A Different Perspective: David S. Reynolds on Lincoln’s Dilemma | Interviews

The series begins very thoughtfully with a real-life tightrope walker who was a popular entertainer in Lincoln’s time. Why is that such a good metaphor?

There was an incredible tightrope walker named Charles Blondin who went back and forth across Niagara Falls, many times forward, then backward with a man on his shoulders and pushing a wheelbarrow. Pretty amazing. And Lincoln a few times compared himself to Blondin. Once people approached him early in the war, and they said, “Can’t you make this a more anti-slavery war from the very beginning?” He said, “I have to be very careful. I have to be like Blondin because if I lean too far in one way, we’re going to lose the Border States. We’re going to lose Kentucky, Missouri. We still had people in bondage in slavery but they were loyal to the Union. I have to be right on my tightrope the whole time.” And he had to wait for just the right minute to release the Emancipation Proclamation. Even though he hated slavery as much or more than almost anybody in America, still, he had to be Blondin. First to get elected but secondly, when he was in office to try to keep the North together, to try to keep it together. And it was not just the way he say himself. There are a lot of political cartoons of him as Blondin crossing that tightrope over Niagara Falls.

This series shows us how Lincoln’s strategy evolved over time. And I was particularly struck by the idea that he talked to some of the fugitive enslaved people, and how did that affect him?

He had been exposed to slavery early on when he traveled down to New Orleans, and he saw enslaved people on a boat in Kentucky. He talked to fugitive slaves, he had such a deep sympathy actually for African Americans. And they influenced him. They became kind of his conscience. I think that’s one thing that the series shows very, very well. One fugitive slave named Frederick Douglass, of course, very famous, was always kind of goading him, and was always in his ear driving him toward emancipation. And Lincoln wanted that as well. But Douglass was such an active force. And Lincoln was the first to allow African Americans into the military. And he thought that without the African American participation he never would have won the war. And then at the very end of the war when he walks into Richmond, he meets these previously enslaved people who surround him when he walks into the Confederate capital, which has fallen, and he says, “You are now free as air, you’re free as the air now.” And one of them actually got on his knees to him, he said, “Get on your knees to your Maker. You don’t have to get on your knees to me, just go on and do your best in life.” So, he was really inspired by African Americans. And the film shows that as well.

I think of research for a book like this being in archives with parchment documents. Was that what it was like?