The Americanologist November Book Review: Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America, by Garry Wills, Simon & Schuster: NY, 1992.

82nd OVI Monument on Howard Avenue north of Gettysburg, where it fought on the first day in a desperate attempt to protect I Corps right flank from Ewell’s Confederate Corps.

In recognition of this Veteran’s day, it seems “altogether fitting and proper” to offer a review of a 30 year old work by an eminent historian, Garry Wills. in “Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America,” Wills makes his case that Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, a mere 272 words, not only eulogized the dead at Gettysburg, but drastically altered the original founding documents of the nation to a new and higher purpose.  I have loved the Gettysburg Address from the time I first read it in first grade, studiously memorizing it for recital for my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Bucher. I was too young then to realize the meaning of the words, the significance of the structure and its import to a modern America, but I knew if it was important enough for her to ask me to read and memorize, I should do so gladly. A few years later, on a trip to Gettysburg with my family, I recited it once again to myself while standing in the Gettysburg National Military Cemetery. It would be many years later before I would return again to Gettysburg, this time in the knowledge that where I stood then and again was the actual final battle line my great-great grandfather Lamont fought at just inside the modern northeast gate at Baltimore Pike to the cemetery, literally 250 yards from the marker for Lincoln’s speech.

Wills offers a historical and literary analysis that is breathtaking in its approach, organization, and argument, particularly in his assertion that Lincoln used his brief time in front of the crowd gathered on November 19, 1863, to “clear the infected atmosphere of American history itself, tainted with official sins and inherited guilt.” (Wills, 38) In a town shattered by the largest battle in north America, where nearly 180,000 men clashed for 3 desperate days, leaving over 500 dead horses and mules among the human loss which covered the town in the stench of rotting and burning flesh for months, this was more than a symbolic challenge.

Wills’ background as a scholar of Greek literature gives him a great advantage in understanding the traditional requirements of the classic elements of a funeral oration for warriors, judged by the standard Pericles set in his “Funeral Oration” nearly 2400 years before Gettysburg, and he constructs his logical argument through an interesting organizational format. Wills situates the event squarely in the context of the philosophical influence of the Greek Revival period in American political thought. He provides an in-depth look at classic Greek oratory as recorded through a literary lens and sharpens his approach by covering the early 19th century writers who were influential in American speech, particularly the line of the Transcendentalists, including George Bancroft, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, and Edward Everett, the prime speaker for the Cemetery’s dedication. Lincoln read and emulated them, and when he encountered Emerson, an early critic of his hesitancy to address the true inequalities between the races, after the delivery of his Emancipation Proclamation, it became clear to Emerson that he had misjudged the man too harshly, “we are beginning to think we have underestimated the capacity and virtue which the Divine Providence has made an instrument of benefit so vast.” (Wills, 104).

One of Wills’ insights is the common tactic by Lincoln in his speeches, clear in preparation and thought, in utilizing the concept of acknowledging antitheses in the construction of language to convince and dispose of objections and test his arguments, knowing that the audience is versed on the issues and may reject his offered words. By directly confronting polarities and then reforming them into a new relationship, Lincoln used the ceremonial epitaph, his brief role to dedicate the ground as the representative of the nation, to tie the goals of the war back past the constitution, which lacked reference to equality and the sin of slavery, to the only founding document that mattered to his purpose, the Declaration of Independence, where the concept of the equal rights of man were pre-eminent. Additionally, Lincoln’s emphasis on both classical funeral oration parts, “epainesis, or praise for the fallen, and paraenesis, advice for the living,” are well struck and purposeful toward Lincoln’s goal of settling the meaning of the war for the purpose of abolishing slavery, even as many in the audience would object to that goal as worthy of the sacrifice of their compatriots. (Wills, 59)

