Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America by Garry Wills
And a Happy Independence Day 2024!
The first time that I read this book would have been shortly after its publication in 1992. By that time, I’d established the practice of buying a copy of whatever Wills had most recently published. I later listened to an audio version, read by Wills (quite well, I might add). And now this reading. Why go back? It’s that rich, and, I must say that I get a lot of pleasure (and instruction) from re-visiting old favorites. The bottle may have been opened some time ago, but the wine hasn’t gone flat.
This book opens, as do many of Wills’s books, with him painting a scene: the site of the bloody battle of Gettysburg. Wills recounts the horrors of the battle left after its conclusion: so many dead to be buried, quickly, and then to be re-interred in the new cemetery designed to honor those dead. Wills describes the arrangements of the dedication of the cemetery, including the main oration to be delivered by Edward Everett, the great Massachusetts scholar and orator. Everett’s long oratory was to be followed by some “remarks” by President Lincoln before the proceeding adjourned. To be clear: organizers billed Everett’s speech as the main attraction. But as Wills demonstrates, Lincoln stole the show, and perhaps no one there at the time realized it. Wills writes:
Abraham Lincoln transformed the ugly 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.
. . . .
The tragedy of macerated bodies, the many bloody and ignoble aspects of this inconclusive encounter, are transfigured in Lincoln’s rhetoric, where the physical residue of battle is volatilized as the product of an experiment testing whether a government can maintain the proposition of equality. The stakes of the three days’ butchery are made intellectual, with abstract truths being vindicated.
. . . .
Lincoln is here not only to sweeten the air of Gettysburg, but to clear the infected atmosphere of American history itself, tainted with official sins and inherited guilt. He would cleanse the Constitution—not, as William Lloyd Garrison had, by burning an instrument that countenanced slavery. He altered the document from within, by appeal from its letter to the spirit, subtly changing the recalcitrant stuff of that legal compromise, bringing it to its own indictment. By implicitly doing this, he performed one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting. Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked. The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological luggage, that new constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they brought there with them. They walked off, from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America. Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely.
I can become overly generous in quoting Wills because of the felicity and pithiness of his prose. But Wills doesn’t lay down such sentences for their own sake; they are the foundation stones of his argument. Lincoln’s short speech that day had many origins: the history of funeral orations delivered by the ancient Greeks, such as that of Pericles as recorded by Thucydides, brought into American culture by the Greek revival (fostered in no small part by Edward Everett); the Transcendentalist movement and abolitionism, as exemplified in the person of Theodore Parker; and the changing zeitgeist, represented by a new, leaner prose, as required by the telegraph and as embodied in the words of Lincoln and later, Mark Twain. Wills weaves all these topics into his account of Lincoln’s great words.
Indeed, Wills’s account goes to the heart of a great issue: why was the Civil War fought? What were Lincoln’s motives and desires in leading this great campaign? It certainly started with Lincoln’s desire to preserve the Union, and only as the war proceeded did it become a matter of re-framing and re-imagining the original program of the Founders. Not merely preservation of the Union, but a new birth of freedom, became the main theme of the American political enterprise, realized in part—quite imperfectly—by the end of slavery. The new birth was slow, painful, and incomplete even into the twentieth century; indeed, freedom and dignity are always struggling to come forth and survive in a hostile world.
Wills’s book frames the great issues of the young republic as it struggles with the legacy of slavery and the terrible war. And as Wills indicated in the quotes above, Lincoln, through his short address at Gettysburg, and later again in his Second Inaugural Address, provided a framework for understanding and advancing the great struggle in which the nation was engaged. As Wills emphasizes, this was not a short impromptu effort by Lincoln, but instead his address represents the culmination of a life spent struggling with the inheritance of the Founders: the Declaration, which Lincoln so cherished, and the Constitution, which Lincoln sought to reconcile with the great principles of the Declaration. It’s a compelling story, expertly told by a scholar-journalist of the highest caliber, well worth your time this Fourth of July, or any time when you want to know why our American experience is worth knowing and embracing. We should embrace our past not so much for what it is, but for what we can accomplish. We should continue to dedicate ourselves to pursuing new births of freedom that foster human equality and dignity and to preserving and perfecting government of the people, by the people, and for the people, that it might not perish from this Earth.