Just saw Spielberg's Lincoln

Brilliant.

See Mr. Lincoln's war, revisited

Lincoln's was the political faith of the Declaration of Independence, a faith to which he gave a ringing and unequivocal affirmation at Gettysburg.

His party today chooses to disavow the Declaration expressly because of its central tenets of democracy and equality, recalling its affirmations of God-given rights only to berate contemporary secularists and betray the spirit of the First Amendment.

But not Lincoln.

And perhaps he did not ridiculously exaggerate the stakes in this, his most famous speech.

The film begins with black and white soldiers struggling to remember his exact words.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

We are met on a great battle-field of that war.

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.

It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground.

The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

And then without a break the movie shows us the president's struggle, in the first months of 1865, to cement in place the defeat of slavery with the passage of the 13th Amendment.

He would succeed.

And then he would die for it in April, the same year.