Aaron Bady argues that, by focusing on the negotiation for the Thirteenth Amendment, the film creates an "artificial sense that more is at stake in a single congressional bill than there actually was": 

As Eric Foner pointed out when he was asked about the movie, if it hadn’t passed when it did, Lincoln had pledged to call Congress into special session in March; “[a]nd there, the Republicans had a two-thirds majority and would ratify in a minute…It’s not this giant crisis in the way that the film’s portraying it.”

Bady goes on to complain that the film makes it seem "that black people had no effect on the politics of slavery and emancipation (except insofar as they inspired the people who mattered)"  - an important nuance given that slavery was in its death throes not primarily because Lincoln ratified its end but because slaves themselves were seizing freedom. Along those lines, historian Kate Masur wishes the film included the throngs of fugitive slaves who fled to Washington, DC: