The First Time I Met Lincoln

This entry probably should be subtitled “A review of Gabor Boritt’s The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech Nobody Knows.” However not only is that subtitle too long (and also confusing because The Gettysburg Gospel also has a subtitle), but it wouldn’t quite be true.  This entry could double as a review, I suppose, but its focus is not on the book (for once).  Because though the content of the book was interesting enough, it sparked a process of thought that meandered far away from the author’s original purpose.

But we’ll start with the book at least. The Gettysburg Gospel was a whim checkout at the library. I was in need of an audiobook, my holds of said “listening material” taking far, far too long to come in. When my commute is an hour a day, I rely on a constant flow of audiobooks for making the time move faster, as well as actually chipping away at my colossal reading list. While I’m in the car, I’m literally a captive audience, making a good book like the embrace of a friend, and making a bad book tempt me to reinvent the Frisbee with the compact discs. 

When my audiobook holds are late, therefore, it’s an emergency. See, I’ve pretty much gone through every audiobook that “lives” at my home library. I’ve been rationing the nonfiction books, but since The Gettysburg Gospel is in the 900’s in the Dewey Decimal system…and since the Dewey Decimal system only goes up to the 900’s…well, you can see I’m starting to run dangerously low on whim-checkout material. 

Nevertheless I looked forward to this particular book. I love history, but as I’ve said before, I am woefully ignorant of my own country’s history. Much as I would love to be an aficionado on presidential lives or have the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution memorized…well, I just never have seemed to get around to it.* So The Gettysburg Gospel promised to be a sort of window into the American Civil War. I hadn’t studied this part of United States history since college, and even those details were hazy.

Another thing that I realized when I started reading this book is that I felt like I “knew” Abraham Lincoln. Maybe all Americans do. For people in the north, he’s kind of a cool uncle or older brother. He’s good and heroic and humble, like Superman. Mind you, I also know of several people from the south who don’t share this point of view, but for the most part in elementary school history books and movies and such, Lincoln is a good guy. 

As I started reading this book, I wondered if my perspective was about to change. After all, it’s a knee-jerk reaction to picture “Santa Claus” as a fat old guy in a red suit, rather than the Catholic Saint Nicholas of history. It follows that the same can be happen to national heroes, especially with a sort of postmodern trend of picking apart heroes. When I worked at the library I would come across books about Lincoln that were centered around his depression, his crazy wife, the tragic death of his son, or books that argued Lincoln was just a power-hungry despot who cared more about keeping his grip of control on the Confederacy than any benevolent anti-slavery motives.

Who was the real Lincoln? I’ve read enough history to know I probably will never know the definitive answer. But perhaps, if I read enough, I’ll be able to wade through author’s personal agendas, sift through historic evidence, and finally get to a place that’s closer to the truth than I am now.

*I have actually read both the Declaration and Constitution several times. But I would still not call myself an expert.