Why does it take Garry Wills 317 pages to explain Lincoln's 272 words delivered at Gettysburg? Because Lincoln's address was that magisterial and Wills' scholarship that magnificent. Wills, 84 at this writing and Professor Emeritus at Northwestern University, wrote Lincoln At Gettysburg in 1992.

While not dueling for oratory greatness, Lincoln's 272 words eclipse the famed oratory giant Edward Everett, the principal speaker at the dedication whose 13,000 words took two hours to deliver.

Why?

Wills explores the context and the text of Lincoln's famed address, but more than that, the forces that shaped his communication in general and this speech in particular. Readers are treated to the influences of Greek Revival, the "Culture of Death" of that day, the Transcendentalism of Theodore Parker, and the theory and oratory power of Daniel Webster.

The author also demonstrates Lincoln's mastery of thought and style. For Lincoln, the Civil War was about preserving the Union more than freeing slaves. He used the moment to connect people to the Declaration and Constitution -- "a single people dedicated to a proposition" -- and it was unity around that proposition that pushed the issue of slavery in our country toward obsolescence.

As to style, Wills shows us that Lincoln rendered obsolete the communication methods of his day, a mere thirty minutes after Everett spoke. The author's treatment of the power of words, along with the insights from Hugh Blair, Mark Twain, and John Hay is worth the price of the book.

Wills won the Pulitzer Prize for Lincoln At Gettysburg and it is not hard to understand why. This is not light reading, but it is fascinating and so insightful.

Five reasons to read:

1. Scholarship: Put on your deep diving gear; Wills plumbs the depths of this speech, taking us down through cold waters of history to the works of Pericles and Thucydides.
2. Communication: Lincoln At Gettysburg is essential reading for anyone who wants to improve their communication. It is enlightening, educating, and fascinating.
3. Context: Will deftly relays the "need for artful words to sweeten the poisoned air of Gettysburg." Each side claimed fifty thousand dead, wounded, and missing. Residents were forced to plant around bodies in the fields and gardens. Contractors were bidding to bury the bodies of soldiers, a work that intern 100 bodies a day. Will takes the speech out of our classrooms and puts us at Gettysburg.
4. Myth explosion:For years I have believed the myths that Will quickly dispels: (1) The Gettysburg Address was composed "on the fly." (2) That Lincoln was not pleased with the speech, e.g. purportedly saying, "That speech won't scour." Not so.
5. The Tycoon: Wills gives us glimpses of Lincoln through the eyes of his 25-year-old secretary, John Hay (who would later serve as Secretary of State to two Presidents.) Hay referred to Lincoln as "The Tycoon." These interactions are interesting and particularly helpful in examining the power of Lincoln's communication.

Every year around the July 4th Holiday I try to read several books with a patriotic theme. This is one of the books for 2016. Gary Wills breaks apart Lincolns famous address and presents a number of social, historical, and literary factors that influenced the language and the meaning Lincoln had behind the words. It has been long held that Lincoln scrawled these famous words in a hurry before the address was made. You learn that Lincoln gave much more thought that this is compiling these immortal words.

This year my "Reading Challenge" is to re-read 10 books to see how they hold up to my memory. There is quite a bit in this book that I forgot over 15 years.

If you asked me last week, I'd have told you it was about the use of rhetorical devices and how this style of oratory harkens back to the Greek tradition. I would not have remembered nor told you it shows how Lincoln recast the meaning of the war and fixed the Declaration of Independence as subordinate to Constitution (as noted in the title); nor would I have remembered how Wills shows the influence of the transcendentalists on Lincoln's thinking; nor would I have remembered much about the choice of venue.

Wills defines the founding generation's preference for Roman (a republic, fearful of the masses) imagery to the late nineteenth century's preference for Greek (a democracy with more suffrage) imagery. He shows the development of Lincoln's mood and thought through previous speeches and bits of Lincoln's poetry and a discussion of the (later) second Inaugural Address. There is quite a bit on the 19th century American experience of death (using the word "Victorian" only as an adjective for authors) and the cemetery movement.

I remembered that by not naming a person, the battlefield being dedicated or the battle fought there, "the North" or "the South" or any place, or even the Declaration of Independence which the oratory is about, he makes the piece timeless. By using nouns instead of referent pronouns he creates stirring images. By using of balance he makes it poetic. I did not remember how the war was recast in that "the great task before us" is not emancipation, but the perpetuation of self-government.

It's funny how the memory works. There are a few poems that Lincoln wrote and I did not remember any of them. Most of them are forgettable, but the poem on pp. 92-93 where Lincoln lays out his beliefs on race should not have been.

The contrast with oratory of its day is shown in the Appendix III in the speech delivered that same day by Pennsylvania Governor Everett. Also in Appendix III is an example of the Greek funeral oratory from which the style is derived.

Were I to have rated this book last week, I'd have given it 5 stars. While it is an important book and Wills brings a lot together, today I see it as a 4 star book. While the book is short and it is not pithy. The pieces on psychobiography and the section on the transcendental influence ramble.

Garry Wills is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. This work is a fantastic piece of history and thought. It uses Lincoln’s most famous speech to look at the mind and context of America’s greatest president. Wills does a fantastic job letting Lincoln speak for himself. Ending with the Second Inaugural speech genuinely made me emotional. If you like history, ideas, and rhetoric you will love this book!

Wills paints a sharp, clear-eyed portrait of Lincoln from an angle and in a setting I had never seen before - Lincoln's love of words and his skill at using them brought to the fore front. A lot of demythification here. The address emerges as almost perfectly constructed for its purpose.

Was looking forward to this accounting of the Gettysburg address. But it took me a long time to get through this not-very-long book. For me, it was like reading a grad students dissertation. The breakdown in analysis made sense. But some sections, like that on Greek oratory, was dense. The best section was the last: 'Revolution in Style'. The breakdown of how Lincoln mastered the paring down of language was fascinating. But even this section started being too academic.

Incredibly exciting book, not just for anyone who loves American history, but for anyone who is interested in the challenge of writing well.

What Gary Wills does is not just to analyze the Gettysburg Address, which is less than five hundred words long. He provides an intellectual profile of Lincoln. He analyzes the way Lincoln learned to structure his ideas on freedom, slavery, and the nature of American democracy, and he provides fascinating line by line break-downs so you can really see Lincoln grow as a writer. He also provides fascinating details on the great orators of the past who influenced Lincoln, from the Ancient Greeks like Pericles right down to Lincoln's immediate ancestors, like Daniel Webster and Henry Clay.

You don't have to be a scholar of American history or the American Civil War to find this book fascinating. Anyone who cares about writing well will find it completely engrossing from start to finish!

I bought this book for $2 at the Cedar Falls Public Library Book Nook, knowing that Gary Wills won a Pulitzer Prize for his analysis of the Gettysburg Address. Wills indeed did an excellent job here explaining the significance of the address in ways that I had not previously considered. One of the chapters explores ancient Greek oratory as a foundation for the address; the historian Thucydides recorded Greek addresses that exhorted the living to carry on the unfinished work of fallen soldiers, just as Lincoln did over 2,000 years later. Another of the chapters explores how Lincoln drew on the Declaration of Independence in his address to articulate an understanding of America as formed by a single united people and not by the states; as such, he did not believe that this united people had the right to break the country into two. I recommend this book for all those who are intrigued by the implications of the words Lincoln spoke on November 19, 1863.

