A lot of this book, particularly references to the “rural cemetery movement” and Ancient Greek figures, went over my head. However, Wills provides an excellent commentary about how revolutionary the Gettysburg Address has been in how we conceive of of government. He gives context about the more loosely bound way through which the American people used to conceptualize the federal government. He then fleshes out (in depth) the genius of the rhetoric Lincoln used in the Gettysburg Address. The beauty of the Address, according to Wills, is that Lincoln used language so deceptively simple that it isn’t even really apparent an argument is being made. Playing upon the egalitarian ideals of the Declaration of Independence (which Lincoln thought of as a sort of philosophical end goal that should drive the actions of the federal government), Lincoln helped guide the American people to accept a more democratic view of government that is now taken for granted (more or less), as opposed to the Republican views of many of the founders.

A New Birth Of Freedom

The Battle of Gettysburg, a pivotal event in the Civil War, raged from July 1 to July 3, 1863. It was the largest battle ever fought in the Western Hemisphere and ended the Confederacy's second invasion of the North. Following the battle, the community of Gettysburg was thick with dead and wounded men. The Governor of Pennsylvania authorized the purchase of a cemetery for the reburial of the Union dead. The cemetery was dedicated in a ceremony on November 19, 1863. Edward Everett, a distinguished orator of the day, delivered a speech lasting over two hours. President Abraham Lincoln also accepted an invitation to deliver short remarks. His remarks of 272 became known as the Gettysburg Address. They constitute a seminal statement, and restatement of the American vision.

Garry Wills' study "Lincoln at Gettysburg" deserves the accolades it has received if for no other reason than it gave many readers the opportunity to read and think about the Gettysburg Address. This is a speech that is dulled and lost in childhood. It needs to be approached and rethought as an adult to get an understanding of the depth of Lincoln's message.

Wills sees the Gettysburg Address as recasting and remaking the American democratic experience. The speech expressly brings the hearer and reader back to the Declaration of Independence with its self-evident truth that "All men are created equal." This truth, Lincoln turns into a "proposition" on which our country was founded. (The Constitution, adopted thirteen years after the Declaration, countenances slavery and includes no language about human equality.) In his spare prose, Lincoln says little directly about the nature of "equality". Wills discusses the address and masterfully places it in the context of Lincoln's earlier speeches to help the reader understand the development of Lincoln's ideas on slavery, the antithesis of human equality.

The Gettysburg Address also sounded the theme of the United States as a single undivided nation rather than a union or confederation of States. Wills shows how this theme too derives from the Declaration, when the people of the colonies rose up in unity to declare their Independence from Britain. Wills also reminds the reader of the sources of the idea of Nationhood in American history. He alludes to the Federalism of Chief Justice John Marshall and Justice Joseph Story. In particular, Wills discusses the Webster-Hayne debates. Lincoln greatly admired Webster as well as his fellow Whig, Henry Clay. Webster uttered the famous line "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable," which resonates through the Gettysburg Address.

Wills tries to show the influence on Lincoln's thought on the transcendentalism of Emerson and of Theodore Parker. I thought this one of the more challenging sections of the book. While the Declaration was born in the skepticism of British empiricism and of Deism, transcendentalism emphasized the ideal. The Declaration and the Address, and the American mission, Lincoln transformed into ideal to be struggled for and realized by the living to commemorate the sacrifice of those who gave their lives to attain it.

The book also includes an excellent treatment of rhetoric and speech, tracing Lincoln's address back to Thucydides and Georgias and ending with the observation that it marked the beginning of modern American prose.

Wills' book encourages the reader to think about the Gettysburg Address and the great nature of the American political experiment. (Original review edited on Thanksgiving Day, November 23, 2017).

Robin Friedman

This book is great. It's elegantly written, well-argued, well-documented and full of insight and information. Wills not only explains Lincoln's rhetorical techniques, he situates them in the context of classical rhetoric (in particular the ancient Greek funeral-for-heroes speech), American cultural trends of the mid 1800's (in particular Transcendentalism and the "rural cemetery" movement), and Lincoln's own history as a writer and giver of speeches.

