The Historian and His Friend Abe : Civil War: James McPherson delivers final lecture at the Huntington Library’s Lincoln exhibit. He also discusses his opposition to a proposed Disney theme park near battle sites in Virginia.

James McPherson was leading the way through the Huntington Library on Sunday, pointing out some of his favorite things among the mementos of his old friend, Abraham Lincoln.

There was the Emancipation Proclamation, of course, and the bills (one for $5) that Lincoln sent out as a young Illinois lawyer, and letters written about whether he should run for the presidency.

McPherson knows them all, for he was one of the organizers of the much-praised Lincoln exhibit at the San Marino library.

He is also a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose book “Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era” is widely held to be one of the best works on that oft-studied subject.

McPherson, who has taught history at Princeton University for 30 years--and acted as a consultant for the much-hailed PBS special “The Civil War”--was at the Huntington to give the concluding lecture in a series that began in January about the Civil War and its time. But just before addressing the crowd of about 300, he took yet another quick tour of the exhibit, the biggest, in both size and scope, that the library has ever assembled.

“I guess my favorite things are Lincoln’s letters, to see the evolution of his political ideas,” said McPherson, standing next to one of the cabinets containing several missives from Lincoln to friends and colleagues as the Civil War was about to begin.

In times gone by, McPherson could have moved with the anonymity of most academic historians who write scholarly tomes that are immediately relegated to library shelves. But the immense popularity of his Civil War book has made him into something of a star.

Of late, that stardom has embroiled McPherson, along with other noted historians, in a flap involving the Walt Disney Co. He has lent his name, as have such notables as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Shelby Foote, against Disney’s America, a proposed $650-million historical theme park in Prince William County, Va. He and other historians have maintained that the theme park would threaten a number of historical sites close by. Disney Chairman Michael Eisner added to the controversy this month by taking his own shot at the historians.

“I sat through many history classes where I read some of their stuff, and I didn’t learn anything,” Eisner was quoted as saying. “It was pretty boring.”

McPherson said he was more encouraged now than he had been a month ago that the theme park might be blocked and that Disney officials might be encouraged to move it to a new location. He has warned that development sprawl “would desecrate the ground over which men fought and died.”

At the library--whose Lincoln exhibit was recently extended to November--McPherson was standing near a bust of the 16th President as he talked further about the Disney project.

“We may stop them on the grounds that this is really bad for the preservation of historic sites and that it is hurting their image,” McPherson said.

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By now, he was running a little late for his lecture. His subject for the day was how important the Emancipation Proclamation had been in convincing other nations that the Union was on the side of right of the Civil War.

“The American sense of mission invoked by Lincoln--the idea that this New World experiment was a beacon of freedom for oppressed peoples everywhere--is as old as the Mayflower Compact and as new as an apparent American victory in the Cold War,” he told the audience.