As inevitably as crocuses sprouting to herald spring's arrival comes a rash of books about Abraham Lincoln anticipating the Presidents Day that has replaced his Feb. 12 birthday celebration.

Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, in the Dred Scott decision requiring free states to return escaped slaves seeking sanctuary, was in great part responsible for Lincoln's rise from obscurity to the presidency.

Taney gave Lincoln a cause to champion. In "Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney: Slavery, Secession, and the President's War Powers" (Simon & Schuster, 2007 paperback, 325 pp.), James F. Simon of the New York Law School re-examines the adversarial relationship between Lincoln and Taney, but also demonstrates that the pair shared many affinities of viewpoints that historians have neglected.

Equally important to Lincoln's emergence on the national scene was his relationship with Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, whom he debated tenaciously in the 1858 Illinois race for the U.S. Senate. He lost that race, but gained national visibility for his articulation of anti-slavery and nationalistic sentiments ("a house divided against itself cannot stand"), and two years later won the presidency. Douglas and Lincoln off-stage remained friends, and Douglas was a strong supporter of Lincoln in the turmoil of Lincoln's first days as president (as Wendell Wilkie would be of his adversary, Franklin Rooosevelt, when War War II came along). In his "Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America" (Simon & Schuster, 2008, 383 pp.), Allen C. Guelzo of Gettysburg College casts the Lincoln-Douglas relationship in philosophical terms of conflicting views on the relative roles of majority rule, states' rights and just social orders. Guelzo's analysis of the 1858 election results (Lincoln actually got more votes than did Douglas but lost because of districting practices) and of the use of telegraphs and newspapers to nationalize that election is particularly relevant today.

Who decided that civil war was inevitable, and who made it happen? Historians have blamed Southern secessionism, slavery impasses, western expansion squabbles, media opinion-molders and fire-eaters on both sides.

Russell McClintock, in his "Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession" (UNC Press, 2008, 388 pp.), places the decision for war squarely upon Lincoln's shoulders. Northern opinion was divided over whether to let the seceding states leave in peace. Lincoln believed the Union had to be preserved despite political polarizations that had paralyzed the nation all the way back to Martin Van Buren's presidency. At Fort Sumter, Lincoln caused the rebels to fire the first shot in what seemed an inevitable conflict. Once engaged, Northern sentiment slowly followed Lincoln's leadership, moving from war over political balances to war to save the Union and then into war to eradicate slavery. Lincoln, the gawky spinner of aphorisms and frontier folk humor, and a president who had only a short and undistinguished few years of service in the House of Representatives before being president, became the personification of "the right man at the right time," proof that a single person can change and make history.

Despite the evolution and shifts in rationale for the war, its meaning became much clearer as it drew to a close. In pithier and more inspired language than his remarkable Emancipation Proclamation and his contemplative Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln encapsulated the war's meaning in his Gettysburg Address, Nov. 19, 1863. To my thinking, in 1992 Garry Wills wrote the definitive word on the 250-word speech in "Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America," demonstrating that Lincoln deliberately revised the Constitution by reinterpreting the Declaration of Independence.

But, beyond Wills, Gabor Boritt (of Gettysburg College, like Allen Guelzo), in "The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows" (Simon & Schuster paperback, 2008, 417 pp.), pulls together incredibly daunting research that gives us the geography, the decay and odors, the behind-the-scenes personal stories, the newspaper treatments and mistreatments, and the shifts in public appreciation and historical interpretation over the subsequent 145 years. The appendix, footnotes, bibliography and index for his book take up 211 pages -- over half the book. Even so, Boritt cannot unlock the long-standing mystery of when Lincoln actually wrote his speech. Boritt seems to believe it was two pages long, and that he wrote the first page in Washington before going and the second sometime the night before while a guest in the home of David Wills, overseer of the cemetery's creation and of the dedication ceremonies. Wills gave meaning, but Boritt gives context and consequences to an unforgettable speech.

Larry McGehee, professor-emeritus at Wofford Coellege, may be reached by e-mail at mcgeheelt@wofford.edu.

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