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The Gettysburg Gospel The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows Gabor Boritt 9780743288200 Books

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The Gettysburg Gospel The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows Gabor Boritt 9780743288200 Books

After reading this book, I have a new appreciation of the Gettysburg Address.

While many people have an understanding of what Lincoln said, Gabor Boritt provides us a solid background on what Gettysburg went through after the battle. There was not adequate resources to care for the wounded, bury the dead, and dispose of the thousands of horses and mules that were killed in the battle. There was great courage displayed by many of the women of the town, and from outside of Gettysburg, but the first few days after the battle, Gettysburg was nothing more than a makeshift hospital. Every home had wounded; every church and public building converted to help the wounded, and doctors working at amputations until they had to be held up.

And, when Lincoln did come to the dedication on Nov 19 1863, the primary speaker was Edward Everett and it was his masterful oration that made the greatest impact on the audience and the press. Lincoln's spoken words were not fully appreciated until decades after the event.

If you read a book and get nothing new out of it, you have wasted your time. That is not the case here. This book will give you a new insight on Lincoln and his words at Gettysburg that will live for centuries.


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The Gettysburg Gospel The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows Gabor Boritt 9780743288200 Books Reviews

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.
I recently read Ronald C. White, Jr.'s excellent Lincoln's Greatest Speech The Second Inaugural, and was motivated to read more about Abraham Lincoln's other great speeches. That brought me to Gabor Boritt's 2006 history The Gettysburg Gospel The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows. While interesting, I was expecting something more like White's work, which focuses on analysis of the speech with some info on the lead-up and reaction to the speech. Instead, Boritt devotes his book to the period between the Battle of Gettysburg and the time Lincoln takes the stage at Gettysburg and the time he gets of the stage and people start reacting to the speech. Of the speech itself, you might conceivably miss it if you blink.

To be fair to Boritt, I learned a lot about the Battle of Gettysburg and what happened at Gettysburg between the battle and the dedication of the national cemetery. This is interesting stuff, and does a good job of giving you a context of Lincoln's speech. Boritt is also thorough in his analysis of the Gettysburg Address in American culture and how it vied with the Emancipation Proclamation as the single message of the martyred president.

Unfortunately, there's very little analysis of Lincoln's actual Gettysburg address. Much more time is spent on how and when he wrote it than why he wrote what he wrote. It just seems odd to that Boritt left this entire topic unexplored when devoting so much effort to every other facet of the Gettysburg story.

Boritt actually spends a lot more time talking about the content of other Gettysburg speech that nobody knows, the main oration from Edward Everett. You get a fair amount how and why Everett wrote the speech he wrote, and an entire appendix is dedicated to presenting Everett's speech in full. I actually appreciate this part of the book, as - while I had known Lincoln's speech was really a short message delivered after Everett's - I had known little of Everett's speech myself. It's actually a pretty good speech, if not in a class with Lincoln's.

I listened to Tantor Media's unabridged 2006 production of The Gettysburg Gospel, as read by Michael Kramer. The production was solid, and Kramer's steady and straightforward narration fit the historical nature of the book well. The production runs approximately 10 hours.

Overall, I learned quite a bit about every part of the Gettysburg story except Lincoln's speech. While I appreciate that, I feel like Boritt missed the mark by, I can only assume, taking for granted everyone coming to The Gettysburg Gospel already had a detailed knowledge of the actual Gettysburg Address itself and that he didn't need to directly address that topic himself. While Boritt's book is a solid background on the story of the speech, don't expect to learn much about why Lincoln gave the speech he did.
After reading this book, I have a new appreciation of the Gettysburg Address.

While many people have an understanding of what Lincoln said, Gabor Boritt provides us a solid background on what Gettysburg went through after the battle. There was not adequate resources to care for the wounded, bury the dead, and dispose of the thousands of horses and mules that were killed in the battle. There was great courage displayed by many of the women of the town, and from outside of Gettysburg, but the first few days after the battle, Gettysburg was nothing more than a makeshift hospital. Every home had wounded; every church and public building converted to help the wounded, and doctors working at amputations until they had to be held up.

And, when Lincoln did come to the dedication on Nov 19 1863, the primary speaker was Edward Everett and it was his masterful oration that made the greatest impact on the audience and the press. Lincoln's spoken words were not fully appreciated until decades after the event.

If you read a book and get nothing new out of it, you have wasted your time. That is not the case here. This book will give you a new insight on Lincoln and his words at Gettysburg that will live for centuries.