A lithography by E.V.C. Gelderd of the battle of Gettysburg, based on a portion of Paul Philippoteau's
The day after Lincoln delivered his dedicatory remarks at the cemetery at Gettysburg, he received a note from the principal speaker of the ceremony, Edward Everett, in which the latter expressed his appreciation for Lincoln’s words: “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.” In his latest book, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America, published by Simon and Schuster in 1992 and winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction, Garry Wills argues that Lincoln did more than come near the central idea of the occasion. Lincoln, writes Wills, meant “to ‘win’ the whole Civil War in ideological terms as well as military ones” (p. 37).
According to Wills, Lincoln’s oratorical effort at Gettysburg produced “a new founding of the nation” (p. 39). Lincoln drew from the cultural and intellectual currents of his time and skillfully crafted into the short address a distillation of the political thought he had developed for over a decade. He combined these elements so simply and compellingly that he gave new meaning to the war. Ultimately, his almost magical words “wove a spell” and “called up a new nation out of the blood and trauma” (p. 175). Essential to Lincoln’s powerful address is his understanding of the Constitution in the light of the Declaration of Independence, a founding document of a united people committed to creating a government “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Because Lincoln brought to bear his political convictions and his rhetorical skill so successfully, Wills writes that, “for most people now, the Declaration means what Lincoln told us it means, as a way of correcting the Constitution itself without overthrowing it” (p. 147). Thus, after the Gettysburg Address, Americans understood the Constitution differently than they had before:
He [Lincoln] altered the document from within, by appeal from its letter to the spirit, subtly changing the recalcitrant stuff of legal compromise, bringing it to its own indictment. By implicitly doing this, he performed one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting. Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked. The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological luggage, that new constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they brought there with them. ...Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely (p. 38).
Much of Wills’s study is a close analysis of the speech’s framework — its imagery, language, ideals, and style — to discover how Lincoln made this “stunning verbal coup” (p. 40). Contrary to apocryphal stories that Lincoln wrote the address on the spur of the moment, Wills emphasizes how carefully Lincoln constructed his “few appropriate remarks.” Wills employs varied sources to illuminate the rich meaning of the Address — including the oratory of the Greek Revival and of the funereal addresses of ancient Athens, the imagery of the nineteenth-century rural cemetery movement, the Transcendentalist thought of Unitarian minister and abolitionist Theodore Parker, and the constitutional arguments of Daniel Webster. Although the Gettysburg Address can stand alone as a masterful expression of Lincoln’s political thought and eloquence, Wills’s analysis provides intriguing insights into Lincoln’s Address by exploring the cultural and intellectual world of nineteenth century America.
Wills looks, for example, at the “Oratory of the Greek Revival” to place Lincoln’s address in its historical and stylistic context. If late eighteenth-century America was influenced by ancient Rome and strove to become a disciplined, virtuous republic, nineteenth-century America looked to the democratic ideals of ancient Greece. The news of the findings of archaeologists in Greece and of the fight for Greek independence, the works of romantic poets, and the building designs of architects marked the period of the Greek Revival in nineteenth-century America. Throughout the period, classical scholar Edward Everett encouraged the ideas and ideals of the Greek Revival through his oratory. His studied, detailed addresses at revolutionary war battlefields and other sites tied these places of recent events to the history of ancient Athens as a way to enliven the ideals of the ancient democracy in the young American one. At Gettysburg, writes Wills, Everett tried to combine the values of the ancient Greek funeral oration (or Epitaphios Logos) with the drama of the events of the July battle to create an American identity and sense of history (pp. 42-52).
Wills explains, however, that Lincoln’s short dedicatory remarks were closer to the mark that Pericles set in his funeral oration during Athens’ war with Sparta over two thousand years before. Stylistically, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is spare, dignified, and unornamented. By refraining from references to any particular events or persons of the Battle of Gettysburg, it transformed the battle into an ideal type that was part of the nation’s greater movement to realize the ideals for which the country was founded (pp. 52-54). In addition, Lincoln’s address shared other stylistic similarities with ancient epitaphioi. Lincoln made use of antithesis, as when he contrasted life and death, for example, and his Gettysburg Address followed the ancient funeral oration pattern by honoring the dead and exhorting the living to remain true to their cause (pp. 55-60).
