Lincoln at Cooper Union

The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President

Harold Holzer

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781416547945
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Winner of the Lincoln Prize Lincoln at Cooper Union explores Lincoln's most influential and widely reported pre-presidential address -- an extraordinary appeal by the western politician to the eastern elite that propelled him toward the Republican nomination for president. Delivered in New York in February 1860, the Cooper Union speech dispelled doubts about Lincoln's suitability for the presidency and reassured conservatives of his moderation while reaffirming his opposition to slavery to Republican progressives.Award-winning Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer places Lincoln and his speech in the context of the times -- an era of racism, politicized journalism, and public oratory as entertainment -- and shows how the candidate framed the speech as an opportunity to continue his famous "debates" with his archrival Democrat Stephen A. Douglas on the question of slavery.Holzer describes the enormous risk Lincoln took by appearing in New York, where he exposed himself to the country's most critical audience and took on Republican Senator William Henry Seward of New York, the front runner, in his own backyard. Then he recounts a brilliant and innovative public relations campaign, as Lincoln took the speech "on the road" in his successful quest for the presidency.

Chapter One

---

“Abe Lincoln Must Come”

THE TRAIN BEARING a weary but exultant Abraham Lincoln home from nearby De Witt County lumbered into Springfield, Illinois, early on Saturday evening, October 15, 1859. No one was on hand there to greet him. Lincoln disembarked, strode past the brick depot, and commenced the brief, four-block walk along the gas-lit streets that led to his house. The weather was “fine and bracing,” with a touch of frost biting the air.¹

The practicing attorney had spent the last five days at Clinton, a village some forty miles to the northeast, busily “attending court,” as he innocuously put it. But ever the politician, he had kept one eye keenly fixed on fast-approaching state election contests in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, and perhaps most crucial of all, Ohio. Just a few weeks earlier, Lincoln had stumped tirelessly for Republican candidates there, delivering rousing addresses at both Columbus and Cincinnati, rebutting, one after another, earlier speeches by his perennial rival, the “Little Giant” of the Democratic party, Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas. The night before Lincoln’s return home, voters across the country went to the polls, Republicans triumphed everywhere, and his admirers in Clinton gathered to toast “Long Abraham” the “Giant Killer.” Convivial though it was, the party paled in comparison to the celebration awaiting him the next evening in Springfield.

Here, not long after he settled in at home, a surprised Lincoln was welcomed by a “vast multitude” of “several hundred” cheering Republicans. As a brass band serenaded Lincoln from the street, the crowd shouted for him to step outside and speak. Soon they would importune Lincoln to walk farther, and the procession would head boisterously over to the State House, for still more celebrations, speeches, and music.²

Before greeting his supporters, however, Lincoln surely glanced at the incoming mail that had accumulated in the house since his departure. Among the pile of letters was a telegram. It had arrived three days earlier at the town’s Illinois & Mississippi Telegraph Company office on the north side of the Public Square. Ordinarily, operators would have promptly dispatched it to Lincoln’s nearby law office. But most residents knew that Springfield’s most famous citizen was out of town. So office superintendent J. J. S. Wilson probably sent a boy to run it over to his residence. There, Lincoln found it three days later.³

What Lincoln discovered when he tore open the envelope and read the telegram must have astonished and excited him. Here was another invitation to deliver yet another speech, but one that Lincoln, exhaustion notwithstanding, surely sensed immediately could advance his political ambitions on a grander stage than he had ever ascended. What the telegram brought was his first major invitation to speak in the East. And it marked the beginning of four months of negotiations, drama, and grueling work destined to lead him to the most pivotal public appearance of his career.

One can only imagine the satisfaction that Lincoln felt that night. A year earlier, through the summer and fall of 1858, he had debated Democratic incumbent Stephen A. Douglas face to face seven times in their bitter contest for the U.S. Senate. Lincoln had lost that race, sending him into a brief but profound depression. This autumn, at significant political risk, he had boldly followed the senator into Ohio to argue anew over the wrenching issue that divided not only them, but the rest of the country as well: the extension of slavery. As always, Douglas favored granting settlers the right to welcome or banish slaves from new territories. Just as vigorously, Lincoln opposed the spread of slavery anywhere, insisting that the institution be contained and allowed to die. Embracing Lincoln’s arguments over Douglas’s, Ohio, unlike Illinois the year before, had gone Republican by seventeen thousand votes. It was easy to believe that the tide was turning.⁴

An ambitious, ingenious politician who hungered for a return to elective office, Lincoln knew that the biggest prize of all, the presidency of the United States, would be decided only a year down the road. He sensed that Senator Douglas would likely become the Democratic candidate for the White House in 1860. Now, amidst the excitement of this night of triumph in Springfield, it suddenly seemed possible that the infant Republicans might actually hope to beat Douglas next fall—barely five years after organizing as a new national political party—that is, if they nominated an electable candidate. Improbable as it seemed just a few hours before the state election results had filtered in from across the country on October 14, Lincoln now had reason to imagine himself that man. And here was an invitation to introduce himself where he was least known: in the heart of the vote-rich East.

