more to be learned about americas greatest political genius. As the campaign of 2016 demonstrates, demonstrates to use one of lincolns favorite words that he gained from his reading, a campaign of Political Party chaos filled with incitement to violence, driven by an irrepressable conflict over questions of race and nativism revealing a house divided, the lincoln theme we learn again is never exhausted. From the start, i sought to use my own experience having served closely with a president in the white house as a journalist in washington and involved in campaigns and elections. To think anew about lincolns home life and world, from this angle of vision, i have explored aspects of lincoln that i hope will enlarge and deepen our understanding of the springs of American History and politics. Lincoln lived in a time of selfmade men. Henry clay, who rose from rags to nearly the presidency, and coined the phrase a selfmade man to apply to himself was lincolns ideal as lincoln put it. In the first half of the 19th century, possibilities opened up for men of humble origins to transform themselves into new people, assuming identities that were previously unimagined and which defined democracy. Many men of lincolns generation were selfmade, but lincoln was uniquely selfmade. His selfcreation involved his immergs in Party Politics as part of the first generation of professional politicians in america. His selection of a socially prominent and unusually political wife and his engagement with the realities and politics of slavery, which summoned him forward as Thomas Jefferson prove if i sighed for the fashion. Lincoln cannot be understood apart from the background of Party Politics. It cannot be overstated that lincoln was a party politician. And that background cannot be separated from the issue of slavery. Lincolns entire life, his selfmaking, from its beginning, was shaped by the struggle over slavery. Nor can his religion and understanding of religion be grasped apart from the development of his ideas of democracy and slavery. Nor can his personal story be filtered from slavery. The first time Abraham Lincoln spoke openly about his origins was the year he assumed his new identity as a republican. Until then, he had been remarkably reticent about the facts of his personal life. He was one of the best known political figures in illinois. Yet he kept an essential part of himself mysterious. In 1856, he had been a professional politician on public view for 24 years. More than half his lifetime a stallworth member of the wig party. It was as a wig that he had climbed rapidly in its ranks. At the age of 27, he was elected to his second term in the legislature and his peers chose him as the wig floor leader. He was dubbed the chieftain, head of the socalled springfield hunto that directed the state party and coeditor of the newspaper writing many of its editorials anonymously. He was the manager of wig president ial campaigns in the state. And a president ial elector to the electoral college. He was the prime mover behind installing the Convention System that selected candidates, enforcing Party Discipline and using that system to drive out a competitor and make himself congressman. It was the first time when he did that that he used the phrase, a house divided. He was referring to the wig party. He had always campaigned on the wig platform for economic development, federal and state financing of massive Infrastructure Projects and the tariff to protect and encourage manufacturers. He emphasized that he was one of the people, not the aristocracy and felt hurt he was accused of being part of the upper class because of his marriage to mary todd. Who belonged to the edwards todd family, the most distinguished in springfield living on aristocracy hill. Projecting himself as a selfmade man, he believed himself to be and wanted to be seen as rising from the common clay. He was determined to leave his past behind. Even to bury it as if hiding his humiliation, his impulse was to protect himself from revelations about his origins. As for the actual details of his early existence, he had been stone silent. It was at a Campaign Event in 1856, after he had become a republican, that the man who had been extraordinarily reluctant about discussing his pass, sensitive about his social inferiority, blurted out a startling confession. I used to be a slave said lincoln. He did not explain what prompted him to make this incredible statement. Why he branded himself as belonging to the most oppressed, stigmatized and untouchable cast, far worse than being accused of being an abolitionist. Illinois, while a free straight, had a dra conian black code. Why would lincoln announce that he was a former slave . The bare facts he did not disclose to his audience were these. Until he was 21, lincolns father had rented him out to neighbors in rural indiana at a price of 10 to 31 cents a day to labor as a rail splitter, farm hand, hog butcher and ferry operator. The father collected the sons wages. Lincoln was an incidedentured servant. He regarded his father as domineering and himself without rights. Thomas lincoln, who had led a harsh and unfair life wanted his son to learn an honest trade as a laborer. Perhaps trained as a carpenter like