I’m not sure when and where I heard about historian Garry Wills’s Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America. But heard about it I did. I frequently buy books much more quickly than I read them, and Lincoln at Gettysburg was no exception. Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, it’s a well-regarded history book that, quite frankly, I figured I should read.
It was, in many ways, not what I was expecting.
Let’s face it: most of the time, a history book is basically a lot of who-what-where-when with a dash of how and why recounting some famous event or other, or even an event the author figures should be better known. I figured the same would hold true for Lincoln at Gettysburg, recounting how Abraham Lincoln wrote and delivered the Gettysburg Address and what sort of effect the famous speech had on the nation. And that, it turns out, is nothing close to what this book was about.
Oh, to be sure, Wills does take time to dispel some long-held beliefs about the Address, how Lincoln didn’t really write it on the back of an envelope on the train to Gettysburg or that a photographer couldn’t get his camera up in time to capture the president speaking. were untrue. Lincoln was never the main event and was only there to say a few words. It just so happened those few words became the most famous of Lincoln’s various speeches if not the most famous speech in American history.
Instead, Willis looks at the country at the time and Lincoln’s own general and political philosophy and how those these feelings, thoughts, and opinions shaped the Address before Lincoln even wrote down a single word. Wills covers nineteenth century interests in cemeteries and Transcendentalism as well as how Lincoln worked hard to speak as plainly as possible.
Wills even takes a chapter to discuss the topic of slavery, a topic that is never directly mentioned in the Gettysburg Address but was a major factor in Lincoln’s political life. Lincoln, unlike many of his contemporaries, was not an idealist on the subject. He was a pragmatic man who saw that as long as slavery was enshrined in the Constitution, there wasn’t much he could do to end it on the spot. According to Wills, Lincoln was a man who hated war, loved the Declaration of Independence, and whose general gloominess actually made him trendy for the 1860s. Was this the book I thought it was? No, but it was quite worth the read nonetheless.
Grade: A
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