Wills provides context for arguably the most famous speech in American political history in Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America. The book does an excellent job of dispelling popular myths about the speech - for example, it wasn't written hurriedly on a last minute train to Gettysburg or on a napkin, and audience members did not universally enjoy it more than the two hour oration by All-Star Edward Everett. The book's thesis is how the Gettysburg Address raised the values of the Declaration of Independence above the words of the Constitution and ushered in a new way of thinking about equality in America. It does a good job of examining Lincoln's control of language throughout his career, and how this mastery culminated in the Gettysburg Address.

Wills also discusses how the cemetery itself was a new concept to American society, and how the Gettysburg Address as well as Everett's eulogy are rooted in Ancient Greek funeral orations- here his insight is less exciting to me but some readers may find the history lesson enjoyable.

Wills displays a willingness to clash with popular Civil War historians including McPherson, particularly when it comes to Licnoln's perspective on the nature of the Rebellion and of the political status of Southern States. Here, Wills's inclination to use Lincoln's letters and speeches allows for a more curious reader to read more on the subject.

Overall, I enjoyed the book, particularly as it pertains to Lincoln's political and oratory skills. I left with a greater appreciation of Lincoln, the context for the speech, and a desire visit the place where with 272 words Lincoln "wove a spell that has not, yet, been broken."

I'm surprised at how little I liked this book. Honestly, I don't know how this won the Pulitzer; it's about a fifth very technical dissection of the Gettysburg Address itself, and the rest is a wandering hodgepodge (I found myself flipping page after page of information about then-contemporary cemetery design philosophy). Some of this is interesting - the author's rundown of the two hour long preceding Gettysburg Oration went into a lot of detail about public speaking in the mid 1800s that was surprisingly interesting.
But this is the exception - most of the non-Address material is both boring and puzzling in that I'm not sure why it was included. I almost muddled through the whole book, but then I started running into this (from pages 116-117):

"Psychobiographers, as we have seen, claim that this demonstrates Lincoln's oedipal compulsion to "kill" Douglas as a sibling rival."

I don't really think I need to say any more than that. Don't bother with this book.

This was a very scholarly Pulitzer Prize winning book about Lincoln and the greatest speech in our nation’s history. I memorized this speech in school but this author gives understanding to this short speech. In this book, the author examines the speech in minute and exacting detail. He analyzes Lincoln’s influences from the Transcendentalist of Emerson and the Greek oratory of Pericles. And he examines the place, the Gettysburg cemetery where the speech took place. With this speech, Lincoln succeeded in a “new birth of freedom” for the nation.
I can appreciate why this book received the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. His inclusion of the appendices and text by Edward Everett was very useful in the understanding of the discussion and completeness in the understanding of this important speech and this important time in our nation’s history.

With the Pulitzer Prize winning book, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America Garry Wills performs a literary dissection of sorts of a prominent American document, examining both its structure & function in an exceedingly formal & intricate manner. The author looks at Abraham Lincoln's very brief 3 minute statement at Gettysburg in terms of the classic rhetorical formats of Greek & Rome.



But beyond that, he juxtaposes Lincoln's comments with those of the president of Harvard University Edward Everett, who delivered a 2 hour "classical" address to the same audience. As Wills puts it, Everett's speech "embodied the calm reflection & grave authority of the statesman, as if he were using Greek ideals to explain America to Americans." Meanwhile, Lincoln was colloquial as well as brief, seemingly informal while representing a completely new & different rhetorical vanguard that was uniquely American in style & content.

The occasion was of course the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, a turning point in the Civil War because it prevented the Confederacy from establishing a northern front, because of the size of the battle and the also because of the staggering loss of life involved. Both Everett & Lincoln spoke to honor the countless soldiers on both sides who died at the Battle of Gettysburg, with a new cemetery inaugurated as a final resting place for them. In fact, Wills talks about "cemetery culture" early on, indicating that Lincoln's speech to those assembled was not what they expected to hear from their president.

