Though imperfect, Lincoln’s capacity for growth and efforts to do the right thing make him a true martyr to the advancement of equality in our country. Read Wills’ fascinating analysis of one of Lincoln’s greatest speeches and learn what making every word count really means in the hands of a master.

Good book that puts Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in historical and social context. Wills dedicates chapters to writing styles that influenced Lincoln's, the popularity at that time of rural cemeteries and where Gettysburg fit into that style, etc. It reads a lot like a college paper - not in style or language, Wills is far more accomplished than that - but rather how it is designed. It is extremely well researched with copious notes and references.

Really interesting book that is a bit broader than the title. Wills’ focus was on the import of the Gettysburg Address, but delves into much broader topics, such as the meaning of state funeral orations, cemeteries, and how history is soon lost. Overall, an enjoyable and informative book. The Gettysburg Address is something deserving of careful study and attention, something lost in the rote memorization it’s commonly subjected too.

Wills’ preliminary claim is that the Address somehow changed the meaning of the United States - akin to the Declaration of Independence. The support for this claim seems weak. Wills does very little to show whether the Address had historical significance within a reasonable time frame. It certainly did not alter perceptions of constitutional meaning or serve as a focal point for ratification of the post-Civil War amendments. All Wills can muster is mid 20th century works and a contemporaneous Chicago Tribune article. The end of the Reconstruction Area casts a shadow on the Addresses immediate significance that doesn’t similarly shadow the Declaration of Independence or US Constitution.

I read this length essay at a cafe located on the southwest corner of Pratt and Sheridan in the East Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. It may have been the first book by Garry Wills that I ever read and was read, in part, because I was interested in finding out if he was as good as mentions of him in magazines and by friends suggested. I was not disappointed and went on to read several more of his books.

Wonderful.

Must read for anyone who has an interest in American History.

But not only that, I think the topic of this book, Lincoln’s conceptual framework which supported the Gettysburg Address, is invaluable to understand for any American (though for those careful enough in reading, the message has no borders). Lincoln understood America as not being composed in the Constitution, but as an entity who lived so far back as the Declaration of Independence. This is the view that holds the America to be the world’s attempt at fulfilling that most amazing proposition: “that all men are created equal.”

I think this is the correct understanding of America, and any other misses the forest for the trees.

This a very detailed discussion of what went into the evolution of the Gettysburg Address. As one reviewer noted it is a bit too much for a casual read. It is full of background on styles of speech, subtle differences in word meaning and choice, and interpretation of what was actually said versus various written version, among other topics.

One of the points of discussion is the specific location of where the ceremony took place. From having visited Gettysburg and asking the precise question of the park ranger recounted in the book, I can attest that the answer I received is just as given in Appendix II.

A good read for many but parts are too far off course if you are anticipating a simple discussion of the Address.

Wills undertakes a scholarly and thorough analysis of perhaps the most famous speech in American history. By tracing the structure of Lincoln’s address to Ancient Greek funeral orations to expounding on the transcendentalist underpinnings, he provides a much needed context to describe the work Lincoln was trying to do with this speech. Not only was the Gettysburg Address an important speech to dedicate a physical place ravaged by civil war, but it was a speech that accomplished a shift in the national conscience. Lincoln truly remade America by using the seminal line in the Declaration of Independence, “...that all men are created equal...”, as the new national focus in the wake of the Civil War and the emancipation of slaves. He set the stage for thirteenth amendment, thus guaranteeing true and perpetual emancipation based not on a military premise but the premise of equality enshrined in our national charter.
Lincoln knew the time had to advance the banner of equality as described by the Declaration through his keen awareness of public opinion. By using the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg, he created such a shift in our national focus that today we still base our politics from the position of equality. Lincoln’s political genius stems from his keen ability to accurately decipher public sentiment to advance a political and social agenda that would have been unconscionable to the masses a mere decade earlier. And in doing so and in such a manner as he did in the Gettysburg Address, he also laid the foundations for healing as a nation. He chartered a new course for the country with no prejudice of North or South, but in the context of perpetual union,under the premise that all men are created equal.

Starts out with extraordinary narratives and insights into contemporary politics, the way people lived and thought, then devolves into rather minute examinations of language from an oratorical, Greek perspective. Long passages quoted toward the end; gets a bit numbing.

But the insights!

--The 19th C culture of death
--Slave Power ruled the US since its founding, owned presidents, ran the Supreme Court
--When mildly threatened by a president who did not advocate for abolition but for reason they decided to rebel
--If war and Lincoln had not intervened, the Supremes likely would have ruled that slavery was not just Constitutional but must be spread into the North
--That our founding document was not the Constitution but the Declaration

and so forth.

