Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America

An interesting and scholarly book on Lincoln and his speech at Gettysburg. Great information, but a bit dry at times. I appreciate this book's importance to USA History and can see why it won a Pulitzer.

Excellent. This book gives so much life to the Gettysburg Address by elevating it with its historical context. It touches on everything you could want to know about Greek oratorical patterns, Transcendentalist intellectual history, and political interpretations of the Declaration of Independence, making each relevant to Lincoln’s famous speech.

It may seem a little surprising that an entire book could be devoted to a speech that took only a few minutes to deliver and comprised 272 words, but as I was drawn to the Gettysburg Address from my high school days and consider it one of the greatest ever delivered, I decided to give it a try.

Wills sets the stage before analyzing the speech. The battle of Gettysburg in July 1863 took three days and produced 50,000 casualties, roughly equal numbers from both sides. 50,000. It was of course a pivotal battle, pushing the Confederates out of the North and turning the tide of the war, which could otherwise have been won by the South. Four months later a cemetery was to be dedicated, and the principal speaker for the day was to be former secretary of state Edward Everett, a member of the intelligentsia who like many in those days was an adherent of classical Greek revival. Everett proceeded to talk for two hours from memory, as was his style. Lincoln was there to speak afterwards to make the dedication more formal, but of course stole the show in his simple, profound way.

As Wills explains, Lincoln truly understood compression and restraint. In one of the sections of the book he maps the speech to classical Greek oratory, how he ‘got it’ far better than Everett, and noting the parallels between his speech and Pericles’ funeral oration during the Peloponnesian War. In another he shows how the speech is self-referential throughout, interlocking the lines in a way which amplified their meaning. This may sound a bit dry to some but I found it very interesting. Wills is insightful throughout, from relating the opening clauses of the speech to Psalm 90, to analyzing Lincoln’s other speeches, including the “before and after” version of his first Inaugural speech; originally penned by William Seward, and improved considerably by Lincoln.

The historical context for all of this is provided, along with the excellent point from the Southern perspective:
“Some think, to this day, that Lincoln did not really have arguments for union, just a kind of mystical attachment to it. That was the charge of Southerners, who felt they had a better constitutional case for secession than he had for compelling states to remain.”

Lincoln’s assertion of the Federal Government over the States was unprecedented and changed America forever, the fuzziness of the ‘rights’ by which he did this, his ambiguous nature of his views on slavery, his ability to see things from a larger perspective, the poetry in his words, and his vulnerability all make him fascinating to me, and Wills brings all of this out.

Quotes:
First, the speech itself. I get goosebumps starting from “But in a larger sense…”, and then continuing to “the world will little note…”, “…the last full measure of devotion”, and then of course the ending. It is absolutely brilliant.

“Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
We are met on a great battlefield of that war.
We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that the nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we do here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for the living, rather, to be dedicated to the unfinished work which they who have fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

On oneness, from a poem Lincoln wrote in earlier years:
“The very spot where grew that bread
That formed my bones, I see.
How strange, old field, on thee to tread
And feel I’m part of thee.”

On Lincoln’s view of slavery:
“Lincoln was accused during his lifetime of clever evasions and key silences. He was especially indirect and hard to interpret on the subject of slavery. The puzzled his contemporaries, and has infuriated some later students of his attitude.”

It is clearly hard to read the following lines, from Lincoln, in 1858, as he ran for an Illinois senate unsuccessfully against Stephen Douglas, prior to his Presidential election in 1860. In Lincoln’s defense, Douglas was accusing Lincoln of being an abolitionist in a state that had just voted ten years before, in 1848, to deny all free blacks entry to the state, and Lincoln was actually the liberal in this debate … but still…

“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way, the social and political equality of the white and black races – that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor of intermarrying with white people, and I will say, in addition to this, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of political and social equality … and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

And of course the well-known lines:
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; if I could save it by freeing all slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by feeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”

On the other hand…:
“At the framing and adoption of the constitution, they forbore to so much as mention the word ‘slave’ or ‘slavery’ in the whole instrument. … Thus, the thing is hid away, in the constitution, just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time.”

And:
“They [the fathers] did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all men were actually enjoying the equality, nor yet that they were about to confer it, immediately, upon them. In fact, they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.”

Lincoln on war a year before Gettysburg; as Wills points out, he had no illusions as to war’s ‘nobility’:
“Actual war coming, blood grows hot, and blood is spilled. Thought is forced from old channels into confusion. Deception breeds and thrives. Confidence dies, and universal suspicion reigns. Each man feels an impulse to kill his neighbor, lest he be killed by him. Revenge and retaliation follow.”

Lastly, on Lincoln’s poetic expression, the first being an example of parenthetical emphasis (the ‘fervently do we pray’ part), and also grammatical inversion (e.g. instead of wording it as ‘We fondly hope and fervently pray’):
“Fondly do we hope, (fervently do we pray), that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.”

“Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.”

And finally this one; may we all react to difficult things in life with the ‘better angels of our nature’:
“The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Seriously I feel like I missed learning about Lincoln and Gettysburg in my history classes! Though familiar with the address and of course, the battlefield, I really never had any context. This book is well-written and dives into the mid nineteenth century in intriguing aspects that I was unaware of - Greek influence, the beginning of rural cemeteries, the end of an era of great lengthy orations (literally one of the last with Everett’s never ending overture right before Lincoln’s). Thank God! I kept thinking how uncomfortable people must have been sitting/standing outside for two hours listening to him and wishing for the headliner! Anyway, my favorite takeaway from this read was the insight into Lincoln himself. His eloquence wasn’t just a gift but a passion for delivering an effective and clearly thought out message - ultimately an outcome that he was hoping for “for the people” and the Union. In my mind, I cannot think of a more impactful speech.