Lincoln came not only to sweeten the air of Gettysburg but to clear the infected atmosphere of American history itself, tainted with official sins & inherited guilt. He would cleanse the Constitution by altering the document from within, by appeal from its letter to its spirit, subtly changing the recalcitrant stuff of that legal compromise, bringing it to its own indictment and by doing this, he performed one of the most daring of open air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed. The crowd departed with a new thing in it ideological luggage, that new Constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they brought with them. Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely.

For as Garry Wills indicates, Lincoln was "an agnostic on slavery" but absolutely fanatical in his quest to preserve American unity. He commented that "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the union and not either to save or to destroy slavery." Beyond that, he realized that the American constitution was incomplete, espousing an ideal but not yet a reality. Thus, our "republican robe needed to be repurified" and Lincoln saw the Declaration of Independence replacing the gospel as an instrument of spiritual rebirth. The president refused to take a stance on the "intellectual inferiority of blacks to whites and astutely used one prejudice to counter another, comparing anti-slavery to anti-monarchism, while affording an "almost cult-like status" to the Declaration of Independence.

Curiously, the Gettysburg Address does not mention Gettysburg nor slavery nor even the union. In the address, Lincoln was "not aiming at Periclean effect as did Prof. Everett, for Lincoln was an artist, not just a scholar." More importantly, Lincoln's commentary at Gettysburg "created a political prose for America, to rank with the vernacular excellence of Mark Twain." He sensed that many Americans revered (were prejudiced in favor of) the Declaration of Independence but many of them were also prejudiced in favor of slavery. Lincoln had a long tradition of arguing in ingenious ways, that "Americans must, in consistency, give up one or the other prejudice. For, the two could not exist in the same mind once their mutual enmity is recognized."



I found Wills' profiling Lincoln's ability as an "actor as well as a statesman" quite interesting, indicating that he had consistently used differing rhetorical stresses when speaking in downstate Illinois where southern sympathies prevailed than he employed in Chicago & other more northern precincts of the state. And Lincoln sought to speak of the Emancipation Proclamation as a "military measure", with Wills quoting Richard Hofstadter to say that the document had "all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading, containing no indictment of slavery but simply basing emancipation on military necessity". To Lincoln's mind, just as the South could not unilaterally secede, the North could not unilaterally emancipate. Also & not just in the debates with Sen. Douglas, Lincoln was "accused of clever evasions & key silences."

Again, the fault lay with the Constitution's "imperfect treatment of slavery" with language that was considered shameful & at best provisional by Lincoln, meaning that slavery was meant to be abolished in due time. Thus, acco0rding to Lincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation did not free slaves in the nation at large but only in the theater of active insurrection & only as a "necessary war measure." At Gettysburg, Lincoln not only did not but would not mention the document because "he meant to rise above the particular, the local & the divisive." Also, it is mentioned that until the Civil War, "the United States" was invariably a plural noun: "the United States are a free government." After Gettysburg, it became singular: "The United States is a free government." Wills stresses that

The Gettysburg Address has become an authoritative expression of the American spirit--as authoritative as the Declaration itself, and perhaps even more influential because it determines how we read the Declaration. For most Americans now, the Declaration means what Lincoln told us it means, as a way of correcting the Constitution itself without overthrowing it. It is this correction of the spirit, this intellectual revolution that is so important. 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.

At the core of Abraham Lincoln's beliefs was his personal wish "that all men everywhere be free, that a House divided cannot endure, permanently half slave & half free." In Lincoln at Gettysburg Garry Wills indicates that in his use of the vernacular, Lincoln anticipates Mark Twain. And citing the brevity of the Gettysburg Address, there is a postwar quote from Mr. Twain about the need for brevity in any talk, indicating that "few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon."

President Lincoln "spoke a modern language because he was dealing with a scientific age for which phrasings like "conceived in liberty" and "dedicated to a proposition" were appropriate. His speech is "economical, taut & interconnected" according to Wills and for Lincoln "words were weapons, even though he meant them to be weapons of peace in the midst of war. In his brief time before the crowd at Gettysburg, he wove a spell that has not, yet, been broken--he called up a new nation out of blood & trauma."

Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America provides a new frame for a document most Americans come to grapple with at some point in their education. It is a book based on a premise, one that is conveyed in the subtitle, coming with ample documentation by Garry Wills, though some may feel that his case is just a tad overstated. I do quarrel with some of the terminology, including words such as: thanatopsic, autochthony, exordium, anaphora & archaize but then what are dictionaries &/or the Internet for but to be employed and some of the meanings can be guessed at within the specific context. Still, this reflection on Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is a rather scholarly work & may not be to everyone's taste.

*There are 70+ pages of appendices, including the Gettysburg Address itself & some variations on what reporters & others thought that he had said there. **Within my review, the 1st image is of the author, Garry Wills; the 2nd, an actual photo of Abraham Lincoln taken at Gettysburg.

I have always loved the Gettysburg Address. In its few words it holds to the light so many principles of our democracy. As a young person I could recite it in full. As I age, memory not so strong, I can't any more. But any time I hear it, my heart is stirred by the eloquence of that short commentary.

This book was about the words of the Address, of Lincoln's writing them, seeking to separate myths and probabilities. One cannot say fact and fiction because much is not known, but Wills pulls together likelihoods based on Lincoln's approaches to other speeches. He also spends some time talking about Edward Everett's 2 hour speech, pointing out things I did not know. Wills even includes Everett's speech, which I found very interesting. I think I could have stood there and listened without getting bored.

Just a beautiful piece of work that is also possibly the best book I've read on Abraham Lincoln. For one, Wills does a wonderful job of analyzing Lincoln's influences, from the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Theodore Parker to the oratory of the Greek revival movement to Romanticism, and all of it is so lucidly described and densely packed together that I often had to put the book down to absorb it all or think on it for a moment. Wills' main point though is that the Gettysburg Address, by making the Declaration of Independence America's most important "founding document" (written four score and seven years before 1863), and by substituting the aspirational call for equality made in the Declaration for the fuzzy compromises made in the Constitution, helped craft America as an international and on-going project for human betterment, rather than a local and limited one, and in so far as this speech reshaped generations of Americans' views of their country and its founding, Lincoln truly succeeded in ensuring a "new birth of freedom" for the nation. Overall it's a well-wrought description of the political and intellectual life of mid-nineteenth century America, one which also shows how a single genius managed to reshape that life going forward.

This is quite some time to spend on such a short text, but the author really makes it come alive. In particular, I learned from the author as he connected this speech to Greek oratory which ennobled specific events and people by connecting them to the larger identity of the body politic, and I learned from the author's knowledge of Lincoln's contemporary hearers. The strength of Romanticism in the 19th century, I learned, contributed to what Garry wills called a "culture of death" which connected easily with and admired Lincoln's melancholy nature.

The book "Lincoln at Gettysburg: Words That Remade America" by Garry Willis was a tough read for me. It took me nearly two-and-a-half weeks to read, and for most of the time, I didn’t understand what I was reading. When I did, however, I found the book extremely insightful, interesting, and thought-provoking.
tTo start, this book gives an in depth explanation on the relationship between the Greek oratory (speaking and writing) and Lincoln’s Address. The most inducing part of these chapters was when Willis shows that the words written by famous Greek philosophers and political figures can be so closely tied to what we write today. In particular, I enjoyed seeing the comparison between the Greeks speeches for fallen soldiers to the Gettysburg Address; they are almost identical. “The Greeks exhausted the resources of their exquisite art in adorning the habitations of the dead” (63). For example, speeches honoring dead were divided into two parts: the epainesis of the dead and the parainesis of the living. One part of the epainesis, the progonoi, describes how the heroes have the nobility of great answers. Lincoln’s progonoi begins: “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation . . .”
tThe book also delves into what triggered the need for a cemetery dedication to the soldiers at Gettysburg and the “culture of death” in the mid-late nineteenth century. This part of the book was interesting, but more difficult to understand. However, it helped transition into the book’s final chapters, where the speech itself and its importance were explained. Right behind the Greek oratory chapters, this was my favorite part of the book.
tI can affirm with certainty that I will re-read this book. It is loaded with insightful facts and quotes that I am sure will prove to be more useful once I can better comprehend the book’s meaning. President Lincoln is high up on my favorite lists of Presidents, and I hope to continue my study on him and his impact on America.

