Reviewing Gabor Boritt's "The Gettysburg Gospel": Part 1

I went into this book feeling like I had preconceptions about Lincoln, Gettysburg, and the American Civil War. But I knew I was ignorant, and in a way acknowledging ignorance is a good way of becoming a sort of tabula rasa.  

It was easy to admit ignorance (at least to myself). With a title like The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech Nobody Knows I expected to learn something I didn’t know. And I didn’t feel ashamed of it, since apparently nobody knew it. 

The book doesn’t recount the events of the battle of Gettysburg. It assumes the reader already knows it was the turning point of the war. And though the reader may assume he or she knows how bad the devastation was, Boritt begins his book with in-depth descriptions of how bad it actually was. Imagine wounded and dead in such large numbers that it overwhelms the population of a city. Bodies lay neglected in fields because there simply wasn’t manpower to remove them to hospitals or to bury the corpses. Even when corpses did get buried, it was such a hasty job that later they had to dig up the graves in the attempt to figure out the identity of the soldier lying there, what side he’d fought on, who his next of kin were…and finally, to give him a decent burial.

That was the reason Lincoln came to Gettysburg. Not to give his famous speech, but to lay the buried dead to rest in a national cemetery. Boritt describes the dignitaries, the journey by train to the site, the celebrity fever that caused people to flock to Gettysburg to hear the dignitaries and catch a glimpse of the president.* He poses the question of whether Lincoln wrote the speech in a flash of inspiration (as was the legend), or if he wrote it carefully over a period of time (as some historians suggest); Boritt never quite answers this question, instead going over the impact the Gettysburg Address has had over the course of history from the World Wars to September 11. 

Source: http://www.audioeditions.com/audio-book-images/l/The-Gettysburg-Gospel-305058.jpg

So what does the Gettysburg Address mean for us in the modern world? What does it mean for a people who are numb, almost desensitized, from suicide bombers, school shootings, and cyberterrorism? Americans live in a culture where we are constantly second-guessing ourselves, second-guessing our right to exist as a government “Of the people, by the people for the people.” 

Maybe we are in a serendipitous position to understand the Address as the citizens of Gettysburg heard it. They’d lived in a hell on earth, with the dead and dying surrounding them, the smell of putrid flesh and medicinal chemicals permeating the air. And here was Lincoln, telling them that the eyes of the world were on them. 

Today, more than ever we feel the eyes of the world on us, and we’re afraid of screwing up.  We have the feeling we already have, too much to be redeemed. The United States had screwed up from the outset when its founders allowed slavery to coexist with the words “All men are created equal.” The Civil War was a sort of penance for that initial compromise.   

And now? Now it “is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

Remember: The world is watching.   

*It probably would have been on a media show like Extra! or Inside Edition if they’d had television.  If there had been cell phones all the people there would have been trying to film Lincoln over the heads of the crowd or take selfies with Edward Everett speaking behind them.