GABOR BORITT. The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech that Nobody Knows. New York: Simon and Schuster. 2006. Pp. ix, 415. $25.00

Abstract

The title of this latest volume from the very productive pen of Gabor Boritt will come, as is intended, as a surprise both to the American public and to American historians, most of whom, it may safely be surmised, know the Gettysburg Address very well indeed, or think they do. That, of course, is the point. A subtitle along the lines of “the Lincoln speech you assumed you knew but in fact you don't know it as well as you thought you did” would have proved somewhat unwieldy; but that, in essence, is the thrust of this study and its contribution to Lincoln scholarship generally and to that on the Gettysburg Address specifically. Boritt, of course, has used a version of this title before, in his edited collection, The Gettysburg Nobody Knows (1997), but perhaps the origins of the present volume lie in another of his many edited works, The Historians' Lincoln: Pseudohistory, Psychohistory, and History (1996). In the latter, Boritt mused on the popularity of Gore Vidal's Lincoln (1984), a novel that he described as “insidiously ahistorical” in its construction of a “cynical, amoral world … with a comfortable Lincoln at its center.” It was a novel, he concluded, composed for a “Watergate-tempered” generation (p. xxii). The book under review may, in part, be read as a corrective, not just to Vidal's novel, but to the many myths and misconceptions that have arisen over the years regarding both Abraham Lincoln and his most famous speech. It is, in some senses, an attempt to return to the “first principles” of the Gettysburg Address insofar as these can be winnowed out of the chaff of almost a century and a half of writing, opinion, and fiction. In its author's own words, it “tries to clear away the range of meanings later generations laid upon the Gettysburg Address,” yet its impulse to free Lincoln's speech from the detritus of the decades derives as much from the need to establish a modern, updated context for the Gettysburg Address as it does from the desire to isolate Lincoln's sentiment in its pure, unadulterated form (p. 3).