An immigrant flees oppression to study the Great Emancipator - Gettysburg College professor and Hungarian immigrant Gabor S. Boritt's teaching of US Civil War history - includes related article on Boritt's escape from Hungary during October 1956 revolution

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 8, 1994 | by Greg Pierce

A refugee from the Soviet crackdown in Hungary has become one of the foremost U.S. experts on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. From Gettysburg, he works to educate his adopted countrymen.

Gabor S. Boritt sits in the study of his farmhouse near Gettysburg, Pa., not far from where Gen. George Pickett's men charged into history. At 54, Boritt is one of America's preeminent Civil War scholars - a long journey since the spring day in 1957 when he arrived from Hungary unable to speak English.

"In professional terms, one of the most difficult things in history is getting perspective," says the Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies at Gettysburg College, "and not having grown up here, I have it in some degree - the long view of things."

Boritt has seen much of war, narrowly escaping death as a child during World War II and again as a teenager during the Hungarian Revolution (see sidebar). Today, though, he lives on the quiet banks of Marsh Creek with his wife, Liz, and their three sons. Their house served as a Confederate hospital, and the land around it has the peculiar peacefulness of old battlefields. Thirty-six rebels were buried in its soil until the Daughters of the Confederacy arranged to have them sent home.

"Liz found this in a hedgerow", Boritt says, holding up his wife's latest souvenir, a bayonet. The edge of a bookshelf in the study is covered with bullets and arrowheads found on the farm.

Each summer, several hundred people spend a week at Gettysburg College learning about America's bloodiest war from Boritt, director of the college's Civil War Institute, and a host of prominent historians. Military matters dominate the conferences, but "some presentations defy easy categorization," notes Boritt, as when David Eisenhower spoke on "Dwight D. Eisenhower's Battle of Gettysburg," identifying his grandfather's connections to the town, and the battle's influence on the general during World War II.

James McPherson, whose Battle Cry of Freedom won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for history, has been a frequent and popular lecturer at the conference. Boritt points to him as the "ideal illustration" of what the institute tries to accomplish: "speak to the literate public about history without abandoning scholarly moorings."

But Boritt is being modest. No one personifies accessible scholarship better than this immigrant who arrived in New York at age 17 alone and penniless. To survive, Boritt did manual labor during the day and took high school classes at night. Someone told him to "go West, young man," because there he would find the real America. He enrolled at Yankton College in South Dakota. "It doesn't exist anymore," he says. "It's a penitentiary. My kids have no end of fun saying I graduated from a penitentiary."

At Yankton, however, he started reading The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, which helped him learn English. In his sophomore year, he wrote a term paper on Lincoln's economic ideas. He went on to make it his master's thesis at Yankton and doctoral dissertation at Boston University, where he also met his wife. "Her middle name - you can guess it - is Lincoln," he jokes.

Boritt had noticed something odd. Among the thousands of books about Lincoln, none had truly focused on his economic views. The young college teacher remedied that in 1978, when Memphis State University Press published Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream. "I hold the value of life is to improve one's condition," Lincoln told German immigrants in Cincinnati in 1861. "Whatever is calculated to advance the condition of the honest, struggling laboring man, so far as my judgment will enable me to judge of a correct thing, I am for that thing."

Boritt sketched a new view of Lincoln, uniting the young politician and the Great Emancipator. From the beginning, he wrote, Lincoln the legislator focused on ways the government could help average citizens achieve the American dream, advocating the financing of railroads and canals, the establishment of state and national banks, and a high tariff to protect fledgling industries. And in the end, Lincoln insisted on the same rights for blacks - "to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his hand earns." The book caused a stir among historians and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

"I think in many ways Lincoln was a symbol of the U.S. to me," Boritt says, "and studying him was in a way like saying, |I love the United States.'"

Boritt has received many honors, but perhaps nothing in his career received as much attention as his investigation of Lincoln's big toes. In 1978, doctors again raised the possibility that Lincoln suffered from Marfan's syndrome, a rare and fatal disease whose symptoms include long limbs and unusually large big toes. Some say its sufferers exhibit extraordinary intelligence.

Boritt had his doubts. The latest claim rested on a sketch of Lincoln as he lay on his deathbed; it showed big toes twice as long as the others, but the artist had based his work on a description.