The Lincolns’ War on Despair

Once-glittery “Masterpiece Theatre” and “Mystery!” have their moments from time to time. And say it isn’t so that Inspector Morse will soon be frowning from the heavens.

But “The American Experience,” “Frontline,” “POV” and “Nova” are the long-running PBS regulars that remain unmatched elsewhere. They are the golden brand of PBS at a time when much of its programming fades into TV’s landscape, anonymously pastel and forgettable.

Tonight, for example, “The American Experience” resumes being TV’s preeminent U.S. history teacher when rolling out “Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided.” The title of this smart, moving, beautifully mounted three-parter refers not only to a nation halved like a melon by the Civil War, but to the troubled first couple, whose own turbulence overlapped that epic clash of blue and gray.

“A House Divided” is not itself historic. In the realm of TV histories, it walks at times in the creased high tops of “Gore Vidal’s Lincoln,” a fine 1988 miniseries on NBC, and more recently, “The Civil War,” a landmark PBS marathon from Ken Burns, whose wedding of scholarship and style extends documentary storytelling to the masses without pandering.

Many viewers, for example, will not gasp when hearing from “A House Divided” that Abraham Lincoln was not entirely a gleaming white knight galloping to the rescue of enslaved African Americans, that he despised slavery as an institution but was ambivalent about racial equality in the U.S.

Nor will they be shocked to learn that Mary succumbed to personal demons much of her adult life, that she secretly piled up debt by shopping obsessively, that the early deaths of three of four Lincoln sons nourished her despair and instability.

Or that, despite their mutual love, she was part of the tonnage weighing on her husband throughout the war. You sense those crushing burdens when gazing into the deep caverns of his eyes, and at familiar, but still jolting old pictures of a conflict whose staggering casualty counts on both sides were said to have haunted the president.

“Grant advanced 60 miles and lost 60,000 men,” someone says late in these six hours. The screen brings evidence of that ferocity: Sculls aligned on a wintry killing field as if in military formation, and twisted bodies strewn like driftwood, their eyes open, their mouths gaping potholes. As they were, too, in frame after frame of “The Civil War.”

“A House Divided” is hardly Ken Burns lite, though. As an eloquent, intimate, candidly reforged compendium of the Lincolns, and what drove and tore at them, David Grubin’s documentary stands head and stovepipe hat above the crowd. With David McCullough’s always perfect pitch as narrator, moreover, and David Morse and Holly Hunter speaking occasionally as the Lincolns, what’s not to admire?

The privileged daughter of a slave owner, Mary Todd Lincoln emerges here less clearly than her oft-studied husband, whose own stature is all-eclipsing. She was bright and witty in her youth, with a strong intellect and keen interest in politics and fine clothes, we hear from historians. And she was much more polished than the man she would marry, a gangly young lawyer who looked deceptively like 6 feet, 4 inches of hayseed.

By all accounts she was fragile emotionally, though. The death of the Lincolns’ favorite son, Willie, sank her into an abyss of grief and sadness from which she emerged only sporadically before dying in 1882. She was devoted to her husband, we hear, even while often embarrassing him with erratic behavior hinting at madness.

“A House Divided” celebrates Abraham Lincoln while trimming the giant an inch or two and exploding folklore the way charging Confederate troops were blown apart at Gettysburg. This Lincoln is not the egalitarian of popular legend, but an ambitious leader whose enlightened decisions derive as much from shrewd pragmatism as deep humanity.

It’s a complex, troubled, flawed, but ultimately triumphant figure in American history who rises to twangy brilliance here. Beneath his easy backwoods manner, we hear, is a steely core and streak of dark, sardonic wit that parallels the era’s grimness and the tragedies of his private life.

So much attention is paid here to Lincoln’s skill with language that it’s boggling to hear again that he had less than a year’s formal schooling. Take his Gettysburg Address, one of the great speeches of U.S. history despite its brevity, one that Lincoln delivered, says historian Charles B. Strozier, on ground “still soggy from bodies buried beneath it.”

As it’s read here, a camera pans down a partial list of casualties, each of Lincoln’s 10 sentences becoming a memorial, each of his 272 words a candle lighted on behalf of spent lives, a defining moment that historian Doris Kearns Goodwin says challenged Americans to “create a new nation out of all the blood that had been spent.”

Ultimately, of course, even his. Early in “A Divided House” comes a symbolic foreshadowing of how he would be abandoned by what he had called “the better angels of our nature.” It’s a long-shot photo of Lincoln with other men at Niagara Falls, their tall silk hats silhouetted against the awesome cascade in the distance, making them look small, and as powerless against this great force of nature as he would be against what lay ahead for him in Ford’s Theatre within days of Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

A reenactment of the assassination here is a surreal stunner, the bullet from the revolver of John Wilkes Booth’s revolver advancing toward its target slowly, affording viewers some moments to contemplate its impact.

“Once this conflict is over, I end,” Gore Vidal had Lincoln saying during the war. In “A House Divided,” history is forever.

* “The American Experience” three-part “Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided” airs tonight through Wednesday at 9 p.m. on KCET-TV and KVCR-TV.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached by e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.