Summary
A lone sentry’s eyelid flickers like a candle in a gale; the dawn court-martial brands William Scott, a Vermont farm-boy turned Union corporal, with the scarlet sentence of death for the treason of exhaustion. While drums rehearse his funeral, Abraham Lincoln, hunched under the iron weight of civil war, dreams the continent into a charnel house of blue and gray mothers weeping into the same cracked teacup. A letter—inked by a mother’s trembling hand—arrives like a sparrow through the White House window; the President’s long fingers unfold it, and the parchment exhales the scent of maple and panic. He sees, in the hearth’s ember-glow, the un-dug grave that waits for Scott, and the spectral flag that will someday drape it. Galloping through dust thick as history itself, Lincoln’s carriage erupts at the execution ground just as rifles rise; the boy’s knees kiss the dust, the President’s voice lifts, and the firing squad dissolves into a congregation of astonished witnesses. Reborn, Scott seizes the regimental colors at Bull Run’s infernal height, rallies the retreating tide, and absorbs the republic’s metal into his own heart. As surgeons grope among the twitching dead, Scott, exsanguinated, beholds the Commander-in-Chief bending over him like a pale moon, bestowing a laurel of fire. The boy dies smiling; the screen erupts in a final tableau where two enemy banners fuse into one star-spangled seraph.
Synopsis
The incidents pictured in this film are founded on fact and relate to William Scott, a young soldier from the State of Vermont. Scott is on guard after a heavy day's march, and being found asleep is placed under arrest. He is tried by court-martial and sentenced to death. Meantime we see President Lincoln in his study at the White House in deep thought, and seeing a vision of the Civil War and the sorrow caused by it. The vision disappears and he reads a letter from Mrs. Scott pleading for the pardon of her son. Deeply affected he lays the letter down and sees another vision, that of the gray-haired mother and a nameless grave. We next see being marched off to the spot where he is to be shot. All is in readiness for the fatal word of command to be given, when through a cloud of dust a coach dashes up attended by outriders. The President steps out and pardons the prisoner, who falls on his knees and blesses him. The next scene is that of a battle with the Union soldiers retreating. The color-bearer falls, but William Scott rushes up, grabs the flag and rallies the Union troops, but amid the dreadful carnage he himself is shot. That night the doctors and ambulances are searching among the dead for the wounded who are still alive. They reach Scott. He is dying. A vision of the President appears before him, giving him a wreath of fame. Scott staggers to his feet, and as the vision fades away, drops dead. As a fitting climax, we see a tableau of President Lincoln taking from a Union and a Confederate color-bearer their respective flags, rolling them together and when they are unrolled displaying the Stars and Stripes.
Review Excerpt
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The first time I watched Abraham Lincoln's Clemency I forgot to breathe.
Not hyperbole: the film’s one-reel alchemy distills an entire epoch into thirteen gelatin-soaked minutes, and every frame quivers with the same tremulous urgency that once rattled telegraph wires across a bleeding republic. Shot in 1910 by the Wharton brothers—Leopold and Theodore—this Biograph-style one-reeler is less a dusty curio than a pocket-sized Iliad stitched from nitrate and conscience. You don’t merely observe ..."
