Yes, Team of Rivals was Tony Kushner's "principal source" for Lincoln

I came to  Michael Vorenberg's Final Freedom: The Civil War, The Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (2001) via Timothy Noah, who suggested in a New Republic  "best books" listicle  that this book was likely the unacknowledged main source of the movie Lincoln,  In a Jan. 10 followup, Noah notes that "Lincoln isn't adapted in any meaningful way from its nominal source, Doris Kearns Goodwin's book, Team of Rivals, which despite its many virtues dedicates only a few pages to the film's central narrative--the passage of the 13th amendment to the Constitution" and that Final Freedom is "a book rich in narrative detail that [screenplay author Tony] Kushner surely feasted on."

I finished Final Freedom yesterday, after a slow read, noting points of convergence and divergence with the movie along the way. A week or two ago, I reread Goodwin's four pages on the House's passage of the thirteenth amendment in January 1865. And what struck me right away -- and now again as I read those pages again -- is that the film's narrative shape and thematic focus bear a much closer resemblance to Goodwin's short hero's narrative than to Vorenberg's richly detailed, polyphonic tic-toc.

Preparing to write that thought up, I went to TNR to pull Noah's article and discovered that he has gone on something of a quest to get Tony Kushner to acknowledge a debt to Vorenberg. In a followup,  Noah spoke to both Kushner and Vorenberg.  Kushner acknowledges having read Final Freedom, and praises it warmly, but denies that it was a primary source. Reading his response was for me a case of reading more or less what I was about to write. So..me first! -- it's my blog. Then, Kushner and Vorenberg.

In Spielberg's Lincoln, don't underestimate Thaddeus Stevens

There is a legitimate criticism to be made that Steven Spielberg's Lincoln underplays the role of African Americans in their own liberation. The charge holds, notwithstanding that the opening battle sequence prominently spotlights black soldiers in a battle tableau of intense horror, immediately followed by a powerful scene in which a young black soldier, present at that battle, challenges Lincoln with the nation's failure to live up to the lofty sentiments expressed in the Gettysburg address. Kate Masur makes a convincing case  that  "it’s disappointing that in a movie devoted to explaining the abolition of slavery in the United States, African-American characters do almost nothing but passively wait for white men to liberate them." Masur's complaint that the film renders passive two African American White House servants who were in fact effective activists seems to me inarguable.

Less legitimate, it seems to me, are complaints that the film glorifies political compromise (as opposed to inviting us to assent to ethically compromised political machinations, which it does do) - or that in valorizing Lincoln's pragmatic maneuvering, it correspondingly devalues the unalloyed abolitionism and racial egalitarianism of the radical Republicans, led by Thaddeus Stevens. So argues Ta-Nehisi Coates: