Your Guide To:
The
Characters in Spielberg's Lincoln
by Ethan M. Lewis
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How they looked in the movie
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How they looked in real life
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Abraham
Lincoln was the 16th
President of the United States. The
first President from the Republican Party,
his election inspired 11 states to secede
from the union and start their own country,
called the "Confederate States of
America". The CSA had a constitution
almost identical to that of the US, but it
guaranteed slavery forever. Lincoln refused
to recognize the legality of secession, and
the Civil War began. By the time the
movie takes place, nearly 600,000 soldiers
had died.
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Mary
Todd Lincoln (affectionately known as
"Molly" to her husband) was Abraham Lincoln's
wife. A diminutive 5'2" tall, the
humorous Lincoln (who at 6' 4" towered over
most people of his time) used to joke that he
and his wife were "the long and short of
it". Mary was mentally unstable, perhaps
due to the premature deaths of two of her
sons, and the stress of the war. Her
brothers-in-law fought for the Confederacy,
which must have been terribly hard to deal
with. Mrs. Lincoln was what we would
nowadays call a "compulsive shopper" and she
spent significant sums of money to decorate
the White House, which led the Congress to
threaten investigations.
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Robert
Todd Lincoln was the Lincoln's oldest
son. Though the family was from
Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln sent Robert to
boarding school at Exeter in New Hampshire,
with the goal of making it more likely that
the young man would be a success in business
in the East. Unfortunately, assimilating
to the elite boarding school built a wall
between son and father. They did not have a
warm relationship. As seen in the movie,
young Lincoln desperately wanted to serve in
the Army, but he was denied the opportunity
for years due to his mother's reluctance.
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Tad
Lincoln was the President's youngest
son. As depicted in the movie, he loved
to dress in replica army uniforms and visit
the soldiers--he constantly tried to raise
funds to assist soldiers. Tad was born
with a cleft palate which gave him a speech
impediment (many contemporary sources indicate
that it was almost impossible to understand
what Tad said, though his parents had no such
difficulties). Tad Lincoln died at the
age of 18 six years after the assassination of
his father.
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William
Seward was a founder of the Republican
Party. A master politician, the former
governor of New York was Lincoln's Secretary
of State. Seward was a passionate
abolitionist, who was somewhat impatient with
people who wanted to "make deals" with
southern slaveholders. Seward had hoped
to be elected President in 1860, and was
initially skeptical of the unpolished
Lincoln. But by 1865 he was a loyal
supporter of all of Lincoln's wartime
policies. Seward was also a target of
assassins on April 14, 1865. Seward was
bedridden after a terrible accident that broke
several ribs and his jaw--the would-be
assassin stabbed Seward in the neck and face,
but the knife was turned on the wiring that
held Seward's jaw shut. Seward is also
known for purchasing Alaska from Russia in
1867.
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Edwin
Stanton was Lincoln's second Secretary
of War. The first one, Pennsylvania
Senator Simon Cameron was corrupt and an
abolitionist, which led Lincoln to replace
him. Stanton was a powerful man during the
war, and after the war he was instrumental in
the impeachment of Lincoln's successor Andrew
Johnson.
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Thaddeus
Stevens, a Representative from
Pennsylvania was the leader of the group of
politicians known as "Radical
Republicans". The Radicals believed that
the Southern states had forfeited membership
in the Union and deserved to be treated as
conquered territory. Radicals were also
committed to the end of slavery. Stevens
is considered the father of the 13th, 14th,
and 15th amendments to the Constitution, which
extended Civil Rights while further ensuring
the supremacy of the national government over
the states. An elderly, disabled man at the
time of the movie, Stevens was a tireless
advocate for equality. He had a decades
long relationship with Lydia
Hamilton Smith, a widowed
African-American who was his
housekeeper. The nature of the
relationship is unclear (Stevens' enemies
called her his common-law wife), but such
inter-racial friendships were quite rare at
the time.
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Fernando
Wood was a Democrat from New York City,
who served as mayor of New York as well as
Representative during the Civil War. He
was a stauch opponent of the Radical
Republicans. He did little to prevent
the devastating race riots in New York in the
summer of 1863, and even proposed that the
city should secede from the Union.
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Ulysses
S. Grant served as Lieutenant General in
command of all US military forces at the end
of the Civil War. A graduate of West
Point and a veteran of the Mexican War, Grant
had struggled in several business ventures
before the Civil War began. He
volunteered to serve with troops from his
native Ohio, and rapidly achieved major
successes in the west (the battle of Fort
Donelson) and the south (Vicksburg).
Grant was known for battles that resulted in
frighteningly high casualty rates, but he knew
that his side could pay the cost, unlike the
undermanned, undersupplied Confederates.
Grant was also meant to be targeted by
assassins on April 14th, but he and his wife
had left the city earlier in the day.
Grant went on to become the 18th President of
the US from 1869 through 1877.
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Elizabeth
Keckley was an
African-American former slave who worked for
Mrs. Lincoln as seamstress, designer and
general companion. She seemed to be
one of very few people who could put up with
Mary Lincoln's volatile temper, and also
seemed to be one of the few people who could
calm Mrs. Lincoln down. She wrote a
memoir of her time in the White House which
was rather controversial at the time.
Though Robert Todd Lincoln is credited with
suppressing the book, you
can read it here. It is a key source of
information about Mary Lincoln and life in
the White House during the Civil War.
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