Trees, planted along carefully planned meandering roadways on sculptured hills, shaded the tombstones In an America steeped in Romanticism, cemeteries were laid out beyond the city as places for a transcendental contemplation of nature, death and duty. 19, when Lincoln delivered his address Garry Wills has not forgotten that it was a cemetery that Edward Everett and Abraham Lincoln had been invited to dedicate. The reburial of the Union dead was still under way on Leading citizen, arranged for the animals to be dragged into piles and burned, and, after considerable negotiation, he found workers to bury the men hastily in temporary graves. When the two great battered armies moved away from Gettysburg in July 1863, they left behind thousands of bodies of horses and men decaying in the summer sun.

This scholarly study of oratory begins with the stink of rotting corpses. Wills, despite the dismaying evidence that the proposition is still dishonored, has written a brilliant book demonstrating that Lincoln's More than sixscore since Abraham Lincoln committed this nation to that proposition. It has been more than tenscore years since Thomas Jefferson held it to be self-evident that all men are created equal Garry Wills has taken note, remembered and given our nation's greatest gathering of words, the Gettysburg Address, new urgency. 'THE world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.' June 7, 1992, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

Lincoln at Gettysburg by Garry Wills