This is another book that I have come across that I thought I had left a review for. this book the author takes a look at Lincoln speaking at Gettysburg. What he was wanting to get across to the people there that day. what I found interesting is that the man who spoke before Lincoln did so for two hours people were restless tired then getting ready for the President and his words. most did not even understand there meaning until much later when his speech was published in newspapers throughout the country. Taking the country back to each man is created equal, you cannot have division these men who fought and died did so for the country to remain Untied. By incorporating the Consitution into his speech this was the rebirth of our Nation, to become one. A good book looking at the speech and what went on that day. Follow us at www.1rad-readerreviews.com

A President who was erudite, thoughtful ... who knew the power of his words.

Four score and seven years ago...I began this book! Well, not really, in fact, it was short, but it felt long.

This is a very specific, detailed, analytical book about the Gettysburg Address, period. Wills takes it apart, almost sentence by sentence, and analyzes its structure and origins. Wills does a great job of conveying the fact that this very short (272 words, took Lincoln only about 3 minutes to say) speech not only packed a powerful punch, but changed the course of prose and oratory forever. (By the way, the main speaker, Edward Everett, took over 2 hours to deliver his address!).

I found it very interesting. Would be a great resource for college students studying Lincoln, specifically his writing style & ability. Also, a few other topics: Greek influence on writing, transcendentalism, death & burial in the mid-1800's, the works of Gorgias and Pericles.

Lincoln was a “radical” in both senses: he broke with tradition by returning to the roots. The heart of Wills’s book is Lincoln’s elevation of the Declaration of Independence as a transcendental text above the earthly and provisional Constitution. The Constitution, with its tolerance of slavery, was felt by Lincoln and other transcendentalist political thinkers to require renewal by the Declaration, whose unequivocal proposition of equality for all constitutes the moral center of the American system, the American Idea in timeless and transcendent form. (Lincoln, like Emerson, was very much concerned with the ebb and flow of spiritual life in and out of established institutions.)

Wills argues that we owe to Lincoln our sense of a Constitution vividly informed and regularly amended by the people’s progressive approximation of a transcendent ideal. Wills also kicks over a few rocks to show us the judicial conservatives, “strict constructionists” and Neo-Confederate ideologues—Americans hostile to America’s founding ideals, statistically inevitable dregs and degenerates—who to this day begrudge Lincoln for making universal equality integral to the peoples’ conception of their Constitution. American bigots and subjectionists hate that there’s a potent liberation ideology built into the system. That must be so annoying.

The polished pearl of Lincoln’s constitutional thinking, the Gettysburg Address is also, of course, a funeral oration Lincoln delivered at the cemetery where 3,512 Union soldiers killed at the battle of Gettysburg are buried, and therefore it has its fascinating social-literary situation in “nineteenth century oratory, funerary conventions, and the poetry of death.” The Address’s birth-death-rebirth imagery and rhetorical reliance on antithesis, its brevity, abstraction and dense concision, show Lincoln consciously imitating the Athenian funeral oration, the Epitaphios Logos most memorably delivered by Pericles after the first year of the Peloponnesian War (Wills even writes of the Address as having “the chaste and graven quality of an Attic frieze”).

I love seeing American usage and institutions springing from the deep humanist culture of its founders and re-founders. The founders feared direct democracy, and focused their humanism on the Roman Republic; nineteenth century Americans preened themselves as heirs of democratic Athens, made Greek Revival the first truly national architectural style, and were, like much of Europe, enthralled by the Greek struggle for independence from the Ottomans. Edward Everett—the main event of the Gettysburg ceremony, not Lincoln—was “the voice of fashionably Romantic Hellenism” who had made his career speaking at fundraisers for Greek independence and delivering Periclean orations at Revolutionary War battlefields.

The location of the Athenian Kerameikos outside the city walls, in precincts of contemplative rusticity, near the groves of the Academy, inspired the “rural cemetery movement” across America, a movement of which the Gettysburg National Cemetery is a famous product (others are Boston’s Mount Auburn, which drew 30,000 visitors a year; and Concord’s Sleepy Hollow, whose dedication Emerson delivered). The Greek rural cemetery’s “pantheistic identification of dissolution with initiation,” and the Greek view of patriot graves as ideal educative sites for the young caught on with nineteenth century Americans for a variety of reasons:


1. The waning of traditional religion before the Transcendentalist cult of nature (the “theological gloom” of the churchyard and the cathedral vault exchanged for picturesque open-air sublimity, landscape-as-church).

2.The necrophiliac aspects of Romanticism, and the Romantic association of melancholy with genius, mourning with profundity (Lincoln’s law partner Herndon: “His apparent gloom impressed his friends, and created sympathy for him—one means of his great success”).

3. The limnality fetish—séances, spirit photography, dead babies with angel headstones (Mary Lincoln conducted séances in the White House, and later had a spirit photograph taken in which the ghost of her assassinated husband leans over her protectively).

A selection of morbid Victoriana:

1.Mary and Abe’s spirit photo
2.Assassination spread in Harper’s Weekly
3.Lincoln’s hearse
4.Gettysburg dead

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