Most importantly, he demonstrates how Lincoln used the address to promulgate his philosophy about the nature of the political Union that is the United States of America. Lincoln believed that the American people had decided that they were one people, one nation, at least as early as 1776, and emphatically proved they were with the Declaration of Independence and the Revolution. In Lincoln's view, the 1787 Constitution did not make the Union; it only made the already-existing Union (in the words of the Constitution's preamble) "more perfect". The Union was "given birth" by an idea, and its ideal was spelled out in the Declaration. The Constitution is nothing more or less than an imperfect attempt to make that ideal reality, subject to political constraints at any point in time.

Seen in this light, the stirring last sentence of the Gettysburg Address is more than a clever Jedi mind-trick to arouse patriotic fervor, it's a rebuttal to every kind of "States' Rights" revisionistic history, and a succinct statement of what the Civil War and the Battle of Gettysburg were all about.

The speech itself truly is a masterpiece, and Wills's book is equal to the task of explaining why and how this is so. Highly recommended.

Wills takes us back not only to the day that Lincoln gave this speech, but also he starts off crafting deftly, and laboriously, our experiences while visiting a cemetery such as this one. That realm between the living and the dead should be used to remember and commemorate those that have fallen so that we can finish the work before us. Our work to reinvent the Union should be founded upon giving new meaning to "all men are created equal."

Also, Wills explains how revolutionary Lincoln's Gettysburg address really was. And he proposes why it was so short, and also why so much was left out of it... like the words "slavery", "the South", or even the word "Union". And finally he examines how the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln's Second Inaugural are so similar, and why the "sin of slavery" was not part of the Gettysburg Address but was able to be included in his Second Inaugural.

If there ever was a book that I should reread, this is one of them.

Lincoln and Gettysburg have been inextricably interlinked ever since November 19, 1863 -- the day that Abraham Lincoln delivered his dedication address for the newly completed National Cemetery at Gettysburg. Four months had passed since the tremendous battle of July 1-3 had turned the tide of civil war permanently in the Union's favor, albeit at an exceedingly high cost -- 46,000 casualties, including almost 8,000 soldiers killed. It is now a matter of record that President Lincoln's Gettysburg Address put the Civil War on a new moral footing, gave it new meaning. Many authors have told that story before; but none, to my mind, has done so as well as Garry Wills in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1993 book Lincoln at Gettysburg.

Wills, a prolific author who brings his formidable intellect and erudition to a wide range of historical topics, is particularly well-qualified to write about Abraham Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address. One of his most notable earlier books is Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (1978); and as Wills points out, the links between the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address are many and strong. Lincoln revered Jefferson as the greatest advocate of American liberty and saw the Declaration as the one indispensable American text.

While the United States Constitution of 1787 contained indirect references to slavery, in a manner that showed how uncomfortable the Framers at Philadelphia were as they sought to address the existence of slavery in a new nation dedicated to liberty, Lincoln felt that "the Declaration somehow escaped the constraints that bound the Constitution. It was free to state an ideal that transcended its age, one that serves as a touchstone for later strivings" (p. 102). It is no accident that the Gettysburg Address begins with that four-score-and-seven-years ago reference to the Declaration.

Yet Lincoln at Gettysburg is not all about the DOI: far from it. Wills sets the Gettysburg Address within a cultural and historical context that encompasses Transcendentalism, Greek Revival culture, and the 19th century's striking attitudes regarding death and mourning.

For Wills, the Gettysburg Address goes beyond the Declaration, redefines the Declaration, in the American mind. It is for this reason that the book has the subtitle The Words That Remade America, as Wills makes clear in passages like this one:

"The Gettysburg Address has become an authoritative expression of the American spirit -- as authoritative as the Declaration itself, and perhaps even more influential, since it determines how we read the Declaration. For most people now, the Declaration means what Lincoln told us it means, as a way of correcting the Constitution itself without overthrowing it....By accepting the Gettysburg Address, its concept of a single people dedicated to a proposition, we have been changed. Because of it, we live in a different America." (pp. 146-47)

The book's epilogues and appendices are every bit as helpful as its core content. One epilogue, titled "The Other Address," relates the Gettysburg to Lincoln's other best-known address -- his Second Inaugural Address of March 4, 1865, itself the subject of another magnificent study, Ronald White's Lincoln's Greatest Speech (2003).

