The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows » (Bargain)

Gabor Boritt is the Robert Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies and Director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. Born in World War II Hungary, he participated as a teenager in the 1956 revolution against the Soviet Union. He escaped to the United States, where he received his higher education and became one of the finest Lincoln scholars. His life story is soon to be the subject of a feature-length documentary film. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of sixteen books about Lincoln and the Civil War. Boritt and his wife live on a farm near the Gettysburg battlefield, where they have raised their three sons.

The literature of the Gettysburg Address tends to fall into one of two extremes. At one end are those books that maintain that Lincoln wrote his speech hastily, even on a scrap of paper on the train en route from Washington to Gettysburg. In this version, Lincoln delivered his remarks to an uncomprehending public, which applauded politely, failing to appreciate his genius. Many of the books that argued this point of view are out of print today, but the myths and legends live on.Boritt's vivid narrative will be filled with colorful, little-known details. It will recreate the events, but it will also assess the significance of Lincoln's remarks and place them in their proper historical context as no book has before, showing how the remarks that were quickly forgotten took on a new life decades later and became the most famous speech in American history.

Publishers Weekly

In this engrossing study, Civil War scholar Boritt (editor of The Lincoln Enigma) offers a revealing history of that most famous piece of American oratory, the Gettysburg Address. Boritt opens with an evocative description of a stench-filled, corpse-strewn Gettysburg on July 4, 1863, after the battle. When Lincoln arrived a few months later to dedicate the national cemetery, he had an important task: "to explain to the people," writes Borritt, in plain, powerful prose, "why the bloodletting must go on." After vividly recreating the delivery of the address, Boritt discusses the speech's mixed reception. Republican newspapers praised it; Democrats, viewing it as the beginning of Lincoln's re-election campaign, belittled or tried to ignore it; one Democratic newspaper called the speech a "mawkish harangue." Just as bad, Lincoln's graceful oratory was garbled in transmission to newspapers. Most interesting is Boritt's recounting of how, after Lincoln's assassination, the speech was mostly forgotten until the 1880s, when Gettysburg increasingly became a symbol of a reunion between North and South, and the Gettysburg Address took on the sheen of America's "sacred scriptures." Lincoln's poetic language, says Boritt, helps the speech live on, and the message of "sacrificial redemption" still speaks to Americans today. This elegant account will delight readers who enjoyed Garry Wills's Lincoln at Gettysburg. (Lengthy appendixes parsing drafts of the speech, however, will interest mainly aficionados.) 16 pages of b&w illus., and b&w illus. throughout. (Nov. 19) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Preface     1
After Battle     5
Rebirth     31
Lincoln Comes to Gettysburg     49
Carousing Crowds     69
The Gettysburg Gospel     91
Echoes     130
Gloria     163
Coda     204
Appendixes     207
The Program at the Soldiers' National Cemetery, November 19, 1863     207
A Beautiful Hand: Facsimiles of the Five Versions of the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln's Hand     245
Parsing Lincoln     256
Dollar Signs     287
Notes     293
A Bibliographic Note: Dwarfs and Giants     377
Acknowledgments     394
Index     403