It has been said of Lincoln by others, particularly in the current rage of historical revisionism in the service of “social justice” that, as a white man and a product of his time, Lincoln held the issue of true equality for blacks as an illogical goal, not consistent with his views on the constitution. While he did repeatedly state that he did not believe that the government could go to war in the goal of making the races equal, or even to remove the practice of slavery, and that he would not endorse such a measure should it be practicable, he was unequivocal about the issue of one nation divided by slavery.  Wills convincingly makes the case that Lincoln’s law and debate practice before his presidency offered clues into his logic and strategic behaviors in working his arguments down to the “nub” of the question before the court. He willingly conceded points of contention which were either trivial or which might hamper his ability to prove his primary and singular points at the heart of the case; his aversion to arguing for complete equality as the goal of a devastating war, began as a fight to preserve the union, was strategically cunning. However, the critical point offered by the Union’s victory at Gettysburg, like the battle at Antietam the year before, provided him with the chance to alter the message he would push before the public, and pointedly, toward Republican governors of northern states facing re-election. There must be some great cause left to achieve, made purposeful by “the brave men, living and the dead, who struggled here.”

How would Lincoln bind the nation to his grand vision of a nation renewed in the corrected spirit of the Declaration of Independence, finally freed from the limiting moral dilemma that shackled free states to slave states in a compromise to achieve the written, flawed constitution designed in anticipation of a natural solution to the eradication of slavery? Lincoln merged the classic requirements of Greek oration, the Divine Providence of Transcendentalists, and the strategic method of a trial lawyer to lay out his own version of Immanuel Kant’s “Categorical Imperative” for the United States of the future. Hidden in a five-minute speech were the phrases that swept away 80 years of constitutional avoidance of the sin of slavery, repeated statutory compromises which muddled and delayed the conflict until only massive destruction would begin the atonement – requiring the total abolition of slavery as a condition for peace.

“It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is, rather, for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Even as partisan newspapers across the north worked to denigrate the words offered by the first Republican president, deriding the speech as “silly remarks” (The Harrisburg Pennsylvania Patriot & Union), many recognized the significance of the meaning and Lincoln’s call for renewed devotion in the union for what looked like at least another full year of bloody war, after Lee’s army was able to cross back into Virginia battered but still viable in defense of Richmond. As bloody as 1863 had been so far, there was still fighting left to be done, and the coming of 1864 would magnify the loss. But in November of 1863, nowhere was more important in Lincoln’s overall military plan than the besieged city of Chattanooga, where union troops had finally opened a supply line to the starving city, thanks to the rapid redeployment of three divisions from the east. These three divisions, including Carl Schurz’s division, along with Steinwehr’s division also from the XI Corps and Geary’s division from XII Corps, all battered at Gettysburg to the point of disorganization, were sent in a 1500 mile train deployment in 11 days under the command of Joe Hooker to save the city from starvation and surrender. After opening “The Cracker Line” by marching into Lookout Valley from Bridgeport Alabama, repulsing night attacks and assaulting non-descript hills at the Battle of Wauhatchie after another force seized Brown’s Ferry on the Tennessee River, the men who had defended the northern edge of the hill in Pennsylvania on July 1st through the 3rd, soon to be eulogized and honored by President Lincoln, now awaited their next assignment – taking the offensive against Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge to drive the confederates off the commanding heights which held the Union troops trapped in place. It would all begin just a few days later for them, first by taking Orchard Knob’s forward observation point on November 23rd under Phil Sheridan and driving a small confederate force with artillery away from the southern edge of the city before the full assault on November 25th. It is unlikely that these men from the east, valorized for their fight at Gettysburg so eloquently by Abraham Lincoln, had the chance in those few busy days in Chattanooga to read those fitting words as they began the remainder of their time fighting in the west under William Tecumseh Sherman as the XX Corps of the Army of the Cumberland and then the Army of Georgia.

For the men of the Union XI and XX Corps buried on battlefields and shipped home in caskets

Ron Thomason, of Dry Branch Fire Squad, performs “He’s Coming to Us Dead” at the Gettysburg Bluegrass Festival.