Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America by Garry Wills

From the Publisher

The power of words has rarely been given a more compelling demonstration than in the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln was asked to memorialize the gruesome battle. Instead he gave the whole nation "a new birth of freedom" in the space of a mere 272 words. His entire life and previous training and his deep political experience went into this, his revolutionary masterpiece.

By examining both the address and Lincoln in their historical moment and cultural frame, Wills breathes new life into words we thought we knew, and reveals much about a president so mythologized but often misunderstood. Wills shows how Lincoln came to change the world and to effect an intellectual revolution, how his words had to and did complete the work of the guns, and how Lincoln wove a spell that has not yet been broken.

New York Times Books of the Century

...[B]rief, bracing and provocative....Mr. Wills demonstrates [that Lincoln] created a revolution in style so effective that all modern political prose is indebted to the Gettysburg address.

New York Times Books of the Century

...[B]rief, bracing and provocative....Mr. Wills demonstrates [that Lincoln] created a revolution in style so effective that all modern political prose is indebted to the Gettysburg address.

Kirkus Reviews

Another attempt by journalist-historian Wills (Under God, 1990, etc.) to peel away layers of myth to extract the original context and continued relevance of an American institution—as he did in his trilogy about the Enlightenment influence on early America: Cincinnatus (1984), Explaining America (1981), and Inventing America (1978). Memories of the grisly Battle of Gettysburg were hardly faded when, nearly five months later, a cemetery was erected on the site. At that time, against all odds, Lincoln not only brought dignity to this hellish battleground, but ensured forever that Americans would interpret the Constitution and the Civil War fought to preserve it through the egalitarian prism of the Declaration of Independence. He "revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely." Here, as in nearly all his other work, Wills recalls the historical setting to argue in a contrarian mode, taking issue with those who exalt Lincoln at the expense of the day's principal speaker, Edward Everett (Lincoln's secretaries Nicolay and Hay devoted more attention to Everett's two-hour address in their biography of Lincoln than to their boss's three-minute remarks, he reminds us). Uncharacteristically, with appendices and notes totaling about a third of the book, this work feels more padded than Wills's other studies, and he cannot resist his occasional Jesuitical argumentation and intellectual ostentation (a chapter on the oratory of the Greek Revival is particularly egregious). Yet he is brilliant, and he proves it with insights into how Lincoln's speech reflected the Unionist rhetoric of Daniel Webster, transcendentalism, and theimagery of the rural cemetery movement—and, in an especially stunning section, how Lincoln set a new standard for American prose style with 272 economically chosen words. Though Wills continues to wear his erudition on his sleeve, he is also, as ever, provocative—and, here, eloquent and moving too. (B&w photographs—not seen.)

Product Details

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents