The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows by Gabor Boritt

Abraham Lincoln is my husband’s favorite person. I bought the book as a gift for him. He said the book is wonderful and insightful.

This puts so much in perspective regarding the Battle of Gettysburg and what motivated Abraham Lincoln to write the “few appropriate remarks” at the dedication of our first National Cemetery. Highly recommended.

We all know—or think we know—the story of the Gettysburg Address; how Abraham Lincoln jotted a few words on the back of an envelope while on a train en route to dedicate the new military cemetery at Gettysburg; how he gave the speech and the crowd was moved to reverent silence; and how, ever after, the Gettysburg Address has been a mainstay of the secular religion that is the idea of America.

Except, as Gabor Boritt, the Director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College shows us, that story is all wrong—no, not wrong; myth. And myths do not have to have happened in order to be true.

The hard core of that myth comes from a little book called THE PERFECT TRIBUTE by Mary Shipman Andrews, first published in 1906, and republished and reimagined as a stage play, a movie and a TV show many times since. Boritt does not even tell us this until near the end of his text; other parts of the Gettysburg story are more crucial and contributed to the writing of THE PERFECT TRIBUTE, but Andrews’ mythologizing has become the accepted history.

Even scholarly sources tend to focus on the magnitude of Lincoln’s Address: “Lincoln was preceded by a famous orator of the day who droned on for two hours. Nothing is remembered of what he said.” Occasionally, a source will identify the “famous orator” as Edward Everett, and change the “nothing” to “little,” but Boritt highlights the truth that in 1863 and for years, nay decades, thereafter, when the term “Gettysburg Address” was used, the term referred to Everett’s speech.

Everett’s speech was very well known. A pundit of his day, and a masterful public speaker, Everett did what was common at the time; he prepublished his speech in numerous newspapers and journals, and so people who were not at Gettysburg experienced the speech indirectly (more so than his live audience, because Everett edited his remarks on the podium). Boritt reproduces Everett’s speech in full in one of the numerous appendices to THE GETTYSBURG GOSPEL. At over 11,000 words, it is ponderous for a 21st Century audience, but it is just what a 19th Century audience would have expected and loved, full of allusions to Athenian democracy, a detailed (if glorified) version of the battle, and a paean to the honored dead who’d fallen on the field. (The other appendices analyze the different written versions of the Lincoln speech in scholarly detail, and comprise 50% of the entire book.)

Lincoln’s remarks were not prepublished. They ran to only 276 words. And though newspapers of the day published Everett’s remarks in full (often having a supplied printed copy to work with) far fewer papers published the President’s remarks, which were described as “rough and unpolished,” minimized as “a few suitable dedicatory remarks,” outright attacked in the Copperhead press and the South, since “In speaking of ‘a new birth of freedom’ the President proved he must have negro blood,” and absurdly misquoted: “The refinished work” (‘as in furniture?’ Boritt asks parenthetically) and “The dead will not remember what we say here.” You think? Indeed, Boritt shows us that public criticism of Lincoln was, if anything, uglier and less restrained than public criticism of any modern President, including Barack Obama.

The reality of Lincoln’s speech is that, as Professor Boritt shows us, it did not come to the fore until after the end of Reconstruction and after the systemic re-disenfranchisement of African-Americans through Jim Crow was accomplished at the end of the 19th Century. As “The Great Emancipator” faded from the (White) American consciousness, the “Gettysburg Lincoln” took his place. The scroll that Lincoln grasps or reads from in innumerable paintings and sculptures is often now identified as the Address, where it was originally identified (and usually meant to be) the Emancipation Proclamation. The effective erasure of the Proclamation became a part of the reunification process for the country. Not for nothing does the great Lincoln Memorial in Washington have carven in its walls the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural, but it lacks the Proclamation, which affected millions of human beings immediately and forever.

But if it supplanted the idea of the Emancipator, the Gettysburg Address added immeasurably to the dignity in which the Office of the President is cloaked (if not always the men who fill that office). While Lincoln was invited to Gettysburg as an adjunct speaker to Everett, any President would now be the keynote speaker, and his words would be faithfully reported and thoroughly discussed. The iconic Lincoln who arose after Gettysburg (aided and abetted by his martyrdom at war’s end) redefined the Presidency forever as a magisterial office of great power, an office commanding a bully pulpit, and an office, which, when filled by flawed humans of good intent, can elevate both the man and the nation to greater things. In that sense, every President since Abraham Lincoln IS Abraham Lincoln.