Edward Everett's two-hour oration from the cemetery dedication is here as well; it's perfectly passable, but seems bland and ordinary when Everett's words are compared with Lincoln's. Willis characterizes well the differences between the two addresses. Everett, with his formal classical education, "hoped to accomplish something like the impact of Greek drama" (p. 51). By contrast, Wills suggests, "Lincoln sensed, from his own developed artistry, the demands that bring forth classic art - compression, grasp of the essential, balance, ideality, an awareness of the deepest polarities in the situation (life for the city coming from the death of its citizens)" (p. 52). Everett was a scholar; Lincoln was both scholar (albeit self-taught) and artist.

You can even read the Athenian leader Pericles' renowned funeral oration from 431 B.C., the first year of the Peloponnesian War; as Wills notes, Pericles' oration from classical times had a marked influence on the attitudes toward military heroism and death that existed in Lincoln's time. Yet one can also see how Pericles' praises of Athenian democracy - "By title we are a democracy, since the many, not just the few, participate in governing, and citizens are equal in their legal dealings with each other" (p. 250) - may have influenced Lincoln's belief in American democracy.

Today, the Gettysburg Address is just as famous as the battle that prompted it, to the point that "Tourists, arriving at the military cemetery in Gettysburg, almost always ask where Lincoln was standing as he gave the Address. National Park Service markers have for years indicated the obvious place, where the tall column of the Soldiers' National Monument now stands" (p. 205).

Whether President Lincoln actually delivered the Address there or not, the Gettysburg Address remains an essential document of American democracy; and Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America is essential reading for anyone with an interest in Civil War history, Lincoln studies, or American history generally.

A REVIEW in 292:



Fundamentally, the thing I love about criticism is the ability to read a damn fine book about a damn fine speech and recognize the author of the book wrote a little more than a page for every word in the Gettysburg Address. If you count appendixes and notes (and why wouldn't you when the appendix and notes matter?).

I once teased my wife, during my early wooing stage, that I wanted to write an ode to every hair on her head (loads of odes). Garry Wills did. This book is both academic criticism (one chapter is infused with new historicism, one is textual criticism, one is formalist, one is mythological) and an ode to Lincoln, Language, and this damn fine speech. I could see Garry Wills publishing each chapter in some well-funded Civil War journal and eventually weaving each paper together. I'm not sure how it really happened. Wills might just have used the chapters and forms of literary criticism as an organizational framework. I am not going to do an exegesis on the book to find out. That would be far too meta.

Anyway, it was a quick and fascinating read and significantly deepened my understanding of Lincoln's motives for the speech while also acting as an Entmythologisierung* of the text. No. Lincoln did not write the text on the back of a napkin while on a train TO Gettysburg. Anyway, a must read for those who love history, the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, or Transcendentalism.

* I'm using the German here as a joke, since there were several instances when Wills referenced Everett bringing back the seeds of Transcendentalism and higher criticism from his studies there. I'm also using it because it is 1.5x as fun as just saying demystification.

Over two decades after its first publication, this analysis of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address remains a powerful and persuasive work of intellectual history. Wills illuminates the speech by placing it several contexts: the Romantic-era view of cemeteries; the Transcendental view of the Declaration of Independence; Lincoln's own constitutional analysis of slavery and secession; and the techniques of rhetoric and reasoning that the Address shares with Lincoln's other speeches.