I picked this book up at a small private book store in St. Augustine, Florida - do they have small book stores anymore? - and hoped it would be good.

It was more than good. The research for the book is excellent. I was most impressed with that aspect.

Had expected to see a rehash of the day at the cemetery, the repeating of the words, how Lincoln did NOT write the speech on an envelope on the way to Gettysburg.

It was none of that.

Rather it was a fascinating insight into Lincoln's thought process and how over time it evolved, as well as what and whom influenced him during that process.

I came away finding Lincoln even more complex than I thought before reading the book.

Lincoln's love of words, the language and how they influence others was made very clear in the book. Lincoln was a poet, albeit only average, but loved to compare with his private secretary John Hay who was poet laureate in his class at Brown.

Lincoln and Hay developed a father son relationship over the five years Hay was one of his secretaries.

The term "government of the people, of the people and for the people originated in writings of Theodore Park - a transdentalist.

I came away after reading this book more convinced that after Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln was the most intellectual president we have had. Lincoln memorized a book of algorithms. He memorized many of Shakespeare's plays, as well as many of the parts in those plays.

His speech at Gettysburg ran about 2.5 minutes vs 2 hours by the featured speaker Edward Everett. Everett asked for a personal copy of Lincoln's speech shortly after the dedication at the cemetery and wrote Lincoln saying that he hoped he should flatter himself that he had come as close to the central meaning of the occasion in two hours as Lincoln did in two minutes.

The speech was a defining departure from the old way of long speeches to the more concise and shorter speeches.

Excellent book & a great addition to my library.

My Overall Impressions:
Masterful.
Cognitive.
Coherent.
Well Organized.
Well Documented.

Some of the Rhetorical Basics are covered here. Wills describes the delivery of the Gettysburg Address in terms of
The Communication Triangle of Speaker, Message, Listener
Context:
Forum
Presentation

Being a Funerary/Memorial Service, Lincoln also uses the epainesis of the heroic death. Epainesis was used in the tradition of Pericles' funerary oration given in honor of heroes as recorded in History of the Peloponnesian War. Will explains how epainesis is traditionally used and how Lincoln used it in a modern setting at the first modern US American war.

Lincoln mixed Transcendentalism, 19th-century culture of death (proto-20th-century Gothicism?) his social-political theory, & deliberative rhetoric with funerary oration.

The appendices are reference materials, not supplemental information, necessary to more fully grasping all that Wills has written about in his book.

The argument that Wills presents is rather short, 171 pages. Yet the information is dense and requires the support of 83 Pages of appendices.

The Good News: This text is accessible to all who have a basic understanding of rhetoric, the Civil War, and Transcendentalism. Accessible, yes. Easy, no. I plan to return to this book again next year. And perhaps the year after that as there are so many ideas and details to be mined.

Okay, no one throw rocks at me yet. I picked up this book with high, high hopes. After all, I think it even won a pulitzer prize. The prologue was well-written and interesting, and then... it sunk. I started reading the first chapter and was bored to tears. A whole chapter on the breakdown of the ancient Greek style of speaking? I skimmed over to chapter 2 and didn't make it through that one either. So now it's lying neglected somewhere in our apartment. If I have dismissed this book way too soon and am missing out on great things, please tell me! I'm willing to give it another try if someone will vouch for it. Otherwise, Goodwill is about to get a new book!

Lincoln's words are engraved in the American memory. However, what were the motives and origins behind what is possibly his most famous speech?

At times, I admit, I was a little tired of the comparisons of ancient Greek and Roman funeral orations. However, the presentation by Wills provides an important perspective on why the Gettysburg Address is a classic speech.