Know Your Enemy - Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America

Matt and Sam discuss Garry Wills's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America.

Duration: 1h 31m
Broadcast on: 06 Jul 2026
Audio Format: other

We're ringing in the 250th anniversary of the United States with an episode on Garry Wills's superb, Pulitzer Prize-winning 1992 book, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade the America. It's central argument is that Abraham Lincoln succeeded in revolutionizing how Americans thought of the founding of their country, especially the Declaration of Independence, with the Gettysburg Address—a revolution not just in "thought" but in "style," one that placed the Declaration's assertion of equality at the very center of our political tradition. The book is one that only Garry Wills could have written, with his PhD in Classics allowing him to compare Lincoln's "funeral oration" to that of Pericles, with his long meditation on the American presidency and leadership preparing him to grasp the enormity of the task Lincoln set himself, and with his time at National Review in his youth helping him understand why the American right never forgave Lincoln for succeeding. We discuss all this and more in our conversation about one of our favorite writer's very best books.

Tickets for Sam's events: Tuesday with Tad Devine / Thursday with Dan Denvir.

Previous KYE episodes on Garry Wills:

Nixon Agonistes

The Kennedy Imprisonment (w/ Jeet Heer)

Bomb Power (w/ Madeleine Baker)

Sources:

Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (1992)

— Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (2010)

— "Martin Luther King Is Still on the Case!" Esquire, Aug 1, 1968

— "The Blind Teach Us to See," Boston Globe, Aug 20, 1970

Abraham Lincoln, "Letter to Joshua Speed," Aug 24, 1855

Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (1959)

Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order (1974)

Willmoore Kendall and George W. Carey, The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (1970)

...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Oh, right. Welcome listeners to episode 139 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sitman, your podcast co-host, and I'm here as always with my great friend, Sam Etherbell. Hello, Sam. Hi, Matt. Are you finally recovered from your birthday party last week? Fairly. I know. Same. I loved having you there. It was so fun. And Matt and Max did come down to Brooklyn. Not just Brooklyn, but Red Hook. I was texting with John Ganz from the pod before your party earlier that day. And he had this great line. He said, "You know, Sam occasionally has a benign perversity that he expresses, and having all his friends slept in Red Hook is one of them." That's true of me, for sure. Anyways, you were recovered in time for us to totally… I mean, I had such a blast talking about this book with you. Listeners, this episode is our latest entry in the wheels-pilled pick a book of Gary Wills to discuss at length on the show. And, of course, given that if you're listening to this, it'll be just two days after America turns 250, after July 4th. Of course, we're reading Gary's 1992 book Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln at Gettysburg, the words that remade America. What a book. We don't even need to say much about it. Other than it's Gary's kind of recounting of, well, so many fascinating kind of context, details for the Gettysburg Address, the intellectual backdrop to it, and then the revolution in how we understand the American founding, and more specifically, the Declaration, as Will says. Lincoln won. What he articulated in the Gettysburg Address. It's the common understanding of what it meant. Lincoln prevailed, and Gary explains why and how. Yeah, exactly. So I'm sure many listeners have done all kinds of July 4 things, or maybe read various July 4th articles and magazines and newspapers and stuff. After you listen to this episode, you'll probably realize just how much the rhetoric and language of commemoration of the founding of the United States is actually affected by what Lincoln accomplished at Gettysburg in the way that Will's described it in this book. It's a real eye-opening argument in that way. Yes. Well, I don't think we need to say anything else about it. Sam, you have two upcoming events. I insist you tell listeners about, so why don't you do that before we get to the other eyes? Sure. Sure. Very quickly, on Tuesday, it's July 7th, so that'll be tomorrow if you're listening to this on Monday. I'll be doing a talk at P&T Knitware in New York, in Manhattan, with Tad Devine, who's one of Bernie Sanders' campaign strategists in the 2016 election, on his book How the Democrats Screwed Bernie. So if you want to come and break our collective agreement not to relitigate the 2016 election, and instead do that for an hour or two with me and Tad, you can come see us there. And then also on Thursday, July 9th, at 630 at Rodeo, which is a bar in Brooklyn, I'll be co-hosting a fundraiser with friend of the show, Dan Denver, of the dig for a socialist who's running for the mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, David Morales. That'll be fun. That will be something you have to fork over some ducats for. But if you want to see me and Dan and a bunch of other cool people and support the spreading of sewer socialism in the cities of the Northeast Seaboard, then come to that. Well, as always, we're grateful to our partners at Descent, they sponsor the podcast. One thing that means is if you subscribe to know your enemy on our Patreon at patreon.com/knowyourenemy, for $10 a month, you not only get access to all of our bonus episodes and the Know Your Enemy Discord, but a free digital subscription to Descent. So please consider doing that. And as always, for $5 a month, if you subscribe, you can hear all of our bonus episodes and we've had some great ones lately. That's what I mean, you get to nerd out about politics sometimes. I know you, you tease me as the politics junkie, but hey, I'm not the one doing fundraisers for mayors in Providence. I know it's true. Yeah, I loved our episode we did on the, on the big wins for socialist in New York City. So if you want to hear that, subscribe. As always, we want to thank Jesse Brenneman, our intrepid producer, who did a great job with this episode, as he does with all of them, and Will Epstein, who does the music for the podcast. That's right. Well, shall we get to it? Yeah. Here's our episode on Gary Wills' profound, incredible 1992 book linking at Gettysburg, the words that remade America. Happy Independence Day. Yes. Oh, right, Samuel, let's get started. This episode has been a long time coming.

Transcription truncated.

Matt and Sam discuss Garry Wills's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America.