Although Wills’s analysis uses Attic oratory to reveal the simple style and subtle strength of Lincoln’s prose, he does not connect the Address directly to the oratorical patterns of ancient Athens or of the Greek Revival, for “Lincoln brought nothing of Everett’s superb [classically learned] background” to Gettysburg; rather, he “sensed, from his own developed artistry, the demands that bring forth classic art — compression, grasp of the essential, balance, ideality, an awareness of the deepest polarities of the situation...... The result, Wills argues, is that Lincoln did not produce a backward-looking piece that failed to imitate Attic oratory, as had Everett; rather, like Pericles, he addressed “the challenge of the moment” (p. 52).
Wills makes more direct connections among nineteenth century America’s “culture of death,” the rural cemetery movement, and the imagery of the Gettysburg Address. Influenced by ancient Greece and nineteenth-century Romanticism, Americans designed cemeteries (beginning with Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts) that were set amid the rural beauty of nature, rather than in churchyards. There, in the symbolic borderland between life and death, the living could “commune with nature as a way of finding life in death” (p. 65).
In Lincoln’s Springfield, the town’s elite dedicated Ridge Oak Cemetery (where Lincoln is now entombed) in May 1860 with a formal ceremony that emphasized the cemetery’s quiet and secluded natural setting as a sacred place where young and old alike could be inspired with devotion to the civic and the holy (pp. 67, 70). The ceremony at Gettysburg followed a similar order and sought to create a similar atmosphere of liminality. Wills’s portrait of the melancholy Lincoln place him well in his culture and its romanticized ideas about death (pp. 75-76). He also argues that Lincoln might have attended the dedication of Oak Ridge, and would therefore have been familiar with such cemetery dedications (pp. 68-69). Wills notes that, before the cemetery dedication at Gettysburg, Lincoln had met with the Gettysburg cemetery’s designer, William Saunder’s, and was pleased by its “advisable and benefiting arrangement.” Not only was William Saunder’s “steeped in the ideals of the rural cemetery movement,” but he designed the cemetery at Gettysburg with appropriately arced rows to emphasize the equality of the soldiers who fought for the nation (pp. 75-76, 29, 22).
Continuation of article, February 1992, No. 1836
Wills perceptively analyzes the way Lincoln used an “organic and familial” imagery and language in the Gettysburg Address. Derived from Romantic nineteenth-century culture, this imagery was appropriate for, and expected at, the dedication of rural cemeteries. Lincoln also found it appropriate to relay to his audience his conviction that the nation should fulfill the purposes for which the nation was founded, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. For example, Lincoln used “romantic nature-imagery of birth and rebirth” to resolve that the nation “shall have a new birth of freedom,” and that its popular government “shall not perish from the earth.” More important to Wills’ purpose is to reveal Lincoln’s perception of the founders’ role in the nation’s life, exemplified by his proposition that the “fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” That imagery gave force to his call for a commitment to the fathers’ vision (p. 88). Thus, contrary to arguments that Lincoln sensed he lived in a postheroic age and suffered from an excessive ambition that engendered a hostility toward the “fathers.” Wills emphasizes that for Lincoln, the founders represented the ideals of freedom and equality that had yet to be fully realized (p. 86).
If a simple and crafted rhetorical style and a “romantic nature-imagery” gave compelling force to Lincoln’s words, Transcendentalist ideas and the political thought of Daniel Webster, Wills argues, shaped Lincoln’s understanding of the Declaration of Independence and its role in defining the American Union (p. 89).
According to Wills, because “Lincoln was bound to be affected by the rhetoric, assumptions, and conscious ideals of the men who shaped his culture,” his conception of the Declaration as a statement of an ideal to be made progressively real “owes a great deal to the primary intellectual fashion of his period, Transcendentalism.” In particular, this intellectual thought would come through “limited but deep contact with the thought of [historian] George Bancroft, and extensive exposure to [clergyman and abolitionist] Theodore Parker’s views.” (pp. 103-104). Bancroft, for example, had argued in 1854 that “there exists this ideal state toward which it [the actual state] should tend,” and in 1860, stated that the “assertion of right [in the Declaration of Independence] was made for the entire world of mankind and all coming generations, without any exceptions whatever” (p. 105).
For himself, Lincoln’s antislavery arguments were expressed in ways meant to accomplish that which he believed was politically possible at the time. Nevertheless, for Lincoln also, the Declaration of Independence stated a transcendent ideal to be attained and also stood as a founding document of a single American people. As Wills points out by quoting Lincoln, the founders
meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere (p. 102).
