Reviews for Lincoln at Gettysburg

The average rating for Lincoln at Gettysburg based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-10-29 00:00:00 Frank Mabry With the Pulitzer Prize winning book, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America Garry Wills performs a literary dissection of sorts of a prominent American document, examining both its structure & function in an exceedingly formal & intricate manner. The author looks at Abraham Lincoln's very brief 3 minute statement at Gettysburg in terms of the classic rhetorical formats of Greek & Rome. But beyond that, he juxtaposes Lincoln's comments with those of the president of Harvard University Edward Everett, who delivered a 2 hour "classical" address to the same audience. As Wills puts it, Everett's speech "embodied the calm reflection & grave authority of the statesman, as if he were using Greek ideals to explain America to Americans." Meanwhile, Lincoln was colloquial as well as brief, seemingly informal while representing a completely new & different rhetorical vanguard that was uniquely American in style & content. The occasion was of course the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, a turning point in the Civil War because it prevented the Confederacy from establishing a northern front, because of the size of the battle and the also because of the staggering loss of life involved. Both Everett & Lincoln spoke to honor the countless soldiers on both sides who died at the Battle of Gettysburg, with a new cemetery inaugurated as a final resting place for them. In fact, Wills talks about "cemetery culture" early on, indicating that Lincoln's speech to those assembled was not what they expected to hear from their president.Lincoln came not only to sweeten the air of Gettysburg but to clear the infected atmosphere of American history itself, tainted with official sins & inherited guilt. He would cleanse the Constitution by altering the document from within, by appeal from its letter to its spirit, subtly changing the recalcitrant stuff of that legal compromise, bringing it to its own indictment and by doing this, he performed one of the most daring of open air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed. The crowd departed with a new thing in it ideological luggage, that new Constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they brought with them. Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely.For as Garry Wills indicates, Lincoln was "an agnostic on slavery" but absolutely fanatical in his quest to preserve American unity. He commented that "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the union and not either to save or to destroy slavery." Beyond that, he realized that the American constitution was incomplete, espousing an ideal but not yet a reality. Thus, our "republican robe needed to be repurified" and Lincoln saw the Declaration of Independence replacing the gospel as an instrument of spiritual rebirth. The president refused to take a stance on the "intellectual inferiority of blacks to whites and astutely used one prejudice to counter another, comparing anti-slavery to anti-monarchism, while affording an "almost cult-like status" to the Declaration of Independence. Curiously, the Gettysburg Address does not mention Gettysburg nor slavery nor even the union. In the address, Lincoln was "not aiming at Periclean effect as did Prof. Everett, for Lincoln was an artist, not just a scholar." More importantly, Lincoln's commentary at Gettysburg "created a political prose for America, to rank with the vernacular excellence of Mark Twain." He sensed that many Americans revered (were prejudiced in favor of) the Declaration of Independence but many of them were also prejudiced in favor of slavery. Lincoln had a long tradition of arguing in ingenious ways, that "Americans must, in consistency, give up one or the other prejudice. For, the two could not exist in the same mind once their mutual enmity is recognized." I found Wills' profiling Lincoln's ability as an "actor as well as a statesman" quite interesting, indicating that he had consistently used differing rhetorical stresses when speaking in downstate Illinois where southern sympathies prevailed than he employed in Chicago & other more northern precincts of the state. And Lincoln sought to speak of the Emancipation Proclamation as a "military measure", with Wills quoting Richard Hofstadter to say that the document had "all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading, containing no indictment of slavery but simply basing emancipation on military necessity". To Lincoln's mind, just as the South could not unilaterally secede, the North could not unilaterally emancipate. Also & not just in the debates with Sen. Douglas, Lincoln was "accused of clever evasions & key silences." Again, the fault lay with the Constitution's "imperfect treatment of slavery" with language that was considered shameful & at best provisional by Lincoln, meaning that slavery was meant to be abolished in due time. Thus, acco0rding to Lincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation did not free slaves in the nation at large but only in the theater of active insurrection & only as a "necessary war measure." At Gettysburg, Lincoln not only did not but would not mention the document because "he meant to rise above the particular, the local & the divisive." Also, it is mentioned that until the Civil War, "the United States" was invariably a plural noun: "the United States are a free government." After Gettysburg, it became singular: "The United States is a free government." Wills stresses thatThe Gettysburg Address has become an authoritative expression of the American spirit--as authoritative as the Declaration itself, and perhaps even more influential because it determines how we read the Declaration. For most Americans now, the Declaration means what Lincoln told us it means, as a way of correcting the Constitution itself without overthrowing it. It is this correction of the spirit, this intellectual revolution that is so important. 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.At the core of Abraham Lincoln's beliefs was his personal wish "that all men everywhere be free, that a House divided cannot endure, permanently half slave & half free." In Lincoln at Gettysburg Garry Wills indicates that in his use of the vernacular, Lincoln anticipates Mark Twain. And citing the brevity of the Gettysburg Address, there is a postwar quote from Mr. Twain about the need for brevity in any talk, indicating that "few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon." President Lincoln "spoke a modern language because he was dealing with a scientific age for which phrasings like "conceived in liberty" and "dedicated to a proposition" were appropriate. His speech is "economical, taut & interconnected" according to Wills and for Lincoln "words were weapons, even though he meant them to be weapons of peace in the midst of war. In his brief time before the crowd at Gettysburg, he wove a spell that has not, yet, been broken--he called up a new nation out of blood & trauma." Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America provides a new frame for a document most Americans come to grapple with at some point in their education. It is a book based on a premise, one that is conveyed in the subtitle, coming with ample documentation by Garry Wills, though some may feel that his case is just a tad overstated. I do quarrel with some of the terminology, including words such as: thanatopsic, autochthony, exordium, anaphora & archaize but then what are dictionaries &/or the Internet for but to be employed and some of the meanings can be guessed at within the specific context. Still, this reflection on Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is a rather scholarly work & may not be to everyone's taste. *There are 70+ pages of appendices, including the Gettysburg Address itself & some variations on what reporters & others thought that he had said there. **Within my review, the 1st image is of the author, Garry Wills; the 2nd, an actual photo of Abraham Lincoln taken at Gettysburg.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-03-24 00:00:00 Yaron Deskalo A REVIEW in 292: Fundamentally, the thing I love about criticism is the ability to read a damn fine book about a damn fine speech and recognize the author of the book wrote a little more than a page for every word in the Gettysburg Address. If you count appendixes and notes (and why wouldn't you when the appendix and notes matter?). I once teased my wife, during my early wooing stage, that I wanted to write an ode to every hair on her head (loads of odes). Garry Wills did. This book is both academic criticism (one chapter is infused with new historicism, one is textual criticism, one is formalist, one is mythological) and an ode to Lincoln, Language, and this damn fine speech. I could see Garry Wills publishing each chapter in some well-funded Civil War journal and eventually weaving each paper together. I'm not sure how it really happened. Wills might just have used the chapters and forms of literary criticism as an organizational framework. I am not going to do an exegesis on the book to find out. That would be far too meta. Anyway, it was a quick and fascinating read and significantly deepened my understanding of Lincoln's motives for the speech while also acting as an Entmythologisierung* of the text. No. Lincoln did not write the text on the back of a napkin while on a train TO Gettysburg. Anyway, a must read for those who love history, the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, or Transcendentalism. * I'm using the German here as a joke, since there were several instances when Wills referenced Everett bringing back the seeds of Transcendentalism and higher criticism from his studies there. I'm also using it because it is 1.5x as fun as just saying demystification.