himself, considered formal education a waste of time. And sought to suppress any larger ambition as useless dreaminess. It was only when the selfmade man finally identified himself as a republican that he felt free to reveal himself as a slave. And then lincoln completed his story. And now i am so free that they let me practice law. Lincolns humor drove home his point about the getaway but masked the scar. Calling himself a slave was not a slip of the tongue. It was not just another of his funny stories. Though he made it into a joke. He truly considered himself to have been held in bondage and escaped. Lincoln rarely if ever talked about his feelings, even to his closest friends who tried to discern the sides. He hid his depths beneath his simplicity. His authenticity was not deceptive but a veneer nonetheless. He was simple in his dress, manners, in his approach and his presence recalled william herndon, his law partner. He was a man of quite infin it silences and was deeply secretive, uncommunicative and close minded as to his plans, wishes, hopes and fears. I venture to say that he never opened himself to mortal creature. Well, it was no wonder. His captivity as a boy he felt was humiliating and degrading. Imprisonment in a world of neglect, poverty and ignorance. It was at the root of his fierce desire to rise. If he was angry with his father, he also knew that his father had been reduced to a dirt farmer and compelled to flee kentucky to escape from slavery. Slave states are places for poor white people to remove from not to remove to. Lincoln said in 1854 in opposition to steven a. Douglas nebraska act. New free states are the places for poor people to go to and better their condition. Lincoln had been oppressed by a man who was himself oppressed. By crossing the ohio river into indiana, his father had made his own escape. Lincoln was a fugitives son and a fugitive himself. Even more startling than lincolns selfdescription as chattel, as human property, was his subsequent selfidentification as a particular kind of slave, a fugitive slave, a runaway. In one of two interviews he granted, this one intended for circulation in support of his Senate Candidacy in 1858, lincoln offered this physical description of himself. If any personal description of me is thought desirable, it may be said i am in height 64 nearly, lean in flesh, weighing on an average 180 pounds, dark complexion, coarse black air, gr hair, no other marks or brands recollected. Many might have missed lincolns allusion. At the end of his seemingly bland selfportrayal, what did it mean . No other marks or brands recollected was not another of his amusing jokes. But the exact language slave owners used to describe runaway slaves in newspaper ads. Lincoln had, therefore, identified himself not only as one of the fugitives but also mocked their owners. This was more than sympathetic projection. He believed he had his own fugitive experience and emancipated himself. He was an oppressed and stunted boy who achieved his freedom. If with his disadvantages he could do it, it could be done. When he became a republican and identified himself as a slave, he had begun emerging as the Abraham Lincoln identifiable in history. Four years later, at the Illinois State convention, he would be given another identity. The rail splitter, the legendary ax wielding laborer, common man of the people, establishing one of the most enduring icons of American History. Those to the private lincoln who chuckled at the image making by party handlers, it was a picture of himself from the time when he thought of himself as a slave. Like other runaways, he had remade his identity and never took it for granted. Despite his standing for years among the illinois wigs, few people spotted him for greater things other than as a provincial figure, except perhaps his wife. Lincolns marriage was indispensable to his rise. His sense of destiny and his equal inyum. He was an almost comically awkward suitor who had a nervous breakdown over his inability to deal with the opposite sex. One socially superior woman to whom he proposed rejected him for having the manners of a bumpkin. Mary todd, daughter of henry clays Business Partner and political ally, from lexington, kentucky, a southern belle, was a rare woman of the southern upper class who loved politics and was described as a child as a violent little wig. She did not hesitate to offer her strong opinions at a time when women were supposed to remain silent and deafer enshall on the subject. If anything, she was more ambitious for her ambitious husband than he was. His alliance with her gave him more than the social standing he desired. She steadied him, pushed him forward, defended him and never lost faith in his star. She referred to their union as our lincoln party. Mary was high strung, threw temper tantrums and made scenes. She gave lincoln a family, respectability, a proper home and passion ately believed in him. Herndon hated her calling her a she wolf. She would never invite him into the lincoln home in springfield calling him a dirty dog. Lincolns Young Private secretaries, john hey referred to her as the hell cat. There would have been no lincoln without mary. And he knew it. He remained smitten and in wonder