The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 69: 1918-1924: Contents and Index, Volumes 53-68 Book

I recently read Ronald C. White, Jr.'s excellent Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural, and was motivated to read more about Abraham Lincoln's other great speeches. That brought me to Gabor Boritt's 2006 history The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows. While interesting, I was expecting something more like White's work, which focuses on analysis of the speech with some info on the lead-up and reaction to the speech. Instead, Boritt devotes his book to the period between the Battle of Gettysburg and the time Lincoln takes the stage at Gettysburg and the time he gets of the stage and people start reacting to the speech. Of the speech itself, you might conceivably miss it if you blink.

To be fair to Boritt, I learned a lot about the Battle of Gettysburg and what happened at Gettysburg between the battle and the dedication of the national cemetery. This is interesting stuff, and does a good job of giving you a context of Lincoln's speech. Boritt is also thorough in his analysis of the Gettysburg Address in American culture and how it vied with the Emancipation Proclamation as the single message of the martyred president.

Unfortunately, there's very little analysis of Lincoln's actual Gettysburg address. Much more time is spent on how and when he wrote it than why he wrote what he wrote. It just seems odd to that Boritt left this entire topic unexplored when devoting so much effort to every other facet of the Gettysburg story.

Boritt actually spends a lot more time talking about the content of other Gettysburg speech that nobody knows, the main oration from Edward Everett. You get a fair amount how and why Everett wrote the speech he wrote, and an entire appendix is dedicated to presenting Everett's speech in full. I actually appreciate this part of the book, as - while I had known Lincoln's speech was really a short message delivered after Everett's - I had known little of Everett's speech myself. It's actually a pretty good speech, if not in a class with Lincoln's.

I listened to Tantor Media's unabridged 2006 production of The Gettysburg Gospel, as read by Michael Kramer. The production was solid, and Kramer's steady and straightforward narration fit the historical nature of the book well. The production runs approximately 10 hours.

Overall, I learned quite a bit about every part of the Gettysburg story except Lincoln's speech. While I appreciate that, I feel like Boritt missed the mark by, I can only assume, taking for granted everyone coming to The Gettysburg Gospel already had a detailed knowledge of the actual Gettysburg Address itself and that he didn't need to directly address that topic himself. While Boritt's book is a solid background on the story of the speech, don't expect to learn much about why Lincoln gave the speech he did.