In Memoriam: Gabor S. Boritt (1940-2026)

Editor’s Note: Emerging Civil War was saddened to hear of the death this week of Civil War scholar Gabor Boritt. He died on February 2, 2026, at the age of 86, having just celebrated his birthday, entering “his four score and seventh year,” according to his son, Jake. Boritt was founder of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College and co-founder of the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History and the Lincoln Prize. We are pleased to have ECW Contributing Editor Brian Matthew Jordan share this remembrance.

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It’s not difficult to understand why Abraham Lincoln appealed so powerfully to Gabor Boritt. In the unlikely story of that lanky Kentucky lad who rose above humble circumstances, in the tale of that self-educated son whose mastery of the English language became the very hope of self-government, in the humble, unpretentious manners of the intellectual giant who ended slavery and preserved democracy, Gabor Boritt saw a reflection of himself—and of what his adopted land could be.

Gabor was a talented historian who wrote in many registers: the finest scholarly treatment of Lincoln’s economic thought, still unsurpassed after nearly half a century; a narrative retelling of the drafting and delivery of the Gettysburg Address that achieved a wide readership; provocative essays, scholarly articles, and book reviews; even a Gettysburg battlefield tour guide. He was a fine historian, but at heart he was a prose poet, unafraid to bear something of his soul on the page. Not everyone appreciated that aspect of his work; some reviews scorched his last major effort, The Gettysburg Gospel, for its syntax and sentence fragments. But anyone who knew him understood that he wrote from the heart. He had a story to tell, and he told it. And he continued to tell it—even after a devastating stroke made the telling so much more difficult.

Gabor was a public historian before public history was a field, appreciating keenly the capacity of Civil War history to reach a broad lay audience. He understood that if you let it, the land would speak to you—which may be why you so often saw that well-worn red Toyota pickup puttering across the battlefield. He lovingly spared a dilapidated old Gettysburg field hospital from destruction and made it his treasured “Farm by the Ford,” where students were frequently guests. Decades before Civil War centers became fixtures at many colleges and universities, Gabor established—in 1983—the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. The ensuing summer conferences were innovations in so many ways: they connected academic historians with the lay public; they treated battles and military campaigns, but also histories of medicine and memory, art and the environment—all long before those subjects became professional preoccupations. The Civil War Institute brought together academic and public historians alike for lectures and battlefield tours. The papers delivered at those conferences seeded some of the most important edited volumes in our field, previewing, in many cases, field-defining works or up-and-coming scholars. But Gabor was convinced that the most important work accomplished over those many last weeks of June was the building of community—a real community of “old friends and new ones,” united by their shared passion for the Civil War. Each year, he convened the CWI with the recitation of a poem that he wrote, waxing about the beauty of Gettysburg summer (the “orange tiger lilies” proclaiming their “eternal message”), no less than the beauty of the friendships forged with fellow students of the war.

In the classroom, he was tough. He treated you like a peer and demanded that you work like one, too. There were no shortcuts. No reflection papers, no mere summaries of existing scholarship—no, Gabor demanded real research, real ideas, real conclusions.  His was a master class in becoming an historian. For his first-year seminar: write a twenty-five-page essay on how your hometown reacted to the Gettysburg Address. A score of years ago, before the advent of so many digital tools, that meant diligently cranking many reels of microfilm. And the resulting essays better not parrot back only what the newspapers said, or your paper would bleed with red ink, demanding deeper context and analysis. Around the seminar table, he demanded insightful readings of the Lincoln canon. Silently, he would listen as those around the table parsed Lincoln’s speeches and writings, gnawing on his index finger, at times seemingly nodding along in approval. And then, after a spell of silence, he would issue a stern rebuke to the interpretations advanced, explaining all that they had failed to consider (and then adding those very documents to the reading list for the next meeting). Seminar discussions were peppered with his store of aphorisms: “When life throws you a curve ball, throw it back.” “Folks, follow the evidence—this is what historians do.” Or the one he borrowed from Abraham Lincoln: “Work, work, work is the main thing,” advice (originally from Lincoln’s fragment for a law lecture) that became a staple feature on all his syllabi.

In the American Civil War, Gabor discovered the tale of a people coming to understand the ways of democracy. He remained committed to that project throughout his life. “Tearing Down Tyranny,” the op-ed that he published in the Wall Street Journal only days before the 2016 presidential election, was bold and eerily prescient—especially for one who had been a lifelong Republican. A young boy who had watched Nazi tanks trundle down the main street of Budapest, who later fled Communist oppression for his own “new birth of freedom,” was not about to sacrifice the “last best hope of Earth” to the worst urges of nativism or self-interest. He saw a gathering threat but never lost faith that America would do the right thing. Gabor never doubted that America was a nation of immigrants, held together by the strength of its ideas; he knew it yet had work to do in the world. And it still does. Though immeasurably more difficult than even he predicted a decade ago, the work of safeguarding democracy will be made easier with Gabor’s work and life as example and guide.

Gabor never knew a stranger, only old and new friends. Whether you were the president of the United States or a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, whether you were a college student or a Civil War aficionado, he treated you with respect and issued the same greeting: that beaming, toothy smile and the loving embrace, the heart-felt declaration that it was “so good to see you.”  Well, it was so good to know you, so good to learn from you, so good to share but a bit part of your inimitable life. Farewell, old friend. Like your beloved orange tiger lilies growing along the side of the road, in my mind no less than on my heart, you have written an eternal message.