A new view of Lincoln at Gettysburg

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THE GETTYSBURG GOSPEL: THE LINCOLN SPEECH NOBODY KNOWS

By Gabor Boritt, Simon & Schuster, $28, 415 pages, illustrated

The Gettysburg Address, perhaps the best-known speech by an American, has a curious history, as scholar Gabor Boritt shows in this definitive study.

For one thing, even today we hear arguments about whether the speech fell flat for listeners on Nov. 19, 1863, or whether they erupted in applause or sat in awed silence. Contemporary accounts of newspaper reporters (and others) vary wildly.

And, of course, there are the stories about Lincoln dashing off the speech while traveling to Gettysburg by train. Mr. Boritt weighs the evidence -- especially the original draft -- and reaches no firm conclusion, but he thinks it likely that Lincoln wrote the first part of the speech at the White House and then finished it in Gettysburg on the night before he spoke.

But Mr. Boritt's most surprising finding, at least to this reader, is that decades went by before most people came to recognize its greatness. This, and the likelihood that the address was completed with just hours to spare, calls into question the thesis of Garry Wills' "Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America."

Mr. Wills, whose 1992 book won a Pulitzer Prize, asserted that Lincoln, through his speech, had "stealthily" shifted the meaning of the Constitution in the direction of the Declaration of Independence.

Mr. Boritt, in his preface, contrasts Mr. Wills' work with that of Mary Shipman Andrews' "The Perfect Tribute," a 1906 fictional tale that did much to cement the idea that the speech was written on the train to Gettysburg.

"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," Mr. Boritt writes, perceptively. "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."