Book Reviews                                                                    

Garry Wills. Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America. New York Simon and Schuster, 1992. Pp. 318 with appendices, notes, photographs and indices. $23 (cloth).

When Abraham Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg 130 years ago, he did not read some words he had written on the back of an envelope. Nor were the words jotted down carelessly during a train ride. And there was never a sense among the crowd that Lincoln's speech was a disappointment: He had been invited to give some "dedicatory remarks" rather than the featured address.

The untangling of legend and fact is something Garry Wills, adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University, has always been good at doing. Known for his unusual books on American presidents, Wills does justice to the development of Abraham Lincoln's often memorized but seldom understood Gettysburg Address. Lincoln at Gettysburg is a stimulating contribution to recent Lincoln scholarship.

This is a rare kind of history book. It is part intellectual history, part fact-finding junket. It is partly a close textual study and partly a study of the overall rhetorical effect of Lincoln's speech. It is also a clear analysis of the origins of the style and content of Edward Everett's speech, the two-hour long oration that preceded Lincoln's comments. Trained as a classicist, with a deep understanding of American history, Wills brings to this study a grasp of rhetorical theory as well as an appreciation of the intellectual circumstances surrounding both Gettysburg addresses.

Wills also makes this a chapbook on various subjects in Lincoln scholarship. He touches on the Lyceum Speech, the issues at stake in the Lincoln-Douglas debates and the issues surrounding slavery and the Emancipation Proclamation. He also discusses the origins of various copies and editions of the Gettysburg Address. Wills' inquiry leads to analysis under a magnifying glass of Lincoln's pencillings on a copy of the Address held in the Library of Congress. He even has the temerity (for a scholar) to go out and scout around the Gettysburg cemetery to answer questions about the site of the dedication ceremony's platform.

Wills' central thesis, however, is that Lincoln performed a feat of intellectual hood-winking in the Gettysburg Address. "Both North and South strove to win the battle for interpreting Gettysburg as soon as the physical battle had ended. Lincoln is after even larger game — he means to 'win' the whole Civil War in ideological terms as well as military ones. And he will succeed: the Civil War is, to most Americans, what Lincoln wanted it to mean."

Wills argues that the Gettysburg speech made a formal political connection between the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. At Gettysburg the Declaration became the foremost source of American moral principles, giving priority to the equality of mankind. Lincoln thus gave America a mission.

Wills' argument may be making rather large claims itself. One problem is Wills' belief that Lincoln's connection of the Declaration's principles to the Constitution also struck deeply against the classic states' rights position. The Gettysburg Address did refer Americans to the Declaration and call for a renewed commitment to our most basic ideals. Yet it does not follow that the Address was designed by Lincoln to refute a states' rights position or that the speech can be said to have had this sort of effect. One can be against slavery, and in accord with our fundamental principles, yet wish for decentralized government. To some extent Wills seems to wish the Gettysburg Address can be used against modern states' rights advocates.

In addition to Lincoln, one of the major characters at Gettysburg in 1863 was the cemetery itself. Americans of the Romantic period, from 1820 to 1860, began viewing cemeteries as sources of moral education. Here one could learn about life from death, about society from nature. Picnickers and tourists would visit cemeteries, wheeling along well-kept lanes through elaborate parks. Expensive tombs and rituals were developed.

According to Wills, another force at Gettysburg was Transcendentalism, especially that of Theodore Parker. Wills charts the different ways in which Parker — a fervent polemicist — presented the idea of democratic government being "of the people, by the people and for the people." But Parker did more than contribute a catchy phrase. He gave abolitionism increasing respectability in the 1840s and 1850s by linking abolition to the doctrines of the American founding embodied in the tenets of the Declaration of Independence. Wills is at his best in discussing these intellectual influences upon the Gettysburg speech.

Lincoln's rhetorical skills reached their culmination in the Second Inaugural and in the Gettysburg Address. By 1863 Lincoln had undergone the rigors of courtroom lawyering and making stump speeches around Illinois. He had surprised audiences with his House Divided speech and his Cooper Institute speech. The pressure of the wartime presidency sharpened his ability to think and write clearly. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, a speech with simple but resonant words placed in complex structures and sentences, achieves its purposes by its internal form as well as its more explicit content.

And its content, the inspirational message by which Lincoln sought to make sense, for himself and for the nation, of the huge, calamitous losses of the Civil War, was yet another summation of his career. The Gettysburg Address was the final, compressed edition of Lincoln's political thought. The speech clearly outlines his lifelong concern with the principles of the Declaration and his sense of how these were joined to the fate of the American nation. Lincoln at Gettysburg should join any shelf of Lincoln books. *

Todd Volker, project director at the Carus Corporation in Peru, directed the 1992 Ottawa Symposium on Lincoln's rhetoric as part of the city's celebration of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

February 1993/Illinois Issues/33