The prologue to this book is breathtaking. Civil War histories tell us about the Battle of Gettysburg, while Lincoln biographies tell us about his Gettysburg Address delivered four months later. Wills fills in the gap with a thorough and immersive look at everything that happened in between - the haphazard initial burials of the many bodies, the process of creating the cemetery, the daunting task of exhuming, identifying and reburying the bodies, the planning for the dedication ceremony, an account of Edward Everett’s often-overlooked oration that preceded Lincoln’s, and a bit of myth-busting in dispelling the popular notion that Everett’s speech was seen at the time as being overlong and overdone, or that Lincoln’s was seen as too short or slapdash.

The prologue is a bit deceiving, though. This is not a history book or a work of storytelling. It’s an intellectual exercise, analyzing the influences, content and context of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

So with Chapter 1 comes a severe and abrupt change in tone. After the prologue’s captivating setup comes a deep, deep, deep, deep dive into the style and substance of ancient classical Greek oratory and how Lincoln echoed that style in his address. This subject matter is, well, Greek to me, but, hey, I’m willing to learn new things, so I dug in and read very carefully to try to discern how Wills aims to draw parallels between Pericles's Funeral Oration and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. He makes the comparison in a rather broad context and in a manner that’s much more scholarly than accessible, though, so I had to pause and read a few "Ancient Athenians for Dummies"-type articles online about Lincoln and Pericles to better appreciate what Wills was going for here.

It’s all rather dense and slow going, but there are enough interesting nuggets to make a very close reading a rewarding experience. Wills explains the shift at the time away from the Revolutionary generation’s affinity for the ancient Romans, toward an appreciation for the ancient Greeks. So the Greek allusions in Everett’s oration and influences in Lincoln’s speech were much more apparent and appreciated then. Even the concept of a rural cemetery and the very word “cemetery” were derived from the Greeks. So Wills places the dedication ceremony in the context of its time, as part of the "recurrent rites of dedicating new parts of nature to the care of the dead," as opposed to previous generations' habit of conducting burials in dreary churchyards or dank crypts.

Later chapters show how Lincoln was influenced by Transcendentalists in his thinking about the country, the Declaration of Independence and its meaning, and what the concept of Union meant to Lincoln - all as a prelude to how he spoke of it in his Address.

The climactic chapter is ultimately where Wills kind of lost me. I was hoping, after all of this background and setup, that he would take us back to the scene and return to the storytelling style of the prologue. Instead, he thoroughly parses the Address but never returns the reader to the moment of its delivery (except in a second appendix, in which he describes later efforts to locate the spot from which Lincoln spoke).

And in analyzing the Address, he makes a whole lot of literary and antiquarian references that simply went over my head. I was able, with effort, to follow his earlier allusions to the ancient Greeks and the Transcendentalists. But here, he simply starts to assume knowledge on the part of the reader. To cite but one example, we learn that Lincoln, in an earlier piece of writing, once echoed "the poeticisms of Everett, the nature lore of Waugh's John Boot in Scoop, and the comic formality of Claudius and Gertrude." I couldn't tell if I didn't appreciate these references because of my own literary ignorance, or because Wills is being presumptuous or condescending, as though deigning to explain his references to anyone too ignorant to get them is somehow beneath him.

The book’s epilogue considers the Second Inaugural, which, with its themes of repentance and redemption, "complements and completes the Gettysburg Address." And a slew of appendices gives the impression of a book that doesn’t know where to end, and just keeps going until it peters out without a satisfying and definitive conclusion.

There is a lot to like about this book, though I respected it more than I loved it. Wills provides plenty of thought-provoking background and context, digs into the meaning and poetry of the Address, and provides appropriate attention to Everett’s address and his style of oration, which was appreciated at the time but, in preceding Lincoln’s radically different style of address, "was made obsolete within a half-hour of the time when it was spoken."

There is a difference, though, between dumbing something down and making it more accessible and understandable. I think Wills could have done the latter without doing the former. I’m glad this book exists and glad I read it, but - coming from someone who has read about three dozen Lincoln-related books in a row so far - this one may have been a slightly deeper dive into more esoteric areas than I bargained for.