that she had selected a poor nobody. Before the eyes of those who dismissed him, even if they did not see it, the selfmade man was constantly transforming himself through selfeducation and relentless political aspiration. Politics were his heaven and his hades m hades metaphysics. He was a selfmade man as a professional politician, a new profession. The partisan regular in a newly competitive and disciplined two party system. Lincoln was one of the first men in the first generation of american professional politicians. He was not land to gentry like most of the founders. Nor was he successful as a mercha merchant. He was a failure as coowner of a general store and spend years digging out of debt. If being a successful businessman were the prerequisite for office, he would have been disqualified before his first race for the state legislature. Politici politics was not a grudging necessity as a member of the most distinguished lincoln scholars of the 20th century insisted. If it were true to begin with, he never would have become president and in the end would never have enacted the 13th amendment abolishing slavery. Lincoln the politician and lincoln the great emancipator were not ant thet cal sides of the same person or anti thet cal stages in the same life. But one man. If it were not for lincoln the politician, lincoln the great emancipator would never have existed. Lincoln knew from his practical experience that great change required 1,000 political acts, many small, some difficult and a few grand beginning in the illinois legislature. He understood that defeat could be the father of victory and that mere victory was often not the goal in itself but the means to higher ends. He knew that in direction had a direction and men often heard what they wanted to hear. He knew that little jokes could be serious and or ragss could e joked. His contemporary learned his drulry was his cover for political subtlety. His high and low rhetoric inspirational and banal had its own symphonic uses. Lincolns politics altered and sharpened with changing circumstances. Though he was never an abolitionist, he was as he insisted naturally antislavery. He grew up in an atmosphere far more sufficient fused with antislavery sentiment that has been understood. In his fathers cabin, the churches newspapers and books, men he chose as his mentors, conversations and debates, he joined in country stores, and the politics of indiana pitting the party of the people against the party of the virginia aristocrats. Lincolns deepening understanding of slavery in its full complexity is a moral, political and constitutional dilemma, began in his childhood. Among the primitive baptist a i antislavery d rry dissidents i kentucky and indiana in churches his parents attended. As a boy he rode down the Mississippi River to new orleans where the open air impore yum of slaves on display shocked him. His development was hardly a straight line. But he was caught up in the currents of his time. His selfeducation, which started with his immergs in the bible, shakespeare and the free thinking works of thomas payne was the intellect youll foundation for his profoundly condemnation of southern christian proslavery theology. That surfaced first in his eulogy for henry clay and was shaped to diamond hardness in his second inaugural. His 1837 springfield address protested the murder by a proslavery mob in illinois of the abolitionist editor, thousand he did nthough he did not mention him by name. He was one of two Illinois State legislators who performed the unheard of act of proposing a bill in favor of emancipation in the district of columbia. As a congressman, he lived in a boarding house right across from the capitol on the site of what is now the library of congress. And that boarding house was known as abolition house. He experienced the appalling invasion of slave catchers coming to seize one of the waiters as a fugitive slave. Undoubtedly, he knew the secret of the house where he lived, that it was a station in the underground railroad. He denounced the mexican war as fraudulently started and voted numerous times for the proviez zo against the expansion of slavery. With a quiet assistance of the leading abolitionists in the congress, he drafted a bill for emancipation in the district. For which none other than john c. Calhoon of South Carolina the former Vice President , u. S. Senator and tribune of the master class rebuked him. Lincoln reestablished himself in springfield after returning from his brief time in washington contemplating his political career seemingly at its close, a writer of south sea tales began his thinking about and writing of an epic work that would encompass an ocean of ideas, passions and dread. It was also a book written through the debate over the compromise of 1850 that was thought to define the new american nation for a generation to come and to take slavery off the table as an issue. In one of the chapters of moby dick, her man melville describes the sailor weaving on board as ishmail uses his hands, seemed as if this were the loom of time and myself were a shuttle, mechanically weaving away at the fates. Meantime, the impulsive indifferent sword sometimes hitting crookedly or strongly or weakly as the case may