A s New Hampshire joins in the observance of Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday today, it also celebrates a special connection with the 16th president. Many of the state's leading politicians played vital roles, for better and for worse, in Lincoln's career.

Throughout his life, Lincoln asserted that the founding fathers favored the extinction of slavery to achieve a more perfect union. When that vexing issue gained impetus during the mid-1840s, Lincoln was alert to the danger of slavery's expansion and ready to act.

He was not alone. To oppose slavery expansion, Amos Tuck of Exeter split with the Democratic Party and helped found the weekly Independent Democrat in 1845. Practicing the partisan journalism of the day, the paper relentlessly promoted John Parker Hale of Dover, the nation's first independent antislavery U.S. senator. It also persuaded voters to send Tuck to Congress, where he served with another freshman congressman, Abraham Lincoln. George G. Fogg, the Gilmanton lawyer who moved to Concord to edit the newspaper, eventually became national secretary of Lincoln's presidential campaign.

For these early members of what would become the Republican Party, the road to their dream was long and arduous. The U.S. victory in the Mexican War, which they opposed, set them back. Then Daniel Webster, a New Hampshire native, helped craft the compromise of 1850, which seemed to settle the slavery issue.

'Monstrous injustice'

It was New Hampshire's only president, Franklin Pierce, who revived the antislavery cause. In 1854, he embraced and signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, opening northern territories to slavery. Like Hale, Tuck, Fogg and other northern antislavery politicians, Lincoln could barely contain his fury. "The monstrous injustice of slavery," he argued, "deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world (and) enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites."

Lincoln's speeches against Kansas-Nebraska and his debates with Stephen Douglas in their 1858 Senate race enhanced his reputation in Illinois and beyond. Soon after Douglas defeated him, he became a long-shot contender for the presidency.

Lincoln delivered a major antislavery speech at Cooper Union in New York City on Feb. 27, 1860. When Republican activists learned that he had decided to take advantage of this eastern trip to see his son Robert, a student at Philips Exeter Academy, they implored him to share his message in New Hampshire. Lincoln obliged them.

New Hampshire visit

In 1860, the man we revere as an American icon was like the union he revered, still a work in progress. The Lincoln of the Alexander Gardner portraits and the Lincoln Memorial remained rough-hewn, clean-shaven, gangly-legged. Those who knew him appreciated Lincoln's talents, but the country was just taking notice of him. Then, as now, his motivation for speaking in New Hampshire was not the state's handful of electoral votes (five at the time) but the chance to test his presidential ambitions. Lincoln was betting audiences would like him, and he was right.

Four times in three days, Lincoln spoke to packed houses. On March 1, he appeared in the afternoon at Concord's Phenix Hotel and in the evening at Smyth's Hotel in Manchester, where former mayor Frederick Smyth introduced him as "the next president of the United States." At the Dover town hall, Lincoln addressed what one scholar called an "astounding" assemblage of nearly 2,000 listeners. The next day, he spoke at Exeter.

In each instance there was initial surprise in the audience, even among ardent Republicans, at Lincoln's rough appearance, with neckwear awry and hair unkempt. Marshall Snow, a student at Exeter, recalled whispering to a friend: "Isn't it too bad Bob's father is so homely? Don't you feel sorry for him?"

But, Snow noticed, Lincoln "untangled those long legs," drew himself up to his full height and began speaking. "Not ten minutes had passed before . . . his uncouth appearance was absolutely forgotten by us boys. . . . His face lighted up and the man was changed, it seemed absolutely like another person speaking to us. . . . There was no more pity for our friend Bob; we were proud of his father."

In Elwin Page's valuable account of Lincoln in New Hampshire, Lincoln's butterfly-like transformation repeated itself wherever he appeared. Lincoln was an awkward speaker with a high-pitched voice, but initial doubts about him gave way to engagement. It was his argument that connected - what Edward H. Rollins, a leading Concord Republican and instant convert, called an "invincible logic."

Lincoln turned a phrase in these speeches that has remained part of our language: "Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it." These words elicited cheers everywhere. As Rollins told a friend, "It was unquestionably . . . the most candid, convincing, and effective speech which we have had in Concord for years."

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