I tend to be an "actions speak louder than works" kind of person. I think that, had the outcome of the war been different, maybe this speech would have meant nothing. I am not wholly convinced by his thesis that this one, very short speech totally changed most people's outlook on the constitution....
Perhaps I should put this in a trilogy including Explaining America and Inventing America. Here, Wills shows how Lincoln's Gettysburg Address foreshadowed our conception of the United States today (just a minor semantic example: prior to 1865, I would have written "these United States," as if I were...
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