Wills' writing is strong, precise, and accessibly erudite. It may be particularly rewarding to read this relatively short work in the company of two others: Edmund Wilson's  Patriotic Gore, 1962, and Drew Gilpin Faust's  This Republic of Suffering, 2008. Wills explicitly rejects some of Wilson's analysis of Lincoln's constitutional views; but Wilson, like Wills, also takes a look at the ideas circulating in literary culture before and during the war. Faust's book, with its detailed discussion of the way the Civil War as a whole shifted American attitudes towards death, offers a terrific foil to Wills' focus on a single speech. Like both of those books, Lincoln at Gettysburg is a history of ideas, well argued and full of insights.

I remember being extremely impressed with Wills's book when I read it many years ago. I decided to read it again, having, in the intervening years, read a great deal more about President Lincoln, his speeches and his times. As C.S. Lewis insisted, great books must be read more than once. I am glad I followed his advice. The depth of Wills's scholarship and his analysis of the Address are overwhelming. Even when compared to the many excellent Lincoln biographies adorning my bookshelves, there is no better accounting of the heart and mind of this extraordinary man than this slim volume about this singular speech. Wills has convinced me that the Gettysburg Address merits a place, with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, among the greatest of America's founding documents.

This is the best book I've read all year. I've been to Gettysburg six times so I don't know how I missed this Pulitzer Prize-winning book. In a detailed analysis, Wills (a trained classisist) sets up the context of Lincoln's most famous speech , the Gettysburg Address and then analyzes it, showing how Lincoln borrowed from the Ancient Greek funeral orations. The analysis is smart and detailed: showing the speakers (Clay, Webster, Calhoun) who influenced Lincoln's thoughts,along with the writers (Hugh Blair) , and how the cemetery itself was part of the "rural cemetery movement" (who knew?). Not only does this book provide context and analysis of the famous speech, but the reader learns so much about the changes in oratory of the time, Lincoln's evolutionary thought processes in regards to race, and how Lincoln's previous speeches influenced this one. This is rhetorical analysis at its best and I recommend it to anyone interested in Lincoln, 19th century oratory, or the Gettysburg Address secifically. Or people interested in Lincoln's previous speeches (e.g., House Divided, Lincoln Douglas Debates, Lincoln's First Inagural), as all are analyzed and assessed.

It's a great scholarly essay, but too esoteric for a casual read.

Lincoln did not give the keynote address at Gettysburg; that was done by Edward Everett. It lasted two hours and is described in this book as masterpiece of its type, given at the last possible moment it could be appreciated, because shortly thereafter Lincoln's few hundred words had rendered that style of oration outdated.

Wills covers what we know about the ceremony and the composition of the address, how the content fit into Lincoln's thought, and the style of Lincoln's speech. The stylistic element is probably the heart of the book, both in the break from tradition and in its connection to contemporary currents like the natural cemetery movement or transcendentalism. It's a compelling case but I found the notes on the content more interesting. There was a political philosophy painted in the address, built around liberty and equality, and drawing on the Declaration of Independence, that was not then enshrined in the Constitution but is today central to our self-image.

The Historian Garry Wills wrote Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America in 1992. Wills’ Lincoln at Gettysburg argues that Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address made Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence the founding document of the United States instead of the American Constitution. This is an important shift because the Declaration of Independence holds that “all men are created equal”, while the Constitution allows slavery. Wills believes that Lincoln was also trying to explain the larger meaning of the Civil War as Lincoln saw the war to mean, these are themes he will develop more in his Second Inaugural Address in March of 1865. Wills writes that he believes that the Second Inaugural Address is the only speech of Lincoln that Lincoln gave that is “worthy to stand with the” Gettysburg Address (189). Wills believes that the Gettysburg Address is like a piece of art that must be understood in its environment. Wills compares studying the Gettysburg Address in its context to studying Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin in the Church of the Frari in the Italian city of Venice (211). Wills’ Lincoln at Gettysburg fulfills his goal of creating contexts for the Gettysburg, by showing both the cultural forces that created the speech and how the Gettysburg Address changed those cultural forces. The book contains four funeral speeches (including the Gettysburg Address). The book is key to understanding the Gettysburg Address of November 1863.