Creative Commons/John Andrews Spielberg’s film also obscures how fugitive slaves moved the struggle for abolition forward. This nineteenth-century portrait depicts Anthony Burns, whose arrest and trial under the Fugitive Slave Act sparked abolitionist protests and riots in Boston in 1854. More

Library of Congress By focusing on Lincoln’s strategic compromises, Spielberg’s film obscures the work of the abolitionists who made Lincoln’s victory possible through actions and meetings such as the one publicized in this 1850 broadsheet from Salem, Ohio. More