Wills evokes the stink of the corpses, some barely covered at the time of this historic dedication:

A nurse shuddered at the all-too-visible "rise and swell of human bodies" in these furrows war had plowed.... Householders had to plant around the bodies in their fields and gardens, or brace themselves to move the rotting corpses to another place. Soon these uneasy graves were being rifled by relatives looking for their dead -- reburying other bodies that they turned up, even more hastily (and less adequately) than had the first disposal crews. Three weeks after the battle, a prosperous Gettysburg banker, David Wills, reported to Pennsylvania's Governor Curtin: "In many distances arms and legs and sometimes heads protrude and my attention has been directed to several places where the hogs are actually rooting out the bodies and devouring them."

War is smelly!

Here is one sentence from the Prologue:

Lincoln was still wearing a mourning band on his hat for his dead son.

(That's on the day of the Gettysburg Address.) 48,000 men died in the battle -- at least -- and Lincoln was grieving for his son Willie!

Wills brilliantly rehabilitates Edward Everett, the main speaker at Gettysburg, who is often ridiculed by historians. Lincoln at Gettysburg explains what a two-hour speech meant in 1863. (It was essentially a TV miniseries.) Americans were much less visual then; they liked listening to smart guys talking. And it was logical that Everett spoke so much longer than Lincoln; he delivered the "Oration," whereas Lincoln, on the program, is credited with "Dedicatory Remarks." Everett's performance freed Lincoln to speak in a telegraphic style, without mentioning slavery or the name of the battle.

This book also expansively describes Victorian cemeteries. They expressed a spiritual environmentalism, plus a re-paganization of
Christian culture. It all comes out of Romanticism:

As with most romantic developments, Rousseau had pioneered this communion with nature as an opening onto other worlds. In his Musings of a Lonely Rambler (Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire), he told how he lost the sense of a division between himself and the things he impinged on. He flowed out to the world, and it flowed in. He compared this to the bliss he felt on recovering consciousness after being knocked out in an accident. To recover such "transcendings" of himself, he practiced techniques of autohypnosis -- rhythmic walking, "a regular and gentle motion without jolt or interruption," or the contemplation of waves whose "flux and reflux, and continued sound neither swelling or ceasing," created interior movements as gentle and suggestive as the water's.

Rousseau invented mystic French meditation!

In-depth analysis of Lincoln's famous Gettysburg Address. Wills sets the context for the Address, what Lincoln's speaking style was, what his writing style was, who in history he was influenced by, and the culture of death that seemed to permeate the country during that time period. He also talks at length about the featured speaker that day (no, it was NOT Lincoln, hard as that is to believe): Edward Everett, and how his own speeches were influenced by the Greeks. One of Lincoln's shortest speeches, yet also one of his most important ones.

Overall, I actually found this book to be somewhat stiff and uninteresting. I did like the section talking about how Americans during that period had somewhat of an infatuation with death and burials, and how this somewhat odd behavior (as we would see it today) was nurtured starting in childhood. But the chapter about the Greek influences on Everett was tough sledding, and the funeral orations in the Appendix were not relevant.

Grade: C+

Calling all lovers of hermeneutica, oration, and linguistics---This book is for you!

This is a phenomenal book, but its target audience is very small. You have to either be a Civil War fanatic, Lincoln fanatic, or interested in how great speeches are composed.

This book is literally about the 272 words (or so) that Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg.

Wills dissects the speech in every way imaginable. He parses every phrase. He covers the rhythmic patterns. He provides the historical context. He provides the literary context. He introduces how the study of oration by the ancient Greeks all came together and culminated in one of the best short speeches ever given.

The most amazing part of this, is that he makes this endeavor interesting.

Beyond the technical, he demonstrates how Lincoln reshaped the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In a mere 272 words, he took a document that was subservient to the Constitution--- document that focused on the monarchy and justified treason---and transformed it into the dominant document that espouses freedom and equality in America.

This book will not interest everybody, but it is one that everybody should probably read.