About the Book
We asked Dean Jon Gjerde to explain what compelled the deans to choose Lincoln at Gettysburg as the featured book for On the Same Page for fall 2007. Here is his response:
Why was Gettysburg important? In the mid-nineteenth century, the slavery question plagued Americans, but their political leaders had repeatedly failed to come to grips with it. Following the election of Abraham Lincoln in the Fall of 1860, the war of words escalated into a full-scale military conflict, with eleven southern states seceding from the Union the following winter. The Civil War lasted until 1865 and was the bloodiest American war. About 600,000 soldiers were killed in some of the most gruesome battles the world had ever seen. Gettysburg was one of these. In July of 1863, near this small town in southern Pennsylvania, tens of thousands of men died in a three-day long conflict. By its end, the tide of the war was turned and the eventual fate of the Confederacy sealed. Fittingly, it was here that Lincoln delivered his brief Address on November 19, 1863, arguably the most important political speech in American history.
The Gettysburg Address was ten sentences long and numbered 272 words. How important can two-hundred and seventy words be? In Lincoln at Gettysburg, Professor Wills helps us understand the power of the speech by dissecting its remarkable prose and by placing it in an historical context. He argues that Lincoln's speech, for a number of reasons, was a seminal event in American history. For one thing, it fundamentally changed the ways in which Americans spoke publicly, and therefore profoundly altered public discourse. More importantly, Professor Wills shows how Lincoln, through his words, defined liberty and equality, which had been invoked by Americans for decades, as the cornerstones of the experiment of the American nation. Because of this, Professor Wills argues, Lincoln's 272 words remade the United States forever, a transformation that continues to influence us today.
