Posted on 02/11/2026 10:47:43 AM PST by T Ruth
Director Steven Spielberg, whom I introduced last week [in 2012] at Gettysburg at ceremonies marking the 149th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s greatest speech, said he was deeply humbled to be delivering an address on that history-making spot.
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… Daniel Day-Lewis gives the definitive portrayal of our time, perhaps ever, of Honest Abe.
For people like me, who have spent their lives studying Abraham Lincoln, the film is chilling — as if he’s really come to life.
Day-Lewis does it by avoiding the traps most Lincoln actors fall into, the stoic, “Hall of Presidents”-esque stereotype that probably most Americans imagine.
There are no moving pictures of Lincoln, no recordings of his voice. But after his death, everyone was Lincoln’s best friend, and there are descriptions of everything from his accent to his gait.
The most important thing is the voice. Far from having a stentorian, Gregory Peck-like bass, Lincoln’s was a high, piercing tenor. Those who attended his speeches even described it as shrill and unpleasant for the first 10 minutes, until he got warmed up (or his endless stories managed to cow them into submission).
***
Few great people are appreciated in their time. And it’s good to remember that, no matter how right the decisions seem now, they were hard-fought then.
“I wanted — impossibly — to bring Lincoln back from his sleep of one-and-a-half centuries,” Steven Spielberg said at Gettysburg, “even if only for two-and-one-half hours, and even if only in a cinematic dream.”
***
Harold Holzer is one of the country’s leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln. ...
[At the end of the article Holzer gives thumbnail reviews of all prior Lincoln films, ranking them from worst to best, which Holzer considers to be Spielberg’s.]
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
According to the history of the USS Brooklyn, there is no mention of troops being transferred to the Star of the West.
Shortly thereafter, Brooklyn returned to Hampton Roads, Virginia, and she remained in the Norfolk area through the end of 1860 while enthusiasm for secession swept through the deep South in the wake of Abraham Lincoln's election to the presidency. Early in January 1861, Capt. Walker received orders sending Brooklyn to Charleston, South Carolina, with messages for the steamer Star of the West which had sailed south to relieve beleaguered Fort Sumter. However, when she reached Charleston Harbor, she found the channel leading into port obstructed and learned that the resupply effort had failed. Consequently, she returned to Hampton Roads.And you really expect me to believe that a Doughface pro-confederate like Buchanan wanted Union Troops snuck into Fort Sumter. Not very likely.Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Brooklyn_(1858)
No it wasn't. Slavery was not threatened within the US and lest anybody feared it was, the Corwin Amendment would have expressly protected it effectively forever. The Northern Dominated Congress passed a resolution specifically saying they were not fighting over slavery (indeed the union still had multiple slaveholding states and slavery was practiced in Washington DC) and Lincoln said many times he was not fighting over slavery. There simply was no real popular support for abolition anywhere in the North prior to secession.
Was that adequate and proper cause to repudiate the Constitution? Not in my view, nor in the view of anyone with a lick of sense. That is why, after the Civil War was over, Southern apologists contrived all sorts of evasions and excuses for secession other than slavery.
Nobody repudiated the Constitution except Lincoln and the Northern states which waged a war of aggression for money and empire to impose their rule over sovereign states which did not consent to it. The claim that even the original 7 seceding states did so over slavery - even as they offered slavery forever by express constitutional amendment - as well as the attempt to just sweep under the rug the fact that 5 states of the Upper South seceded only when Lincoln chose to start a war is just so much propaganda from PC Revisionists.
Unfortunately, this Lost Cause myth and its pseudo legalisms are attractive today to people who ought to know better. Secession cannot properly be defended as a species of no-fault divorce that does not need a proper reason. Secession was foolish and wicked.
Unfortunately Leftists today as well as misguided nationalists buy into the PC Revisionist "all about slavery" myth because it is simply too politically inconvenient as well as embarrassing to admit they started a war that turned out to be a bloodbath and which destroyed the original union the Founding Fathers created due solely to their lust for the wealth of others and their insatiable greed. Leftists today love it because they are always in favor of centralizing ever more power for daddy government.
Great research. Where did you get the numbers from?
A couple more questions:
What did ships that took the cotton from New Orleans (and other Southern ports) bring to those ports?
Who owned the goods that ships from Britain and Europe brought to American ports? Surely not cotton planters or even cotton factors?
Keep looking.
They don't want to delve into the Nullification Crisis because they can't figure an angle to make it all about slavery instead of economics.
You aren't trying hard enough. Clearly, most sources don't want people to know about the troops, because it undercuts the narrative, but over the years I have found multiple sources that mention the troops.
I just found this one, though it doesn't go into as much detail as others i've found in the past.
https://grokipedia.com/page/Star_of_the_West
And I hope you find it curious that so many sources don't mention the troops. Maybe it will get you to realizing that much of this history has been sanitized to reflect better on the winning side.
https://nyslibrary.libguides.com/cwillustrations/starwest
It also says that the people in Charleston had been warned of her coming by Telegraph.
Again, slaveholders of the South regarded the Corwin Amendment as inadequate because it did not remedy the fugitive slave problem or the risk of slave revolts. Secession arguments and documents often expressly renounced the US constitution.
Again, referring to the Declaration of Independence as the source of a right of secession stumbles on the fact that the Declaration affirmed that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Such a concept is inimical to slavery.