All this surely raced through Lincoln’s mind as he heard the music begin to swell outside his windows on the evening of October 15. What did he say to his politically savvy, equally ambitious wife, Mary—herself once the object of an earlier Lincoln-Douglas rivalry, if local legends were to be believed? Did Lincoln share with her his mounting excitement over the party’s triumphs and prospects? Did he dare speculate that while a major battle had been won, a larger one now loomed, with the presidency itself now in reach, and a major new forum to advance his ambitions suddenly, almost miraculously awaiting him in the East?

All we know for sure is that once inside his door—and sometime before the brass band persuaded him across town to further cheer the Democrats’ recent election day “Waterloo”—Abraham Lincoln discovered the momentous telegram.

It had been sent on October 12 by a New York–based Republican activist named James A. Briggs, one of a growing number of easterners convinced that the only way the party could win the White House was by nominating a westerner who could attract votes from both sides of the country. The overwhelming favorite for the Republican presidential nomination was New York’s own U. S. senator, William Henry Seward. But even as Seward’s supporters worked with confident serenity to secure what seemed his destiny, a growing number of New Yorkers searched for alternatives. The anti-Seward forces remained fearfully certain that his nomination would ensure Douglas’s election to the White House, and with it the unbridled spread of slavery nationwide.

Personally, Briggs, a onetime Cleveland attorney and businessman, now the head of the Ohio state agency in New York, counted himself a supporter of yet another rival aspirant for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination: Ohio governor Salmon P. Chase. But apparently he believed that to give Chase a chance at an 1860 convention victory Republicans must chip away at Seward’s dominant strength by promoting a range of alternatives. The fall of 1859 found Briggs eagerly inviting several potential challengers from the West to declare their cases before eastern audiences—and, of course, before the influential eastern press. In other words, the original invitation to Lincoln was for the hosts, above all, part of an elaborate ploy to stop Seward and help Chase.

Into this complex political web came the terse invitation: twenty-five words that nonetheless held the prospect of changing Lincoln’s life, and perhaps the nation’s life. Lincoln must have understood so instantly.

Hon. A. Lincoln.

will you speak in Mr Beechers church Broolyn [sic] on or about the twenty ninth (29) november on any subject you please pay two hundred (200) dollars.⁵

For all his peripatetic stump speaking, Lincoln had never spoken in the New York area in his life. Now, though not yet a presidential candidate, he was being handed the chance to appear in one of the nation’s shrines to abolitionism—the so-called “Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad,” Reverend Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn—and there to strike a blow against slavery, and for his own political future. The chance to lecture inside a house of worship surely seemed particularly appealing. Back in 1838, Lincoln had delivered his first great speech—to the Springfield Young Men’s Lyceum—from the pulpit of the local Baptist church. For a man who had conceded more elections than he had won, but never lost his thirst for admiration and acclaim, here now was a chance at greater glory than even the most ardent hometown greeting could offer. The telegraph operator did not even know how to spell “Brooklyn”—he left out the “k”—but Lincoln certainly recognized the venue and the chance with no trouble at all. They represented, on the one hand, an extraordinary prospect for a national success, and on the other, a dangerous risk for failure.

As he prepared that night to head back outside his home to deliver an impromptu speech to his friends and then march with the local band over to the Capitol building, he likely sensed that his life had irreversibly changed. First, the clean Republican sweep on election day, in Ohio in particular. Now the invitation East: not just an invitation, but the opportunity of a lifetime.

In its next edition, Springfield’s Republican paper would taunt the recently vanquished opposition with a tongue-in-cheek “apology” to local Democrats for keeping them awake on October 15 with the late-night hurrahs, music, speeches, and cannon fire. But the paper was dead serious when it added that the party’s recent successes meant that Lincoln’s “name was now inscribed high upon the roll of distinguished men spoken of in connection with the Presidency.”⁶

A few days earlier, a Pennsylvania Republican journal had boldly proposed an 1860 national slate of Chase for president and Lincoln for vice president. “We think this ticket would suit the Republicans of Illinois better,” came the quick and earnest reply from Springfield, “if the names were transposed.”⁷

