Gabor S. Boritt - The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows

T he meaning of the Gettysburg Address has changed generation after generation. It has become one of the nations most revered texts, even as historians and public figures have used it and puzzled over its meaning. Connotations given to it have twisted and turned. That Lincoln could not have meant all the things attributed to him over the years is clear. Nor could the various versions of how he created his great speech all be true.

Today, the image of the Gettysburg Address still swings between two extremes. At one end is a persistent tradition that goes back to 1863. It tells of a speech written on the train to Pennsylvania on a piece of wrapping paper retrieved from the floor. Then, at the National Cemetery, people received the speech in silence. It had failed utterly, and the president knew it.

Ward Hill Lamon, Lincolns friend and biographer, and Marshal of the District of Columbia, gave the strongest voice to this tradition: a tale of genius and an uncomprehending public. Many believed what Lamon said. After all, he was at Gettysburg and served as the marshal of the dedication ceremonies. He had introduced the president before he spoke. If anyone knew, he did. The eldest son of the president, who had little use for Lamon, certainly credited him at one time: My fathers Gettysburg Address, Robert Lincoln wrote in 1885, was jotted down in pencil, in part at least, on his way to the place.

The Alabama-born writer Mary Shipman Andrews gave the story its great currency. One day, her son Pauls history teacher, one Walter Burlingame, reminisced in class about his own youth. He told about hearing Edward Everett tell his father, diplomat Anson Burlingame, who also knew Lincoln, that the president wrote his address on a piece of brown paper on the train going up to Gettysburg. Everett, too, had to have known. He gave the main oration at Gettysburg.

Young Paul Andrews went home and told his mother, who then wrote a captivating little book: The Perfect Tribute. An interesting provenance, this. Edward Everett tells Anson Burlingame something that is overheard by Walter Burlingame, who tells Paul Andrews, who tells Mary Shipman Andrews, who tells the world. Americans learned this history by heart. For long The Perfect Tribute reigned as the most popular book on the subject, indeed perhaps on any Lincoln subject. Though Andrewss name is now mostly forgotten, the ideas she popularized still sway no small part of the general public. She admitted, in private, to taking one liberty in telling the tale: she turned the reputed silence of the Gettysburg crowd into vast reverence, the perfect tribute. The little book continues to go through endless editions; Project Gutenberg makes it freely available on the Web; and it has been filmed at least twice, in 1937 and 1991. That, then, is one end of the Gettysburg Address spectrum.

At the other end looms the learned analysis of an extraordinary man of letters, Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America. If Andrewss speech was written in a few minutes on the train and received with silence at Gettysburg, Willss was prepared with care and stealthilyremade America. If the broad public, the millions who make the pilgrimage to Gettysburg year after year, still hold with Andrews, a good part of the reading public has moved to Wills and made his book a best seller, also the winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Admiring scholars have taken his ideas further.

It is not surprising that the fiction writer, the artist, Andrews, for whom a moment of inspiration is all-important, sees Lincoln creating his speech in a flash of insight; and the scholarly writer, Wills, sees Lincoln laboring long and with care. It takes a heroic effort for the students of Lincoln to separate themselves from their subjects. Most of us fail to a smaller or larger degree.

Between the two ends of the spectrum, the Gettysburg Address suffers no neglect from writers of history. Yet perhaps since they collected every scrap of the often confusing and contradictory informationand surely there will be moreit has been all too easy to get lost in the tangle. David C. Mearns, onetime chief of the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress, a careful student of Lincoln, considered the many dubious recollections about the speech in an essay entitled Unknown at this Address. He then recommended that historians with cleared minds and jaundiced eyes, begin again from scratch. This work attempts exactly that. In the process it grew clear, to cite Mearns again, that some things were just transparently truthful. Some were not. And so a new story emerged.