Author: Gary Wills

This is one scholarly work. It is also a work that takes slow careful reading. The author devotes more than one page to each of the two hundred and seventy two words in the famous Gettysburg address.

Wills suggests that Lincoln was heavily influenced by the oratorical skills of the Greeks and also Transcendentalists – a nineteenth century philosophical movement much advocated by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and other luminaries.

One fascinating aspect of the Gettysburg address is how brief it was. Lincoln was not the featured speaker at the event, indeed by some accounts he was invited as an afterthought. This may well be one of the reasons why his speech was so brief, particularly as short speeches were not the norm. In 1858, Lincoln and Stephen Douglas engaged in three hour debates, while Edward Everett delivered a two hour oration prior to Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. While the three minute address was out of character for the period or indeed any period, the speech proves the point “that less is often more.”

The book should be of particular interest to the Lincoln scholar, but beware, it is a tough book to get through, simply because it is such a detailed, intense work.

One of the many interesting elements in the book is the full reproduction of Everett’s speech. Everett was lauded as the finest speaker of his generation, but to be honest, I found his speech to be tedious, lacking in passion and being primarily a chronology of the events at Gettysburg. Everett wrote to Lincoln following their respective addresses, "I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes." How right he was.