THE MAN WHO INVITED Lincoln East, James A. Briggs, had written him once before, in the heat of the 1858 Illinois Senate race, and it is possible that Lincoln—blessed with a politician’s best weapon, a superb memory—recalled the name. Concerned at that earlier date that Senator Douglas was, in his “campaign tirades,” unfairly labeling Chase an outright abolitionist (the political kiss of death for mainstream Republicans), Briggs sent along the text of a speech that his hero had delivered as a senator back in 1850, clarifying his position. Briggs hoped that the next time Douglas misrepresented the Ohio leader, Lincoln would “have the kindness to correct him from Gov. Chase’s own speech.” Added the New Yorker: “There is a deep interest felt here in the Illinois contest. I hope you will win a great and a glorious victory.” Now, more than a year later, Lincoln’s defeat in that contest still smarting, came Briggs’s exhilarating telegram.⁸

Some Lincoln biographers have suggested that he was initially hesitant about the opportunity, but Lincoln was in fact elated about the invitation from the moment he received it, if for no other reason than that it offered the highest fee that he had ever earned as a public speaker. Two hundred dollars was a considerable amount of money in 1859. The potential political capital was of course even greater.⁹

Vexingly, Lincoln’s path to what would become the Cooper Union address was paved with confusion. Postponements, conflicting invitations, changing venues, and a revolving roster of hosts all complicated matters, week after anxious week, before Lincoln finally boarded the train toward New York in late February 1860.

In a way, such difficulties were to be expected. Lincoln’s America was still sixteen long years away from the invention of the great communications boon of the century, the telephone. Long-distance contact was still confined to handwritten correspondence sent through the U.S. mails or dispatched via private telegraph companies.

Nor was transportation to be taken for granted in the prewar era. To travel from Illinois to New York, half the breadth of the continental United States, posed a formidable challenge. Early in his career, Lincoln had championed “internal improvements”—economic development, as we call it today—advocating government investment to build canals and railroads. By 1860, thanks to ever-expanding rail lines, the original colonies were linked to the American West more tightly than ever. But it still took a passenger several numbing days to get from the prairies to the ocean, traveling mostly in upright chairs on unheated, soot-filled cars that rocked and pitched their way at barely twenty miles an hour. Each state, sometimes each county, imposed its own “standard” track gauge, as a result of which cross-country passengers were forced to change trains, and railroad lines, constantly.

Lincoln had done his share of traveling. He had gone all the way to Washington eleven years earlier, his family in tow, to take his seat for his one term in Congress. As he knew, such a trip required major investments in time and discomfort. For the opportunity to seize a prestigious rostrum in the East, however, Lincoln proved willing to make both.

LINCOLN’S OLD ILLINOIS friend Ward Hill Lamon recalled that the telegram from New York “enchanted him,” adding: “No event of his life had given him more heartfelt pleasure.”¹⁰

The future president’s longtime law partner William H. Herndon, so close to the senior attorney that the opposition press nicknamed him “Lincoln’s man Friday,” also testified to Lincoln’s undisguised excitement on the Monday he returned to work, telegram in hand. Lincoln “looked much pleased . . . not to say tickled” when he rushed into the office around nine o’clock that morning. Over the years, Herndon would employ many a vivid word to describe Lincoln’s topsy-turvy emotions. But only this once did he characterize his partner as “tickled.”¹¹

Still, Lincoln could not help toying with his junior associate that day, coyly announcing: “Billy, I am invited or solicited to deliver a lecture in New York. Should I go?”¹²

Herndon, who, whenever possible, liked to highlight his own influence on Lincoln, would recall that he helped to make history by replying: “By all means . . . and it is a good opening, too.”

“If you were in my fix what subject would you choose?” Lincoln went on to inquire.

“Why a political one,” answered Herndon, “that’s your forte.” As Herndon put it: “I advised Mr. Lincoln I thought it would help open the way to the Presidency—thought I could see the meaning of the move by the New York men—thought it was a move against Seward—thought Greeley had something to do with it—think so yet—have no evidence. The result . . . was a profound one, as I think.”

Herndon certainly sensed the dissident New Yorkers’ “move against” pre-co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Introduction
• Chapter One: “Abe Lincoln Must Come”
• Chapter Two: “So Much Labor as This”
• Chapter Three: “Some Confusion in the Arrangements”
• Chapter Four: “Much the Best Portrait”
• Chapter Five: “Nothing Impressive About Him”
• Chapter Six: “The Strength of Absolute Simplicity”
• Chapter Seven: “Such an Impression”
• Chapter Eight: “Unable to Escape This Toil”
• Chapter Nine: “Preserve It for Your Children”
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• Acknowledgments to the Paperback Edition
• About Harold Holzer
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright