No, he didn’t write it on the back of an envelope, and he read it not in a Raymond Massey baritone but in a Kentucky-accented tenor. The crowd at the still-unfinished cemetery in Gettysburg, Pa., was neither bored by featured speaker Edward Everett’s two-hour oration nor startled that President Lincoln got on and off in three minutes. That hapless photographer who was still setting up when the president sat down is a myth, too. But the most preposterous misconception is Abraham Lincoln’s own guess that the world would “little note nor long remember” what got said that November day in 1863. The Gettysburg Address, writes Garry Wills in Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (315 pages. Simon & Schuster. $23), amounted to nothing less than “a new founding of the nation.” But Wills adds that it was also “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.”
Wills is a polymath in the learned yet lively tradition of Edmund Wilson-with less tendency to talk through his hat. He has written on Jack Ruby and G. K. Chesterton, Muhammad Ali and “Oliver Twist”; he specializes in American intellectual history. “Lincoln at Gettysburg” follows up his 1978 “Inventing America,” a microanalysis of the Declaration of Independence that decoded “the lost language of the Enlightenment” in which Jefferson wrote it. Wills argued then that it was the Gettysburg Address that anointed the declaration-with its assertion that “all men are created equal”-as America’s founding document, taking precedence over even the Constitution, which nowhere mentioned equality. The address upgrades the declaration’s egalitarian throat-clearings to a “proposition” to which the new nation was “dedicated.” Wills seeks to explain why this speech has become as much an “authoritative expression of the American spirit” as the declaration itself.
Some of Lincoln’s contemporaries also discerned that he came to Gettysburg “not to present a theory, but to impose a symbol”-and they were not enchanted by his literary legerdemain. The Chicago Times huffed that the “honored dead” had fought for the Union and the Constitution, not equality: “How dare he, then, standing on their graves, misstate the cause for which they died, and libel the statesmen who founded the government? They were men possessing too much self-respect to declare that negroes were their equals . . .” Modern-day strict constructionists like Robert Bork, says Wills, believe that “equality as a national commitment has been sneaked into the Constitution” by way of post-Civil War-that is, post-Gettysburg-amendments. But thanks largely to Lincoln’s “giant (if benign) swindle,” few Americans doubt that equality was the heart of the national vision from day one; fewer still doubt it should continue to be.
How did Lincoln manage to reinvent America in 272 words? Wills can’t entirely explain it-we know three guys who’d pay plenty for the secret-but he doesn’t give up easily. His survey of the address’s cultural context takes in the Greek revival, transcendentalism and the vogue for bucolic cemeteries. Greek democracy was as attractive a model for Lincoln’s century as the Roman republic had been for Jefferson’s; the transcendentalist view of nature as “the incarnation of a thought” (Emerson) is echoed in Lincoln’s vision of a nation dedicated to a “proposition.” The new rural cemeteries (like Gettysburg) were part of the 19th-century “culture of death,” in which (as in the address) mourning had moral purpose.
Wills adjudicates disputes over the exact text of the address and the exact spot where Lincoln spoke; he also reprints Everett’s epic speech, plus a pair of Greek funeral orations. Best of all he scrutinizes the address’s inner mechanisms, such as the “hook-and-eye” interlocking of sentences with repeated words. (“Now we are engaged in a great civil war … We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field. . .”) He quotes Lincoln’s military dispatches to point up the address’s “telegraphic” omission of the “ands” and “buts” conventionally linking related statements: even rhetorically, Lincoln looked ahead to a hard-driving technological future, not back to a slow-moving agrarian past.
Lincoln’s artful simplicity revolutionized political prose at the same time it refurbished the nation’s past and redirected its future. Nice work in three minutes. But Wills, too, has more than one trick up his sleeve: his book is a tribute not just to the genius of Lincoln, but also to the dicey power of language itself, which sometimes picks the pocket in order to save the soul.