be. By this difference in the concludining blow producing a contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric, this savages sword thought i was thus finally which finally shapes and fashions warp and this easy indifferent sword must be chance, i chance free will and necessity, no eyes incompatible, all working together the straight warp of necessity not to be swerved from its ultimate course. Itsal ter naturing vibration tending to that, free will, between given threads and chance though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity and sideways in its motions directed by free will though thus prescribed to by both. Chance by turns, rules either. And has the last featuring blow at events. Her man melvilles description of destiny as practical work on the ship was more closely a portrayal of the political life than predetermined scales of e ideological evolution. Lincoln ing a political life in history as it unfolded. Who aint a slave asked ishmail . On june 26, 1857, lincoln spoke in springfield against the dread scott decision of the Supreme Court declaring that blacks had no rights which the white man was bound to respect and that slavery could not be prohibited in any territory. For lincoln this ruling produced the touchstone of his politics, the declaration of independence. In those days he said, our declaration of independence was held sacred by all and thought to include all but now to aid in making the bondage of the negro universal and eternal, its asailed and sneered at and hawked at and torn till if its framers would rise from this graves they could not at all recognize it. Then he conjured terrifying images of a slave with the world conspireing against him. His bondage fastened through 100 keys by 100 men. All the powers of earth seemed rapidly combining against him said lincoln. Ambition follows and philosophy follows and the theology of the day is joining the cry. They have him in his prison house. They have searched his person and left no prying instrument with him. One after another, they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him. Now they have him as it were, bolted with a lock of 100 keys which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key. The keys in the hand of 100 different men and they scattered to 100 different and distant places and they stand musing as to what invention in all the dominions of mind and matter can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is. From what source did lincoln derive his fearful scene of a prisoner held behind bars, locked with 100 keys in the possession of 100 keepers . Was this inspired by a horror tale of Edgar Alan Poe . Who were these faceless scattered oppressors bound to each other and they stand musing in 100 different and distant places . How to device the most complex oppression. Were there keys . What was the crime . Who was the criminal . Such is the crime which you are to judge. Declared senator Charles Sumner of massachusetts. Rising to deliver his speech, arraigning the slave power for the crime against kansas on may 19, 1856. The criminal also must be dragged in today that you may see and measure the power by which all this wrong is sustained. From no Common Source could it proceed in its perp trags was needed a spirit of vaulting ambition which would hesitate at nothing. A heartiness of purpose which was insenzable to the judgment of mankind, a madness for slavery which would disregard the constitution, the laws and all the great examples of our history. Also a consciousness, a power such as comes from the habit of power. Then Charles Sumner described this power with an image. A combination of energies found only in 100 arms directed by 100 eyes. And through these 100 arounds, he said, directed by 100 eyes, the power exercised a control of Public Opinion through veno pens and a prostituted press. An ability to subsidize crowds in every vocation of life. The politician with his local importance, the lawyer with his subtle tongue, even the authority of the judge on the bench and a familiar use of men in places high and low so that none from the president to it the lowest border postmaster should decline to be its tool. All these things and more were needed and they were found in the slave power of our republic. Two days later, as Charles Sumner sat writing at his desk on the floor of the senate, congressman Preston Brooks feeling honor bound to punish his remarks about senator Andrew Butler entered the chamber and beat sumner over the head with his goldhandled cane. The proper whipping for an inferior, even a slave, until he was left lying in a pool of blood running across the senate floor. Bleeding kansas had become bleeding sumner. Brooks was hailed throughout the south as an avenger. Sumner was transfigured into a martyr, earlier than lincoln when he became a martyr. Eight days after sumner was bludgeoned nearly to death, eight days, lincoln stood on the stage at bloomington illinois to found the Illinois Republican party. Lincoln transformed sumners metaphor from 100 arms directed by 100 eyes to 100 keys controlled by 100 men. He kept the number and its drum beat repetition but changed more than the objects. More than arms to keys and eyes to men. He completely shifted the