November 19, 1863. Edward Everett, the most celebrated orator in America, spoke at Gettysburg for two hours, and spoke well. Then Lincoln rose, delivered 272 words, and sat down before the photographer could fix his plate. Scattered applause. Lincoln reportedly muttered that the speech, like a bad plow, “won’t scour.” He was wrong: everyone knows his speech, and Everett’s survives as a footnote to it.
Garry Wills’s argument is that those two minutes were an intellectual coup, and he means the word. The crowd came to dedicate a cemetery. They left citizens of a different country, and did not know it.
The sleight of hand
Wills states his claim plainly, so we can too: Lincoln swapped the nation’s founding document while the nation watched. “Four score and seven years ago” does not reach back to the Constitution, with its careful silences about persons “held to Service or Labour.” It reaches back to 1776, to a proposition the Constitution nowhere makes: that all men are created equal. By grounding the war in Jefferson’s sentence rather than Madison’s compromises, Lincoln turned equality from an aspiration of American government into its premise. Willmoore Kendall saw the trick and hated it: Lincoln had “derailed” the constitutional tradition. Wills concedes the derailment. He merely thinks the train was headed somewhere worth leaving.
Not a bolt from heaven
A clever thesis does not make a book. What makes this one is Wills’s refusal to treat the Address as a bolt from heaven. He is a classicist, and he reads Lincoln the way one reads Pericles. This turns out to be the right way, because the ceremony itself was consciously Greek: Everett had built his two hours on the scaffolding of the Athenian funeral oration, and Wills honors him for it rather than playing him for laughs. Everett, for his part, knew what he had witnessed. He wrote to Lincoln the next day: “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”
The chapters surrounding the speech are the richest in the book: Greek revival oratory, the rural cemetery movement, the nineteenth century’s elaborate commerce with death. The Address did not escape its age. It gathered the age’s materials, the transcendentalists’ ideal truths and the telegraph’s compression and the lawyer’s syllogism, and fused them into something that made every other speech that day obsolete by nightfall.
A sentence as an act of state
On the prose itself Wills is best, and his own style earns its kinship with the subject. He shows how the speech moves through birth, death, and rebirth; how Lincoln strips out every particular (no “Gettysburg,” no “slavery,” no “I”) so that the occasion becomes the idea; how the sentences interlock like the steps of a proof. This is close reading in the old, strenuous sense: the sense in which a sentence can be an act of state.
The book overreaches where its virtue predicts it will. Wills’s Lincoln is at times too deliberate a conjurer, credited in advance with everything the tradition later found in the text. And the battle barely appears; it is merely what furnished the dead. These are the defects of concentration. Like its subject, the book wastes nothing.
The appendices alone
The appendices alone repay the price of the book: a patient collation of the five manuscript copies in Lincoln’s hand, and a quiet demolition of the legend that he scribbled the speech on an envelope aboard the train. The legend flatters no one. It slanders Lincoln’s craft and his respect for the dead in the same breath. Lincoln revised. Writers do.
The quarrel is not over
Kendall lost the argument but not the war, and his heirs are easy to find. In 1981 the Reagan administration floated M. E. Bradford, the Southern conservative who had answered Harry Jaffa’s Lincoln-worship with an essay titled “The Heresy of Equality,” to chair the National Endowment for the Humanities. Neoconservatives revolted, largely over Bradford’s attacks on Lincoln, and William Bennett got the job instead. The right has been fighting that internal battle ever since, and its post-liberal wing now says out loud what Bradford only implied: that equality-as-premise was the wrong turn, and the map should be redrawn from before Gettysburg.
The left fights on the same ground from the other side. The 1619 Project proposed to move the founding to the arrival of the first slave ship; the Trump administration’s 1776 Commission planted the flag back where Lincoln put it. Notice what neither side disputes. Both accept that America is a proposition with a date, something to be owned and argued rather than merely inhabited, and that whoever fixes the founding year gets to say what the country is for. That assumption did not come from Madison. It is the Gettysburg Address, operating anonymously, in the mouths of people who believe they are quarreling with each other when they are mostly quarreling inside the frame Lincoln built in two minutes. The post-liberals see this more clearly than anyone, which is why their project is the boldest on offer and the most doomed. They want America to be a place again, a nation like other nations, bound by soil and memory rather than by a syllogism. They are eight score and three years too late. You cannot un-dedicate a country.
Thirty years on, Wills’s own argument has been absorbed so completely that we forget it was ever contested. That is the fate Lincoln imposed on his audience: words that remade the world so thoroughly the remaking became invisible. Wills made it visible again, which may be the highest service a historian can perform for a text everyone knows by heart and no one any longer reads.
One of an ongoing series on Garry Wills. The rest are under the Garry Wills tag.