Lincoln's Sword

August 28, 2006
Ever since publication of Garry Wills's Pulitzer Prize–winning Lincoln at Gettysburg
(1992), the woods have been alive with considerations of Lincoln's rhetoric, both spoken and written, by among others Henry Mark Holzer, Allen C. Guelzo and Ronald C. White. Thus this new work by Wilson (author of the Lincoln Prize winner Honor's Voice
) is necessarily redundant. Wilson's emphasis—aside from placing key remarks into historical context—is on applying excruciatingly detailed and tireless (sometimes tiresome) textual analysis to such utterances as Lincoln's farewell to Springfield, Ill.; the First Inaugural; the July 4th, 1861, message to Congress; the Emancipation Proclamation; and the Gettysburg Address. Robert Lincoln recalled his father as "a very deliberate writer, anything but rapid." It is Lincoln's very deliberate, painstaking, multidraft process that Wilson seeks to document. Readers deeply immersed in Lincoln trivia will find Wilson's intricate forensics inviting. Others, nurturing a more casual interest, will fast find themselves drowned in details of subtle variations between drafts of Lincoln's various major addresses, all so carefully dissected in order to reveal the mechanical, trial-and-error process that lay behind Lincoln's soaring eloquence. 50 b&w illus.

January 1, 2015

By examining Lincoln's private correspondence and speeches during his presidency, Wilson determines that Lincoln became a deft manipulator of words as he shaped public opinion on slavery and emancipation, civil liberties, African Americans in the military, the necessity of the Union, and the meaning of the war. (LJ 11/1/06)

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.