It's difficult not to see parallels between then and today: the extremist takeover of the Supreme Court, their silly stance that all modern life should be judged by 1787 standards (the Constitution), our backward slide to Slave Power, increasing partisanship and hostility.

If you want to be inspired, if you love America, or if you ask why, read this book. An analysis of 272 words that changed the course of a nation. I’ve always held that the Second Inaugural is Lincoln’s finest speech, this book may have changed my mind. In terms of the significance of what was said as well as the extremely avant garde way it was delivered (the speech that followed Lincoln’s utterance lasted over 2 hours, Lincoln in fact was invited to deliver “a few appropriate remarks” essentially to ribbon cut the ceremony) this speech is fascinating. Before this book I didn’t quite understand how Lincoln took a traditional format – the battle funeral speech –reinvented it and fashioned it to modern times. I didn’t quite understand how Lincoln reframed the United States around the concept of equality inferred from the Declaration of Independence, rather than the argument of the Constitution versus states’ rights before reading this book. I feel that should be taught in history class. Utterly fascinating.
Unsure of the significance? This speech marks the moment the United States went from a plural noun to a singular noun.
Writing is organized thought, and few have achieved the ability to extract the maximum meaning with right amount of words like Lincoln. He knows how to structure his verbal rhetoric, the exact moments to reference the Bible or other classical references, and the best ways to shape the emotional arch of his thoughts. Being a frequent visitor of the Lincoln memorial, I cannot help but be amazed that the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural speech, and a plaque honoring the spot Martin Luther King delivered “I have a dream” form a triangle that projects outside of the Lincoln memorial. These three may be the most important three American speeches, reminding us of the ideals to which this country was founded on and continues to pursue. If you want to be inspired, if you love America, or if you ask why, read this book.

Quotes
It would have been hard to predict that Gettysburg, out of all this muddle, these missed chances, all the senseless deaths, would become a symbol of national purpose, pride, and ideals. Abraham Lincoln transformed the reality into something rich and strange – and he did it with 272 words. The power of words has rarely been given a more compelling demonstration. 20
America as a second Athens was an idea whose moment had come in the nineteenth century. This nation’s founders first looked to Rome, not to Greece, for their model. Like most men of the eighteenth century, they thought of Athens as ruled by mobs. 42
Lincoln had a logical mind, furthermore, that regularly showed itself in the act of distinguishing alternatives. His thought leaned towards antithesis, as classical rhetoricians have noticed. He regularly underlined contrast-words in the texts he prepared for delivery. 55
According to Lincoln and [Daniel] Webster the Declaration of Independence was closer to being the founding document of the United States than was the Constitution. 130
Lincoln did not cease to regard the Declaration as the expression of a transcendent ideal to be approximated…it will be noted that [other thinkers such as] Webster, like Parker, used the tripe formulations about government of, for, by the people’ but for Webster [and Lincoln] the people had a grittier historical reality…the one people that brought itself into being while issuing the Declaration. Regard for that sovereign enunciator of the doctrine, and not just for the nobility of the high ideals expressed, is part of the constitutional reality he honored…on this, Lincoln never wavered. The problem, for him, was insurrection, not war. The South could not be a body of foreign belligerents. 133
[Lincoln never used the term “traitor” to describe Southerners] He would not even use the term “seceders” without a disclaiming phrase like “so called.” He was equally quick to pardon Southerners and Northerners, since their basic category was the same in either case: they were citizens. 135
Arguing for the exclusion of slavery in new territiories, he put in vivid terms the different status of slavery as considered in itself and in each of the three relevant jurisdictions of America: “If I saw a venomous snake crawling in the road, any man would say I may seize the nearest stick and kill it. [slavery] / But if I found that snake in bed with my children that would be another question. I might hurt the children more than the snake, and it might bite them. [slavery in the South]. / Much more, if I found it in bed with my neighbor’s children and I had bound myself by a solemn oath not to meddle with his children under any circumstances, it would become me to let that particular mode of getting rid of the gentleman alone. [Slavery in the south seen from the North.] / But if there was a bed newly made up, to which the children were to be taken, and it was proposed to take a batch of young snakes and put them there with them, I take it no man would say there was any question how I ought to decide. [Slavery in new territories].” 138
*James McPherson describes Lincoln as a revolutionary in terms of the economic and other physical changes he effected, whether on purpose or not – a valid point sensibly discussed. But Lincoln was revolutionary in another sense…he not only put the Declaration in a new light as a matter of founding law, but put its central proposition, equality, in a newly favored position as a principle of the Constitution (which, as the Chicago Times noticed, never uses the word)…The results of this were seen almost at once. Up to the Civil War, “the United States” was invariably a plural noun: “The United States are a free government.” After Gettysburg, it became a singular: “The United States is a free government.”…When he spoke at the end of the Address, about government, “of the people, by the people, for the people,” he was not just praising “popular government” as a Transcendentalist’s ideal, just like Theodore Parker. Rather, like Webster, he was saying that America is a people addressing its great assignment as that was accepted in the Declaration. 145
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. 147
Lincoln’s remarks [in being short] anticipated the shift to vernacular rhythms that Mark Twain would complete twenty years later. Hemingway claimed that all modern American novels are the offspring of Huckleberry Finn. It is no greater exaggeration to say that all modern political prose descends from the Gettysburg Address. 182
To end, after complex melodic parings, with a strong row of monosyllables, was an effect he especially liked. Not only, “what we do here” and the “the work we are in” and “the world to know” of the above examples. 156
Lincoln’s words acquired a flexibility of structure, a rhythmic pacing, a variation in length of words and phrases and clauses and sentences, that make his sentences move “naturally” for all their density and scope. 158
Lincoln’s eloquence. He not only read aloud, to think his way into sounds, but wrote as a way of ordering his thought. He had a keenness for analytical exercises…He loved the study of grammar, which some think the most arid of subjects…spelling as he had to learn it (apart from etymology) is more arbitrary than logical. It was the logical side of language – the principles of order as these reflect patterns of thought or the external word – that appealed to him. 163
Lincoln interlocks his sentences, making of them a constantly self-referential system. This linked up by explicit repetition amounts to a kind of hook-and-eye method for joining the parts of his address. The rhetorical devices are almost invisible, since they use no figurative language or formal tropes…Each of the paragraphs printed separately here is bound to the preceding and the following by some resumptive element. 173
It was inappropriate, at Gettysburg, to talk about the sins of the men to whom he was paying tribute. He talked of rebirth from blood, there, but not of washing away the crimes of the past, as he does in the Second Inaugural Address. In this last speech, war is made to pay history’s dues in a prophet’s ledger, where scales balance precisely the blood drawn by the last and by the bayonet…this statement complements and completes the Gettysburg Address. It is the only speech worth to stand with it. 185

This wasn't what I was expecting. This is like a book of essays on themes loosely tied to Lincoln's Gettysburg speech. I kept waiting for him to really dig into the speech but that never really happened. Much time was spent on some of the influential rhetorical speakers of the time, particularly Edward Everett who also gave a great speech at Gettysburg. Wills dug into the Greek history of epitaphs which was somewhat interesting. He went on numerous tangents that led to an unconnected "essay" feeling. Felt somewhat like a Harold Bloom book that leaves most readers in the dust. There were some interesting aspects, but overall it doesn't feel like a very meaningful book to me, though I'm surely in the minority in this thinking.

Wills won the Pulitzer for this.
This book covers Lincoln's time in Gettysburg leading to the dedication ceremony as well as the making of the famous address. He all but bursts the myth that the speech was written on the train ride to Pennsylvania. Wills covers the sources that Lincoln gathered for his famous words and how Lincoln corralled these ideas into his speech.
Great book that needs to be read by any admirer of "16"
I need to re-read.

I’ve been trying of late to read books that have won the Pulitzer Prize. Being an avid Lincoln reader, I was really looking forward to this fairly short volume. But, but like some other Pulitzer winning books I’ve read, I found this one to be a disappointment. I had read a book analyzing Lincoln’s second inaugural address, which was very interesting and enlightening, and was expecting the same treatment of his Gettysberg Address here. But in most chapters, the author simply uses portions of the address as a springboard to discuss various philosophical and sociological ideas prevalent in the 19th century, trying to make a case that Lincoln was impacted by these concepts in preparing his speech. In my opinion, I found the author almost always failed to make his case. It seemed as if rather that starting from the speech and attempting to determine Lincoln’s inspiration, the author started from these pet ideas and attempted to show how the speech was influenced by them. Most of his arguments seem to me pure speculation, and his detailed explanation of concepts only remotely related to the speech caused my eyes to glaze over on many occasions. The one interesting chapter came towards the end where the grammar and style of the speech was analyzed. This is about the 9th or 10th book I’ve read about Lincoln, and it is easily my least favorite.