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Was the slave liberator Abraham Lincoln a great president or a hypocrite? The documentary series “Lincoln’s Dilemma” on Apple TV+ gives a fair picture of a man caught between ideals and realities.
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Stuttgart – Washington could burn soon. Not far from the capital of the USA, civil war armies of the North and the South are in the field against each other. Abraham Lincoln, the President of the White House, publishes his “Emancipation Proclamation” on January 1, 1863, a milestone in American history. All slaves in the warring southern states are declared free men. The Republican Lincoln will go down in history as one of the greatest US presidents, a man who removed a stigma and put many people out of great suffering.
But this heroically naive view of history was gone. Lincoln has long been viewed much more critically by right and left, yes, sometimes painted in the darkest colors, as a hypocrite, political weasel and secret racist. In the age of Donald Trump’s campaign of lies and the parallel reality of Fox News, then, critical differentiation becomes glaring distortion. The four-part documentary series “Lincoln’s Dilemma” on the Apple TV+ streaming service is just the thing, especially for Europeans, who are still a bit further away from all of this than some Americans.
Hoping for the mass exodus
“Lincoln’s Dilemma” does not deny what some African-American intellectuals and educated elite among ultra-reactionary Southerners accuse Lincoln with paradoxical unanimity: that the President of the North did not initially wage an abolitionist civil war. Lincoln waged war to restore the union of all states. This battle of arms, which began in 1861, went pitifully badly for the materially superior North. Lincoln proclaimed slave liberation in 1863 to give the North a new idealistic war aim and to destabilize the Southern states. In the north, it was hoped that there would be a mass exodus of slaves – and that many freed slaves would make themselves available to the army.
The four-parter, however, puts that neatly into perspective. Lincoln was indeed a staunch opponent of slavery. But he always knew that the dispute over this inhumane institution could tear the country apart. Prior to his presidency, he advocated containment, a gradual reduction in slavery because he saw the potential for civil war. Still, his Southern opponents portrayed him as a crackpot radical who would bring down a white, God-ordained America.
The dirty art of the possible
When the war came, it was so miserable for the North that Lincoln feared that those slave regions that had not yet joined the South’s rebellion might tip the scales. To keep them in the Union, he initially stressed that the war was being fought for Union unity and nothing else. The documentary “Lincoln’s Dilemma” fans out this political situation before and during the war in an understandable way. With good interviews and brisk animations, it shows that Lincoln was not struggling for moral or humanistic positions, he had long since decided on that, but for political enforceability.
“Lincoln’s Dilemma” gives an exciting insight into American history. But the four-part series is above all red hot: it describes politics as a field of practical constraints and power calculations, as a difficult, sometimes downright dirty art of the possible. And that with a plausible example, because even then, as the last threatening possibility of political miscalculation, war did not remain a rhetorical ruse in parliamentary speeches, but became a bloody reality.
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