Jared Peatman. The Long Shadow of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

Abstract

Before the 1960s, most people thought Abraham Lincoln praised the northern dead at Gettysburg because they had fought to preserve the Union and the world's only democracy. Few people believed, as does Jared Peatman, that Lincoln considered racial equality a prerequisite to democratic government and sent the country to war to achieve it. Ironically, the most informative and strongest parts of this book concern the beliefs of those generations which, in Peatman's view, interpreted Lincoln incorrectly by ignoring race. In fact, those generations had it right. Peatman overestimates the visibility of Lincoln's words in 1863. Most newspapers that covered the Gettysburg ceremonies either ignored Lincoln's address or printed it without comment. Only 5 percent of Americans subscribed to a newspaper, which means that most people never thought about what Lincoln meant to say at Gettysburg. Peatman explains that the centers of Federal and Confederate newspaper production were located in highly populated cities (New York and Richmond), and that single newspaper issues were read by more than one person, but these facts hardly refute the conclusion that only a minority of Americans knew or cared about Lincoln's address.