Four score and seven versions ago

AS a child, President Lincoln wrote a bit of doggerel taunting all of us who would find him remarkable: “Abraham Lincoln is my nam[e] / And with my pen I wrote the same / I wrote it in both hast[e] and speed / and left it here for fools to read.” That this ignorant frontier boy became the author of some of the finest public language ever written is a mystery that will never fail to fascinate.

A boomlet of books about Lincoln’s oratory has flooded the market in recent years, including the seminal “Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America” by Garry Wills; “Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural” by Ronald C. White Jr.; and “Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President” by Harold Holzer. (I wonder, did a canny publisher urge Holzer to get “Lincoln” into the title twice?)

All are excellent, but Douglas L. Wilson takes the conversation to an even higher level in “Lincoln’s Sword” -- not easy to do with our most overanalyzed president. Wilson, a scholar at Illinois’ Knox College, restores the humanity behind the famous face we see every time we leave a few pennies in a dish by a cash register. He does so by arguing how difficult writing was for Lincoln, how essential the grind of getting the words right was to his well-being and how the result was prose that saved the republic.

We don’t always think of Lincoln as a writer. His oratory seems almost as if presented to Americans on tablets, ready to be engraved in marble. “Lincoln’s Sword” reveals Lincoln the craftsman, agonizing over every word. He was the opposite of a blogger; language came to him slowly, and his silences are as meaningful as his expressions. That’s why each word matters -- a foreign concept in today’s cacophony. The story is all the more interesting because Lincoln took steps to hide his labor. But Wilson is on to him. After years of painstaking research in the Library of Congress, going over multiple handwritten versions of each speech, he has a story to tell.

Wilson, who has written the best book on Lincoln’s youth, “Honor’s Voice,” here concentrates on his presidency. He begins with a reminder that almost no one expected the Illinois circuit lawyer to say or think anything interesting when he arrived in Washington. A leading Republican, Charles Francis Adams, called him “frivolous and uncertain.” A newspaper editor wondered aloud, “Who will write this ignorant man’s state papers?” Lincoln answered that question in his first inaugural address, stating his policy in firm tones and concluding with a rhapsodic appeal to our “better angels.”

Wilson then examines a series of public documents in which Lincoln stated his case, month after month, to the American people. He brings these state papers to life, showing us the rough drafts, the words crossed out and the cramped inserts of a man in a fever to get it just right. He also includes Lincoln’s less familiar letters to editors and private citizens, many of which arrived just in time to lance the poisonous doubt that dogged so much of the Civil War effort. We see Lincoln adapting each document to its audience, with a slang word here, a homespun metaphor there and a prudent monotone when the topic was hair-trigger sensitive. There is a reason that the Emancipation Proclamation has “all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading,” as historian Richard Hofstadter famously said. It had to be dull to avoid causing riots, as Wilson explains nicely: “It succeeded not by eloquence, but by inexquisite language exquisitely suited to the occasion.”

Lincoln could put on a fireworks show when he wanted. The speeches that especially move us -- his farewell address in Springfield, Ill., his two inaugurals, the Gettysburg Address -- are poetry in prose. Really, there’s nothing in our history to match them at showing grace under pressure. Now, thanks to Wilson, we can see the scaffolding employed by this Michelangelo. It does not detract from Lincoln’s prose to see the chisel marks and brush strokes up close -- on the contrary.

Wilson is surely right to suggest that Lincoln’s powers of persuasion began with an unusual, even radical sense of language and its possibilities. As a child, Lincoln’s stepmother remembered, he would write words down anywhere he could -- on boards, on tablets, on paper -- until he was sure of their meaning. Throughout his life as a lawyer and politician, he read whatever he wrote aloud, slowly and awkwardly, making sure that it persuaded him before it was allowed to persuade others. Newspaper editors republishing his speeches were always trying to “improve” his prose to make it conform to the bloated standards of the day; he wouldn’t budge “a hair’s breadth.”

Thank God. At a time when most Americans were confused, angry and frightened, his precision was exactly what people needed. Of course, then as now, most politicians were interested in obfuscation. Nearly two centuries after his birth, Lincoln seems as lonely and weird as he did to his contemporaries. There is simply no one like him.

Throughout “Lincoln’s Sword,” we see the writer at work, scribbling thoughts on tiny scraps of paper as they occurred to him (he believed in a slow gestation process), then pulling the scraps out of his pockets and desk drawers, giving them numbers and assembling them into a single text. There’s a surprising paint-by-numbers quality to his speeches, unknown until now.

Wilson doggedly tracks every shred Lincoln wrote upon. One page shows his handwriting shaking, as he felt the vibrations on a train. It’s as if we’re in the seat next to him. If “Lincoln’s Sword” is not as beautifully written as Wills’ “Lincoln at Gettysburg,” it’s a more scientific study -- and it’s thrilling to get as close as humanly possible to the moment of creation.

Even Lincoln’s deletions are intriguing. An 1862 veto message, for example, shows him striking out the sentence, “When you extinguish hope, you create desperation.” In a world too often given to expressions of both despair and false hope, it is moving to see how painstakingly this writer infused his words with genuine meaning. Avoiding cliches, distrusting the overuse of patriotic imagery and taking care to link his thoughts to actual policies, Lincoln did something very rare in our history. Instead of speaking the words “freedom,” “hope” and “victory,” he achieved them. *