Lincoln (film, 2012)

Lincoln is a 2012 film by director Steven Spielberg, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln during the last four months of his life, focusing on the lame duck session after reelection to his second term as President, in which he achieved the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in the House of Representatives. The film was nominated for 12 Academy Awards, winning two including Mr. Day-Lewis's third Oscar for best actor. The screenplay is based in part Doris Kearns Goodwin's biography, Team of Rivals.

Plot synopsis

As the Civil War drags to a close, the President's thoughts move to the reconstruction, and the urgent need to replace his Emancipation Proclamation, a war measure, with an amendment definitively freeing the former slaves. Time constraints, the difficulty of passing the Amendment in the Secession States, and the competing radical and conservative factions in the Republican party, lead him to embark on a risky strategy of secretly summoning Confederate representatives to Washington while simultaneously having his political operatives covertly approach lame duck Democrats with promises of federal positions in return for support in the House for the Thirteenth Amendment.