Words and history.(Lincoln's Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words)(The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows)(Book review)

Lincoln's Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words, by Douglas L. Wilson (Knopf, 352 pp., $26.95)

The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows, by Gabor Boritt (Simon & Schuster, 432 pp., $28)

WILLIAM SEWARD, the secretary of state, was not alone among Lincoln's cabinet members in thinking he should have been president instead of that crude individual from Illinois. But by March 4, 1861, Seward felt comfortable enough in his relations with Lincoln to suggest some language for the Inaugural Address. Seward proposed: "The mystic chords which, proceeding from so many battlefields and so many patriotic graves, pass through all the hearts and all hearths in this broad continent of ours, will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation."

Not at all bad. Lincoln made it immortal: "The mystic chords of memory stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

Lincoln's "mystic chords" do not "proceed" but are "stretching," which is more kinetic as well as colloquial, and they are stretching not from "so many battlefields" but from "memory," adding psychological plausibility and also the alliteration of "mystic" and "memory." Lincoln changes Seward's plural to singular in "living heart and hearthstone," as if speaking to a particular home, and again employs alliteration. He appeals to the visual and distinctively American imagination with the sweep of "all over this broad land." Lincoln's masterstroke, however, is to change the faux-supernatural cliche "guardian angel of our nation" to "the better angels of our nature," which shifts from divine agency to "our nature" at its best. Latent in this entire passage we find a comprehensive metaphor identifying the "Union" with a (political) Heaven in which those better angels of our nature touch and play upon those "mystic chords." On that March 4, however, even as he evoked the Heaven of Union, seven states had already seceded, others were on the edge, and so Lincoln also vowed to do his sworn duty as protector of the Constitution, emphasizing that he would protect federal property throughout the South. His prose poem has the smell of gunpowder and a core of steel.

Douglas Wilson, co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College, begins his study of Lincoln's oratorical genius with the remarks the president-elect made from the train platform at Springfield, Ill., on February 11, 1861, as he left for Washington, D.C., "with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington." Did Lincoln even then know, given the magnitude of the looming secession crisis, that he would have to re-found the nation? That he might have to give it the "new birth of freedom" he would proclaim as the meaning of the war in his Gettysburg Address?

He had been through the debates with Stephen Douglas, wielding the "all men are created equal" of the Declaration as his "sword," as Douglas Wilson calls it. Under the pressure of history, Lincoln gave those words of 1776 a new and profounder meaning beyond their "original intent." Gabor Boritt, director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, understands--it is one of the many excellences of his new book, The Gettysburg Gospel--that "a living faith evolves, combining the 'ancient faith' with present needs." At Gettysburg, Boritt maintains, Lincoln "gave new life and new meaning to Jefferson's Declaration." The pressure of history shapes language, and the living language continues to shape history.