“If I am to speak for ten minutes, I need a week for preparation,” President Woodrow Wilson once famously said. “If fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.”

Seven score and three years ago next week — on November 19, 1863 — President Abraham Lincoln, like Wilson, a beleaguered president of a war-riven nation, proved himself more than ready. Though the time Lincoln required for preparation remains a matter of mystery (two weeks? Two days? Last minute?), he managed that day, speaking from a wooden platform in the freshly dug national soldiers’ cemetery at the battle-scarred village of Gettysburg, to offer arguably the greatest oration ever delivered on American soil. Lincoln used barely two minutes to pronounce some 270 words that changed America. Or did they?

The debate about the immediate impact of the Gettysburg Address has been percolating anew among scholars since 1992, when Garry Wills published his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Speech That Remade America.” Mr. Wills argued Lincoln accomplished revolutions in both thought and style with those “few appropriate remarks” (the surprisingly brusque words his host used to invite him). “Because of it,” Mr. Wills wrote of the speech, “we live in a different America.”

According to Douglas L. Wilson, co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. (no relation to Woodrow, though he did exhume the Wilsonian quote with which I began this essay), Mr. Wills was right. Lincoln’s “alluring affirmation of the nation’s ideals,” he declares in his new book, “Lincoln’s Sword” (Knopf, 352 pages, $26.95), would “gradually become ingrained in the national consciousness.” Gabor Boritt, Director of the Civil Institute at Gettysburg College, does not disagree. But his definition of “gradually” does. Mr. Wilson argues for prompter immortality, maintaining the address was “recognized at once by some discerning observers as something notable.”

Mr. Boritt, on the other hand, contends in his own new book, “The Gettysburg Gospel” (Simon & Schuster, 432 pages, $28), that Lincoln’s triumph was little appreciated during what was left of his lifetime, struck some observers at the time as too political (the first thrust in his 1864 campaign for re-election),and only achieved legendary status much later — when an increasingly racist America found comfort in re-interpreting its ringing endorsement of equality into a plea for nationalism and endurance during war. “A generation had to pass,” writes Mr. Boritt, “before his ‘few appropriate remarks’ grew into the Gettysburg Address.”

The authors’ debate does not end here. Both marvel at Lincoln’s ability to create so complex a talk so quickly. But Mr. Wilson thinks he labored longer and harder on the speech than does Mr. Boritt, who — recalling, then dismissing, the old legend that the president dashed it off on the back of an envelope aboard the rocking train to Pennsylvania — makes a strong case for the idea that the inspirited president really did compose it in a breathtakingly brief time. Mr. Wilson contends Lincoln folded the text he took to the cemetery on November 19; Mr. Boritt thinks he didn’t. As to its reception, Mr. Boritt argues the appreciative crowd interrupted Mr. Lincoln five times for polite applause, while Mr. Wilson insists the speech fell on the audience like a “wet blanket” (supposedly Lincoln’s own rueful words), so unexpectedly brief it was greeted by perplexed silence. Yet Mr. Wilson argues that Lincoln didn’t much care how thousands heard the speech, only how millions would read it — “the verdict of real consequence.” As if in re-rebuttal, Mr. Boritt shows how many newspapers of the day not only reproduced the text, but also mangled it (“Four score and ten years ago,” reported the Chicago Times).

Who is right? For generations, historians — William E. Barton, Frank Klement, Louis A. Warren, David Mearns, Alan Nevins, Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., and of course, Mr. Wills, to name a few — have been arguing these same points. Never have so many words been written about so few. Mr. Boritt’s is but the latest in a long string of books about Lincoln’s most famous speech. It probably will not be the last. But it may well be the best, and it boasts enough new insights to cast the entire episode in a new light. Mr. Wilson’s may be the finest book yet produced about Lincoln’s uncanny creative process. Happily, readers need not choose sides on ancillary matters to appreciate the bravura triumphs both Mr. Boritt and Mr. Wilson have contributed to the bulging, but ever accommodating, Lincoln bookshelf. Each makes a major contribution to scholarship with highly readable works that convincingly portray Lincoln as a manifestly talented wordsmith and politically astute judge (and molder) of the American mood.

In a way, it must be admitted, it is a bit of a stretch to make a such controversy out of Mr. Boritt’s and Mr. Wilson’s dueling Gettysburg interpretations, although their little differences should prove much fun to argue on the Lincoln banquet circuit that re-commences this weekend at the annual Lincoln Forum in Gettysburg (where Mr. Boritt, the town’s bestknown historian, will deliver a lecture about his new book).

In truth, Mr. Wilson devotes but one of his nine chapters to the Gettysburg Address. Before and after, he produces riveting analyses of Lincoln’s congressional messages, inaugural PleaseseeLINCOLN, page16addresses, and other orations of style and substance. Mr. Boritt, quite stunningly, devotes almost as much of his book to the town of Gettysburg as he does to the speech Lincoln gave there. With novelistic sweep informed by much new research, Mr. Boritt describes how Gettysburg transformed churches into hospital wards for the wounded and saw its free black population cruelly dispersed. Mr. Boritt makes us see, feel, and even smell this holocaust.

Incidentally, as Mr. Boritt reminds us, Lincoln later came down with a mild case of smallpox on the train back to Washington, and likely infected his African-American valet, William Johnson, who tended to him en route home. Lincoln recovered, but Johnson died, and the president — whether out of guilt or, as Mr. Boritt somewhat harshly concludes, for political purposes (“It might even get into a campaign biography”) — paid for his burial at Arlington. It was an honor rare for a black man, and a poignant postscript to the battle that had been waged for a new birth of freedom, at which, ironically, no “colored troops” had fought. Contrary to Lincoln’s modest, almost disingenuous, prediction on the speaker’s platform, the world never forgot what he said there, but apparently never remembered what he did afterward. It is a wrenching back-story.

