In the 80 years since Elwin L. Page's Abraham Lincoln in New Hampshire was first published, many new documents have brought Lincoln's visit to the state into clearer focus. The letter Amos Tuck wrote to Lincoln on May 14, 1860, stands above the rest.

Had Page seen the Tuck letter, he would have had a higher opinion of New Hampshire's place in Lincoln's rise to the presidency. The letter would also have saved him from a logical but false assumption.

Lincoln gave four speeches in New Hampshire during the first three days of March 1860. Although his ambition for the presidency was growing, he was not quite a full-fledged candidate. He had come to the state to visit his son, Robert, a student at Phillips Exeter Academy. He also accepted invitations to speak at rallies in Concord, Manchester, Dover and Exeter to help get out the Republican vote for the coming gubernatorial election.

Published in 1929, Page's Abraham Lincoln in New Hampshire is a charming account of the speaking tour and its effect on Lincoln's prospects. Page, a New Hampshire Supreme Court justice from Concord, was a historian and Lincoln scholar on the side.

Years ago, I read Page's book with pleasure. Later, while researching my own projects, I began to run across material on Lincoln's visit that had been discovered after 1929. This is the natural order of things in history: Fresh finds change the story.

To my dismay, I also noticed that even some major historians were overlooking the new information and repeating Page's obsolete conclusions. I decided to do what I could to set the record straight.

The choices were to write a new study, drawing heavily on Page, or to revise Page's book, using the new material. I decided to update Page's book. His research and organization are first-rate, and his reader-friendly style has held up well for eight decades. Why sacrifice those qualities?

That said, Page would have done some things differently had he known

in 1929 what I knew in 2009. Among the most important discoveries were a long-lost newspaper account of Lincoln's Exeter speech, a letter he wrote to his wife Mary the day before he left New Hampshire and responses to Republican leaders elsewhere in the East who had invited him to speak.

But nothing better illustrates the way the story of Lincoln in New Hampshire has changed since 1929 than the Tuck letter.

Tuck was a founder of the Republican Party in New Hampshire. He and Lincoln had met while serving together in Congress in the late 1840s, Tuck as an antislavery Democrat, Lincoln as a Whig.

Because of this connection, Page was certain Tuck played a significant part in Lincoln's visit to the state in 1860. Tuck lived in Exeter, where Lincoln began and ended his New Hampshire sojourn. It stood to reason he spent time with Tuck. Page believed he did, even describing the route Lincoln walked to Tuck's house.

It turns out Lincoln never made it to Tuck's.

Ten weeks after Lincoln's New Hampshire speeches, Tuck arrived in Chicago as a delegate to the Republican national convention. On Monday, May 14, two days before the convention began, he wrote to his friend Lincoln. His letter was political in nature but closed with a thought that had been bothering Tuck. "I very much regretted that I was absent when you were at Exeter, and was sorry you did not Call upon my family, even in my absence," Tuck wrote.

As valuable as Page would have found this sentence, Tuck's letter contained a far more important revelation. "I take great satisfaction in assuring you," Tuck began, "that what I hoped might be practicable, when I left home, seems to me, when here, to be within the range of decided possibilities - I mean your nomination as Pres." Tuck was lobbying hard for Lincoln among the New England delegates, and making inroads.

Single page