On Jan. 31, 1865, the United States House of Representatives passed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution (by only two votes), thereby abolishing slavery throughout the country. Lincoln’s Dilemma is the story of how that landmark legislation came to be, the man who made it a reality, and the reasons he fought so hard for it in the face of fierce opposition from both his Democratic rivals and his own fellow Republicans. Apple TV+’s four-part docuseries (Feb. 18) may strain at times to add a timely framework to its material and to craft a more “complicated” snapshot of the 16th commander-in-chief. Still, as a history lesson, it’s nuanced and moving, presenting a well-rounded portrait of the courage, resolve and deep empathy that guided Abraham Lincoln on his mission of emancipation.
Directed by Jacqueline Olive and Barak Goodman (the latter of whom also serves as its writer), Lincoln’s Dilemma opens two of its episodes with contemporary snippets of, respectively, the Jan. 6 insurrection of 2021 and Washington, D.C., protesters castigating Lincoln for not being a true abolitionist. Those latter scenes speak to the docuseries’ overarching perspective on Lincoln, who’s depicted less as a pristine holy white savior than as a flesh-and-blood leader who believed that Black people should be free but whose primary concern was preserving the Union. Throughout his first term in office, which would be dominated by the Civil War, Lincoln’s every decision was driven by that aim, although that’s not to say that liberating the country’s enslaved population was merely an afterthought or just a canny tactical maneuver; rather, as made clear by a raft of talking heads as well as narrator Jeffrey Wright (sounding as regal and authoritative as ever), Lincoln’s tale is that of a man figuring out how to unite two projects—saving the Union and freeing Black slaves—by wielding his own political shrewdness for compassionate ends.
Lincoln’s Dilemma is propelled by interviews with historians from America’s leading universities, and their academic insights are the docuseries’ finest asset. They allow it to capture Lincoln’s bedrock values, the way in which his thoughts about “liberty and justice for all” evolved over time, and his canny understanding of the shifting political winds of his era and his concurrent feelings about how to best maximize opportunities for achieving his twin goals. The Lincoln that emerges here is a noble, self-made individual who wanted to demolish slavery but who also grasped that his foremost priority was ensuring the continued existence of the United States of America. Lincoln’s determination to prevent the expansion of Slave Power (i.e. the desire on the part of certain government factions to open the entire country to slaveholding) was what motivated him to re-enter politics and run for the presidency as a legitimate anti-slavery politician, and it propelled him into the Oval Office in January 1861, where he quickly faced a Southern secessionist movement intent on maintaining its slavery-based status quo.
Lincoln’s Dilemma methodically lays out each step of Lincoln’s journey to the White House, as well as the national incidents that helped inflame pro- and anti-slavery factions during the lead-up to the Civil War. At the same time, it conveys Lincoln’s complex opinions about his countrymen, the nation’s democratic ideals, and the explosive issue of slavery, which threatened to detonate America’s grand experiment. Slavery became, to Lincoln, something that should be eradicated both because it was evil, and because doing so would prop up a faltering Union campaign against the outmanned but fiercely formidable Confederate Army. In a few shaky instances, the docuseries flirts with the notion that it’s providing a fresh, less righteous take on Lincoln by showing him to be a man who was more pragmatic than saintly. Yet by and large, it comprehends Lincoln’s struggles, compromises and triumphs in the context in which they took place, so that, for example, Lincoln’s consideration of a proposal to export freed slaves to their ancestral homelands (in Africa and the Caribbean) is cast as a then-relevant response to the assumption that many whites would never fully accept their Black compatriots as equals.
Lincoln’s Dilemma celebrates Lincoln by embracing him as a three-dimensional human being tasked with navigating catastrophic circumstances. Directors Olive and Goodman recount Lincoln’s presidency by employing newspaper headlines, archival photographs, animated sequences, and CGI-ified images of Lincoln, as well as via the president’s own writing and speeches, which are read in stately narration by Bill Camp. Those passages are complemented by similar recitals of Frederick Douglass’s words and thoughts by Leslie Odom Jr. that are used to parallel the two men’s paths toward their common objective. While that narrative structure never proves wholly balanced—by nature, Lincoln is the front-and-center figure in this saga—it does illustrate the ideological push-pull of the period, and the means by which both men’s attitudes and actions were shaped by tumultuous internal and external forces.
The Civil War has, of course, already been studied, excavated and evaluated in voluminous fashion, and Lincoln’s Dilemma’s main addition to that record is the inclusion of multiple slave narratives that underscore the horrors that Black people suffered at the hands of their white masters, the injustices they endured in the North and the South, and the bravery they exhibited by escaping their chains of bondage and, in many cases, taking up arms against their oppressors by joining the Union Army. These segments highlight the multifaceted contributions that Black folks made to the war effort, and if their foregrounding in this TV effort isn’t always completely seamless, they nonetheless afford an on-the-ground view of precisely what Black people were experiencing during this calamity, and therefore the systematic nightmare that Lincoln was endeavoring to dismantle—not to mention how his decisions were impacting the very people he was striving to help.
Eschewing Ken Burns-style non-fiction techniques for a slightly flashier—if no less studious—approach, Lincoln’s Dilemma serves as a thorough primer on Lincoln’s arduous ordeal. It may itself not be revolutionary, but its subtle and multifaceted analysis of Lincoln’s predicament, and his reactions to it, make it as compelling as it is constructive.