More significantly, Honest Abe, the renowned orator who seldom spoke publicly after 1860, neither disclosed the political motives behind his rare presidential visit to Gettysburg, nor acknowledged his literary debt to Daniel Webster or Theodore Parker for inventing the phrase, “government of, by, and for the people.” But true to the better angels of Lincoln’s nature, this writer has a disclosure or two to share about the authors of the books under discussion, and this is perhaps the right moment to offer them.

Gabor Boritt has been a friend for nearly 30 years, and was, with Mark E. Neely Jr., my co-author on three books in the 1980s, plus a 2001 essay on “Lincoln and Modern Art.” I have known Douglas Wilson for only half that time, but I consider him a friend as well. He serves as an official advisor to the U. S. Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, which I co-chair — and on which Gabor Boritt serves as a fellow Commissioner. It’s a rather tangled world, this little sphere of ours; we “can not escape history,” as Lincoln once wrote — or escape our fellow historians, either.

Speaking of Lincoln’s own, original “we can not escape history” speech — the phrase that began the peroration of his stunning 1862 annual message to Congress — it is one of the other oratorical hits Mr. Wilson places under forensiclike scrutiny in “Lincoln’s Sword.” With the perceptive eye of a historian who has also taught American literature, he begins with each finished composition, then meticulously peels away layer upon layer of draft and edit to unearth the spiritual and political core of each. The result is new insight into the creative process of a writer whom yet another Wilson — in this case Edmund — convincingly believed, “alone among American Presidents,”could have been “a distinguished writer of a not-merely political kind.”

Other scholars have studied what Lincoln wrote, but none has focused so often on what Lincoln did not write. Mr. Wilson’s book is a concerto of words intriguingly re-configured or crossed out (“Broken eggs can never be mended” was one prosaic clunker Lincoln wisely deleted from an otherwise enthralling letter to New York editor Horace Greeley in 1862). We observe phrases painstakingly altered and massaged, improved and perfected. We see Lincoln striving for rhythms other politicians could barely hear, much less compose, perhaps because, as Mr. Wilson argues, Lincoln “considered himself a failed poet,” and thereafter aimed at a new political dialectic that came close to prose poetry. (Daniel Mark Epstein went further last year, arguing in “Lincoln and Whitman” [2004] that Lincoln transformed his style after reading “Leaves of Grass.”)

In the end, Mr. Wilson agrees with Mr. Boritt that Lincoln reached his oratorical apogee at Gettysburg — though he makes a strong argument, too, for the Second Inaugural Address, offered “with malice toward none, with charity for all” 16 months later. Mr. Boritt goes further, arguing that the inaugural was “the culmination” of his earlier speech, and with the Gettysburg elegy comprises Lincoln’s vision of national redemption. But, as Mr. Boritt shows, Americans have accorded no other speech in our history the altar we have built for the Gettysburg Address.

In attempting, as he posits, “to clear away the range of meanings later generations laid upon” it, Mr. Boritt deftly reminds us that while Americans originally built statues celebrate emancipation such focus grew distasteful after Reconstruction ended and racism returned, unfettered, to the South (and North). Slowly, then steadily, icons began appearing to honor Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg. Boritt’s final chapter, “Gloria,” provides the definitive historiographical, sociological, and iconographical survey of its cascading reputation.

Inevitably, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Boritt have each, in their own way, burnished the Gettysburg legend with their profound books, providing the scholarship, wisdom, and craft to render its luster more brilliant. There is no myth-deflation in either, no grand revelations; the new discoveries occur around the edges of a well-known story, but they are riveting nonetheless. Yet in reading them, and unavoidably recalling the banal political rhetoric to which we have all been subjected this recent election season, few will escape the sad truth that we no longer expect our presidents to write the words they utter, much less to inspire us — or the ages — with what they are given to read publicly.

Tellingly, Mr. Boritt’s Gettysburg book ends on another battlefield, the site of New York’s World Trade Center, where on the first anniversary of its destruction, Governor George E. Pataki consecrated the tragedy of our own young century by offering to a crowd assembled at Ground Zero the words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Mr. Boritt prints the full speech at just this point, on the final page of his narrative; until this coda he does not offer the complete text. It is a rather odd decision, but worth exploring.

Governor Pataki’s predecessor, Mario M. Cuomo — no slouch himself when it comes to Lincoln — bemoaned the re-offering of the Gettysburg Address on September 11, 2002, as dispiriting evidence that our current leaders cannot, and will not even try to, match Lincoln’s brilliance, instead retooling him for their own advantage. Mr. Boritt, on the other hand, makes a compelling case in “The Gettysburg Gospel” (he says so twice) that “in the twenty-first century, Americans are still saying this is who we are.”

The truth is, all four men have valid points. Lincoln composed the greatest of all American speeches in a unique burst of inspiration inflected by a lifetime of evolving political thought and repressed poetic inclination. The speech gave articulate meaning to the sacrifice required for “a new birth of freedom,” revived both a wounded town and the Northern psyche, and defined national purpose, proving perhaps more decisive as a Civil War turning point than the Battle of Gettysburg itself. It attained mythical status in part because of its prayer-like brevity, its supposedly indifferent original reception, and its easy adaptation to represent shifting national purpose. It still resonates. And, of course, our modern leaders cannot possibly surpass it.

Should they try? That is the subject for another essay.

Mr. Holzer is the author of “Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham” which won a 2005 Lincoln Prize, among many other awards.