At noon on November 18, 1863, Abraham Lincoln boarded a special presidential train running north. Ensconced in the plush presidential car of the B&O Railroad, Lincoln traveled to Baltimore, where he transferred to another rail station and headed west. With him were his half-finished comments to be given the next day in dedicating a new cemetery in the small town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. By early morning Lincoln had completed the brief address of some 270 words, quickly wrote out another version, and gave the speech following a parade, Edward Everett's featured two-hour oration, and musical presentations.

The sprawling audience at Gettysburg seemed uncertain about how to respond to Lincoln's two-to-three-minute address. As many as 20,000 visitors had swarmed into the town, overwhelming its 2,500 residents. Applause interrupted Lincoln several times and followed his speech, but listeners appeared more taken with Everett's soaring oratory than with the president's brief, poetic reflections. Lincoln wondered if he had misspoken. The lack of attention paid his Gettysburg Address in leading American newspapers and the subdued responses of most who read the address seemed to confirm his reservations. But Everett's warm congratulatory note to Lincoln provided needed assurance. The orator told the president: "I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes."

Although pressed for time and unable to finish his address before leaving Washington, Lincoln gave considerable thought to appropriate words for the solemn occasion. Everett's being the featured speaker, Lincoln's own role as a last-minute add-on, and the need to dedicate the new burial ground for soldiers who lost their lives at Gettysburg the previous July predetermined much of the tone and content of Lincoln's comments. But he reflected extensively about what he would say: to honor the dead and to speak of the horrendous conflict that must be pressed and won. In a much larger realm, he would speak of liberty, equality, and democracy, urging his listeners to dedicate themselves and their country to the "unfinished business" facing them, so that they could experience a "new birth of freedom" and that a "government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth."

In The Gettysburg Gospel, Gabor Boritt, a leading Lincoln scholar, tells an appealing story of these events and others that preceded and followed. He adopts a chronological organization in his revealing narrative. In the riveting opening chapter he describes the destruction and chaos that engulfed Gettysburg after the battles of early July 1863. Rotting animal carcasses and decaying human remains were strewn throughout the small town. The filth and stench sickened residents and visitors. Amputated arms and legs were stacked like sticks of firewood under bloody cutting tables. Women as nurse-angels, churches, and nuns helped government doctors and sanitation officials who were overwhelmed by their task.

By September, as the town bit by bit recovered from the carnage, its residents began calling for a cemetery and preserved battlefields to commemorate the path-breaking battles. The result was the Soldiers' National Cemetery at Gettysburg. On November 19, 1863, throngs of visitors crowded into the small town to hear Everett's stirring speech, see President Lincoln, and walk through battlefields where perhaps as many as 10,000 Union and Confederate soldiers lost their lives. Boritt sets the scene of the dedication ceremonies skillfully, including the carousing and sometimes tipsy crowds that regaled the president and other visiting political dignitaries.

In the aftermath of the commemoration, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address failed to attract as much attention as his earlier Emancipation Proclamation. But, as Boritt makes clear, after the end of the flawed Reconstruction era, when Americans from the North and South turned to reconciliation, the strong bipartisan aspect of Lincoln's Gettysburg Gospel and his Second Inaugural Address found a receptive audience. So too in the 20th century, various political figures and factions selected and emphasized portions of Lincoln's address that fit their needs. When in 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr., chose to give his "I Have a Dream Speech" (exactly a century after Lincoln's Gettysburg Address) in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., that event signaled the continuing role of Lincoln's remarkable speech in American public life.

The core matter of Lincoln's "gospel" was a democratic faith in equality and freedom, but it also included an explicitly religious dimension. Several memorable phrases in the speech, Boritt suggests, revealed Lincoln's own personal spiritual journey. The president probably added the words "under God" as he spoke, although he did not mention Christianity. He invoked biblical language his audience would understand, and in mentioning a "new birth of freedom," he was, argues Boritt, calling for a "born-again nation." Here were illuminating signs, the author adds, in Lincoln's pilgrimage from secular skeptic "into a religious fatalist."[1] In his line-by-line and sometimes word-by-word reading of the Gettysburg Address, Boritt shows how Lincoln incorporated these themes even while remembering the brave and courageous men who had died there on the battlefield. Boritt's conclusion about Lincoln's speech is exactly right: "The Gospel of Gettysburg was born. American memory was being created."

A few quibbles are in order. Boritt more than adequately covers the turns the Gettysburg Gospel took in the late 19th century, but he's much too brief in discussing the cultural uses to which it was put in the next century. He devotes only fifteen pages to that extended period. The author also seems torn between popular and academic approaches to his subject. Most of his book will appeal to general readers, but his extremely detailed analysis of Lincoln's speech, as he himself admits, will be "mostly of interest to scholars." It is surprising, too, how little Boritt engages previous scholarship on his subject (except in his appended bibliographical essay), particularly Garry Wills' Pulitzer Prize-winning study of the Gettysburg Address.[2]

But on nearly every page The Gettysburg Gospel testifies to Gabor Boritt's obvious strengths as a historian and writer. From his first monograph, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (1978), through his numerous essays and edited books as director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College and on to the present work, Boritt has shown himself to be a thorough, diligent, fair-minded scholar. His wide-reaching research in published primary sources, newspapers, and manuscript collections is everywhere apparent.

We see more clearly, after reading this book, how Lincoln's famous speech has shaped American cultural memory, and how it in turn has been shaped and reshaped by the imperatives of succeeding generations. And Boritt reminds us that this story is far from over. The words of the greatest American president—uttered on that memorable day in November 1863—about our "unfinished business" in achieving freedom, equality, and full democracy are challenges still calling us. The Gettysburg Gospel, if heard and heeded, remains a beckoning beacon.

Richard W. Etulain, professor of history, emeritus, at the University of New Mexico, is the author most recently of Beyond the Missouri: The Story of the American West (Univ. of New Mexico Press). He is at work on a study of Abraham Lincoln and the American West.

1. For a superb brief essay on Lincoln's faith journey, see Ronald C. White, Jr., "Lincoln and Divine Providence," Response [Seattle Pacific University] 29 (Summer 2006), pp. 20-23.

2. Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (Simon & Schuster, 1992).

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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