Consistent with this belief, writes Wills, Lincoln argued that the Constitution was an “early and provisional embodiment of that ideal.” It represented (in Lincoln’s words) the “sprit of that age” (from the time of the framing of the Constitution to the Missouri Compromise) which expressed “hostility in the PRINCIPLE [of slavery], and toleration ONLY BY NECESSITY” (pp. 101-102).
Wills argues that Lincoln was exposed to Transcendentalist ideas, “every time he went into his Springfield office and talked with his partner,” William Herndon (an admirer of Theodore Parker), who “pushed upon Lincoln” Parker’s writings (pp. 105-106). He then traces the similarities in Lincoln’s and Parker’s thoughts about the Declaration as a statement of ideal and about the “Slave Power conspiracy,” which they argued was undermining America’s progression toward that ideal. But Lincoln made no specific mention of slavery or emancipation in the Gettysburg Address, Wills argues, because, in the end, “a nation free to proclaim its ideal is freed, again, to approximate that ideal over the years, in ways that run far beyond any specific or limited reforms, even one so important as emancipation” (pp. 106-120).
However, Lincoln admired Whigs Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. Unlike Parker, he “felt they [Clay and Webster] proved that one can remain opposed to slavery while making temporary concessions to the South in order to keep the nation together” (p. 123). Wills quotes from Lincoln’s eulogy for Henry Clay in 1852, for instance, in which Lincoln criticized abolitionists because they would shiver into fragments the Union of these States, tear to tatters its now venerated Constitution; and even burn the last copy of the Bible, rather than slavery should continue a single hour” (p. 124). Wills writes that Lincoln viewed the Declaration of Independence as a “founding document” (p. 132). His ideas about the nature of the Union were largely drawn, Wills argues, from the political thought of Daniel Webster *p. 125) In his famous Reply to Hayne in 1830, and in other writings, Webster had asserted that the United States was not a compact of states, but a true union formed by the people who had joined together to win independence and to adopt the Articles of Confederation “as articles of perpetual union.” In his First Inaugural Address in 1861, Lincoln repeated this historical progression towards an indissoluble Union in the years before the Federal Convention of 1787, and he told of the Constitution’s declared object “to form a more perfect union” (pp. 130-131). This interpretation carried important implications for policies during the Civil War. If the Constitution was the creation and working law of a unified people, then, for Lincoln, the war could only be an “insurrection”. And emancipation carried out as a war measure (pp. 133-144).
Ultimately, Lincoln’s use of the Declaration of Independence as a founding document differs from Webster’s, however, for Wills explains that, “Lincoln does not argue law or history, as Daniel Webster did. He makes history. He dopes not come to present a theory, but to impose a symbol ...”(p. 174).
Here, then, is how Lincoln succeeded in making his “verbal coup.” A dedication address is not merely as speech that forwards logical arguments, but a verbal act that announces a reality. For Wills, Lincoln’s dedicatory act at Gettysburg possessed power because Lincoln combined all the right elements — a modern style of prose that contained simple dignity and conviction found in an ancient Attic funereal address, a romantic imagery appealing to a nineteenth-century American “culture of death,” and a reliance on the Declaration of Independence as a founding document and as a commitment to fulfill the ideal that “all men are created equal.” With these elements, the Gettysburg Address enabled Lincoln to effect “an intellectual revolution.” Writes Wills, “no other words could have done it...[A]t Gettysburg he wove a spell that has not, yet, been broken” (p. 175).
In Lincoln at Gettysburg, Garry Wills has made insightful contributions to our understanding of the Gettysburg Address. If the book at times tends toward overstatement, it nevertheless makes plain the force of Lincoln’s speech. It emphasizes that, for Lincoln, the solemn dedication ceremony at Gettysburg was more than a ceremony; it was an occasion he did not want to risk missing for fear that his effort might fail entirely.” His carefully composed dedicatory remarks certainly point beyond the immediate occasion. It is commonplace to note that the address is a compelling statement of Lincoln’s vision for the nation at a time it was tested by civil war, and yet Wills’ close analysis of the piece brings out much that is passed over by too much familiarity. His varied sources allow him to make intriguing observations about Lincoln’s cultural context, his masterful facility with words, and the continuing influence of the Gettysburg Address in shaping Americans’ perception of their country. Wills’ Lincoln at Gettysburg has brought out even more the irony of Lincoln’s thanking Everett for his judgment that “the little I did say was not entirely a failure.”2