point of view. Instead of the puritapuritans condemnation of the slave holder, the vantage of the pulpit, he assumed the vision of the slave himself. Who aint a slave, asked ishmail . In lincolns description of the cage of hopelessness, he identified with the captive who could not find the key to his freedom. But lincoln discovered 100 keys to his own escape. That was why he understood the captivity and why he would become a new political man, selfeducated and selfemancipated, he would shortly after creating the Illinois Republican party stand before a crowd to issue his personal proclamation. I used to be a slave. Thank you. [ applause ] and thank you. And i believe theres still some time for questions. Please. In modern times, some people like to refer to some of lincolns quotes, particularly in the Lincoln Douglas debates as racist when he said i believe i want the white race to be above the black race. Do you believe that that was lincoln being a politician and pandering to the public, or do you believe that that was his those were his true feelings . Thank you for that question. The Lincoln Douglas debates are endlessly fascinating subject. Steven a. Douglas, lincolns constant rival, even from the 1830s onward, ran for the senate against each other in 1858 and held a series of debates. Douglas used the issue of race constantly and employed it in every possible way he could to take the advantage against lincoln and to deflect the issue of the extension of slavery. So it was race against slavery. Lincoln made his statement at the southern most part of illinois during the debates. It was in i believe charleston, illinois. And he said he defended the rights of blacks as human beings under the declaration of independence but said che could not accept them as socially equal. That was more than a commonly head view. Even most of the abolitionists held that view at the time. So were dealing with a very different world than our world. And maybe we dont appreciate how much progress we have made. Lincoln did that as a way to deal with the relentless racist arguments of douglas in those debates. And at the same time, try and make the argument that blacks also were human. Two questions. Where was the abolition boarding house that lincoln resided at when he was in congress . Could you expand more on did lincoln have conversations potentially with his father about you are treating me luke a slave or anything like that prior to his prior to his 21st birthday or whatever when he was no longer being hired out by his father as a slave . Thank uchl you. On first question of the boarding house was run by a widow named mrs. Sprigg. It was a row of boarding houses where the library of congress now exists. The main building. The jefferson building. The big building. Not the Madison Building where you do your research. The main building. That was a row of boarding houses. Lincoln lived in one of those boarding houses. It was originally a boarding house where theodore weld lived. He was the assistant to john quincy adams. Was one of the bril yanlt organizers of the abolition movement. And Joshua Giddings was there, the leading abolitionist in the congress. There were a number of others there. And mrs. Sprigg was a virginian. She had black waiters. I think it was very clear to people what went on in that house in terms of people buying their freedom and people coming and going who were black, that it was a kind of station of the underground railroad. Later, mrs. Sprigg fell on hard times. And it came to the attention of president lincoln. And he gave her a federal job. And the second question was . If you could remind me again. When he was feeling like the slave because of his father right. His father. Did he express that any way . Talk to his father or others about it while he was under that condition of oppression . His relationship was obviously strained with his father. When he became a successful lawyer in springfield, he purchased a farm for his father and stepmother. And he was very closely attached to his stepmother. Partly because she protected him against his father, especially in his habit of reading, which his father regarded as a waste of time. He was a gifted boy who liked to read. His father didnt understand how you could advance yourself through reading. He bought his father a home. When his father was dieing, lincolns stepbrother and other members of his family urged him to come to the farm to see him. Lincoln refused. So there was never a final reconciliation. Lincoln was, as i said, very closed about his emotional life and didnt talk about it. And i think he did not ever want to talk about that particular wound that he had. Thank you. Good morning, sir. First of all, wasnt i want to you that pointing out that Abraham Lincoln weighed 180 pounds. Thank you, mr. Lincoln. As someone who likes to dress up like lincoln, that tells me that i need to get on the treadmill or split a number of rails in order to get down to that weight. Im going to work on that. My question for you is, as an adviser to president s and in this time of the president ial campaign in which secret communications have become an issue, has there been any scholarship regarding the lincoln era, the wartime . I saw the lincoln movie, of