Again, Lincoln offered strengthened fugitive slave laws. Secession would not fix the fugitive slave problem, it would make it worse. The US would be a different country and thus under no obligation to return escaped slaves.
"But secession, Lincoln argued, would actually make it harder for the South to preserve slavery. If the Southern states tried to leave the Union, they would lose all their constitutional guarantees, and northerners would no longer be obliged to return fugitive slaves to disloyal owners. In other words, the South was safer inside the Union than without, and to prove his point Lincoln confirmed his willingness to support a recently proposed thirteenth amendment to the Constitution, which would specifically prohibit the federal government from interfering with slavery in states where it already existed." (Klingaman, Abraham Lincoln and the Road to Emancipation, pp. 32-33)
Nobody could refute what he said about how slavery was safer in the union than outside it. Lincoln wasn't even the first man who pointed this out.
In the debate in Congress on the resolution to censure John Quincy Adams, for presenting a petition for the dissolution of the Union, Mr. Underwood, of Kentucky, said: "They (the South) were the weaker portion, were in the minority. The North could do what they pleased with them; they could adopt their own measures. All he asked was, that they would let the South know what those measures were. One thing he knew well; that State, which he in part represented, had perhaps a deeper interest in this subject than any other, except Maryland and a small portion of Virginia. And why? Because he knew that to dissolve the Union, and separate the different States composing the confederacy, making the Ohio River and the Mason and Dixon's line the boundary line, he knew as soon as that was done, Slavery was done in Kentucky, Maryland and a large portion of Virginia, and it would extend to all the States South of this line. The dissolution of the Union was the dissolution of Slavery. It has been the common practice for Southern men to get up on this floor, and say, 'Touch this subject, and we will dissolve this Union as a remedy.' Their remedy was the destruction of the thing which they wished to save, and any sensible man could see it. If the Union was dissolved into two parts, the slave would cross the line, and then turn round and curse the master from the other shore." In attempting to secede from the Union, the South had to be aware that they were, effectively, giving up their slaves.
Which is more rational and believable....that the White Southern population was motivated by a concern for the preservation of slavery which was not threatened on behalf of the 5.63% of the White Southern population which owned slaves, and therefore undertook to secede which would effectively mean the end of slavery OR the vast majority felt they were being economically exploited and abused by a (to them) foreign Northern majority which was constantly pushing them around and enacting taxes and economic policies which hurt the South for their own benefit?
Again every state had slavery at the time of the Declaration of Independence and it asserted that government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed and each state could throw off a government that had become abusive toward them and which they no longer consented to be governed by. To say the Declaration of Independence did not support the right of each state to declare independence is not an argument that makes any sense.
There's no "anymore" about it because you never did.
You were never capable of dealing with facts and logic because you're here as a propaganda hack for the Lost Cause, and nothing else matters to you, or ever did.
"When the only tool you've got is a hammer, all your problems start to look like nails."
You keep trying to shoehorn "slavery" into every decision made in that era because that suits what you want to believe.
The fact the Southerners didn't take the Corwin deal is because it wasn't the main sticking point, and what they already had was way better. The fact the Northerners offered the Corwin amendment deal is because what they really wanted was the money.
Modern people interpret that phrase as referring to slaves. The people of that era, did not. Beyond Jefferson and a few others, the vast majority of people read that as applying to themselves. Specifically to white English descended people who were being denied what they thought was fair representation in Parliament.
This idea that "all men are created equal" should apply to slaves was a later invention, but was not at all the intended meaning when the representatives of all the 13 slave states signed it.
The 13 slave states kept slavery. They didn't get rid of it despite "all men are created equal" being put into the Declaration of Independence.
I have challenged your points many times in the past. You always remained unfazed, no matter how persuasive was the evidence against you.
You are a zealot, and not persuadable by reason, so I just don't bother with you anymore.
Its hilarious how he pretends he knows better how the economy at that time worked than northern newspapers, southern newspapers, foreign newspapers, political leaders on both sides, tax experts who have examined the period, etc etc. No No. They all have it wrong. BroJoeK on a message board 165 years later knows how things really worked. :rolleyes:
Secessionists didn’t trust the Republicans. They thought Lincoln would use his appointment power to build up the Republican Party in the Border States. Eventually, slavery would be abolished in those states and the Republicans would organize in the Upper South and do the same there. The secessionists recognized the Corwin Amendment as a last minute attempt to hold the country together. The proposed Amendment did nothing to overcome their fear and their hatred of the Republicans.
The Deep South states were already gone when Lincoln took office. They’d gotten what they wanted. They assumed that slavery and their way of life would be secure as an independent nation. They weren’t going to do a U-turn and come back. And yes, the Corwin Amendment wouldn’t do anything about the fear of Northern abolitionists and slave revolts.
“Stronger” fugitive slave laws apparently means non-enforcement or repeal of the Northern states personal liberty laws. If Lincoln had given the slave states that it would have torn the North — and the Republican Party — apart. Could Lincoln have done it? Would he have? Northern states weren’t likely to repeal their laws, nor was Congress likely to deliver even stronger fugitive slave laws. Lincoln was repeating his commitment to enforce existing laws. He was also making a last minute offer to save (what was left of) the Union. The militant secessionists who controlled the Deep South easily saw through the offer. It wasn’t something Lincoln could make happen and it would have doomed his presidency if he had tried.
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