Trump: "You know when Abraham Lincoln made the Gettsyburg Address speech...great speech...you know he was ridiculed?...He was excorciated by the fake news. They had fake news...they said it was a terrible, terrible speech."— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) September 7, 2018
By Garry Wills. Illustrated. 317 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $23.
"THE world will little note, nor long remember what we say here. . . ."
by William McFeely
Garry Wills has taken note, remembered and given our nation's greatest gathering of words, the Gettysburg Address, new urgency. It has been more than tenscore years since Thomas Jefferson held it to be self-evident that all men are created equal; more than sixscore since Abraham Lincoln committed this nation to that proposition. In 1992, Mr. Wills, despite the dismaying evidence that the proposition is still dishonored, has written a brilliant book demonstrating that Lincoln's words still have power.
This scholarly study of oratory begins with the stink of rotting corpses. When the two great battered armies moved away from Gettysburg in July 1863, they left behind thousands of bodies of horses and men decaying in the summer sun. David Wills, the town's leading citizen, arranged for the animals to be dragged into piles and burned, and, after considerable negotiation, he found workers to bury the men hastily in temporary graves. The reburial of the Union dead was still under way on Nov. 19, when Lincoln delivered his address; Garry Wills has not forgotten that it was a cemetery that Edward Everett and Abraham Lincoln had been invited to dedicate.
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