The Republican Party was born at a meeting convened by former New Hampshire Congressman Amos Tuck on Oct. 12, 1853. That gathering in Exeter brought former Whigs, disgruntled Democrats, Free Soil men and Know-Nothings together to assert a truth they held to be self-evident: Slavery must not be allowed to expand.

The nation was suffering from the terrible flaw at its heart: the contradiction between "all men are created equal" and the South's "peculiar institution." For decades, the South had been trying to force its sick system on the entire country, demanding new territories for slavery's expansion, insisting that free states honor fugitive slave laws, and pushing for the institution's permanent protection.

Amos Tuck and his allies did more than found a party opposed to the slave power. As Abraham Lincoln in New Hampshire reminds us, Granite Staters played a decisive role in picking that party's first president - and freedom's great champion.

First published in 1929, Abraham Lincoln in New Hampshire is an improbably thrilling study of Lincoln's fateful 1860 visit to four New Hampshire cities. Its author, Elwin Page (1876-1974) was an associate justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court whose talents for lucid prose and stubborn research also suited his avocation, New Hampshire history.

As a young man, Page sometimes wrote for the Concord Monitor, and it's altogether right and fitting that a new edition of Abraham Lincoln in New Hampshire should be introduced and updated by Monitor editor emeritus Mike Pride, another ardent chronicler of New Hampshire history. Pride weaves new sources into Page's text with a collaborative grace that both pays homage to and significantly improves upon Page's original.

When history comments on Lincoln's trip East in the late winter of 1860, it rightly emphasizes the importance of his lecture at Cooper Union in New York City, often referred to, Pride notes, "as 'the speech that made Lincoln president.' " The New England speaking tour that followed is generally treated as a footnote, "an afterthought worthy of little attention."

Abraham Lincoln in New Hampshire begs to differ: "Meeting and speaking directly with the state's political leaders paid Lincoln quick dividends." Lincoln's speeches in Concord, Manchester, Dover and Exeter didn't create a national sensation, but they won him a majority of New Hampshire delegates. New Hampshire was the second state to answer the roll call in the Chicago convention's first ballot; the state's enthusiasm for Lincoln was startling and decisive, sparking wildfire conversions. Lincoln was nominated on the third ballot.

Concerning the why and how of Lincoln's trip East, emphasis on the Cooper Union speech wags the dog. Lincoln didn't come East to speak in New York; he took advantage of a paid speaking engagement at Cooper Union to underwrite his real purpose: visiting Robert Todd Lincoln, then a student at Phillips Academy in Exeter. The year before, Robert had botched his Harvard entrance exam. In later years, Page writes, Robert used to say "that his abysmal flunk of Harvard . . . made his father President."

A narrative of small occurrences with great consequences, Abraham Lincoln in New Hampshire fascinates because its limited scope - a few days' travel, a few public appearances, a father's visit to his son - allows great depth of focus. A biography might summarize the entire trip with a sentence or two from a single eyewitness; Lincoln in New Hampshire offers generous testimony from multiple points of view. We meet Lincoln through the eyes of numerous citizens; most make remarkably similar passages from skepticism to awe.

"My eyes were all for Lincoln," one lecture-goer recalled. "I saw a man whose face impressed me as one of the saddest and most melancholy faces that I had ever seen. His hair was rumpled, his neckwear was all awry, he sat somewhat bent in the chair, and altogether presented a very remarkable, and, to us, disappointing appearance."

But witness after witness experienced a transformation: "He rose slowly . . . drew himself up to his full height of six feet, four inches, and began his speech. Not ten minutes had passed before his uncouth appearance was absolutely forgotten. . . . His face lighted up and the man was changed."

In each of his talks, Lincoln displayed his persuasive gift. "It was not oratory," Page writes, but "scholarship of the profoundest sort, falling from the lips of a man untutored by schools but genuinely educated."

Lincoln offered extraordinarily clear explanations of the country's dilemma: "We are a nation of about thirty millions - nearly one sixth slaves, owned as property by a small portion of the rest, who insist upon its protection by government as other property. As this property is valued at $2,000,000,000, it is not strange that the holders of it should not agree with us in regarding it as an evil. It has been said that the truth of the Bible could not be seen through a guinea, and it is not strange that the slaveholders cannot see the truth of this matter through two thousand millions of dollars."

In his debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln had declared, "I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free."

When we insist on controlling what does not belong to us - in Lincoln's time, human beings; in our time, other nations and their resources - we distort our society, our laws and the meaning of the American experiment. Abraham Lincoln in New Hampshire is an inspiring study of a politician confronting crisis and free people reclaiming their principles.

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