How Lincoln wowed ‘em

Abraham LINCOLN’S election as president in November 1860 brought with it a certain unhappy distinction. By any measure, Lincoln was the least qualified candidate Americans had ever sent to the White House. It wasn’t just that the Illinois lawyer had limited executive experience. He had none at all, having never directed any enterprise bigger than a two-man law office. His only appearance on the national stage had been a single congressional term widely regarded as a failure. For a time he had turned his back on politics altogether, convinced he had no future. Lincoln’s fierce opposition to the spread of slavery into the Western territories eventually brought him back into the political arena, but success continued to elude him. He lost two consecutive U.S. Senate races, though his performance in the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 gained him national attention. After his 1858 defeat, he gloomily predicted, “I now sink out of view, and shall be forgotten.” Two years later, the forgotten man had won the presidency.

Harold Holzer’s account of Lincoln’s 1860 speech at Cooper Union in New York City helps explain how a candidate so unlikely and apparently so ill-prepared achieved his surprising success. The book’s subtitle, “The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President,” is a tall claim. But even if Lincoln’s resounding success at Cooper Union was only one of the factors that put him into the White House, it is fair to say that he would never have gotten there if the speech had fallen flat. “Without Cooper Union,” Holzer writes, “Lincoln might have ended up, at best, as a historical footnote.” The brilliant speech dazzled a sophisticated New York audience, suddenly transforming an “obscure Illinois favorite son into a viable national contender for his party’s presidential nomination.”

Lincoln spoke at Cooper Union the night of Feb. 27, 1860, three months before the nominating convention and nine months before the general election. The committee of New York Republicans that had invited him didn’t really intend to boost the dark horse from the Western prairies. They wanted to derail the Republican front-runner -- New York’s own Sen. William H. Seward, the party’s most distinguished statesman. No one doubted his qualifications, but the prospect of a Seward presidency didn’t sit well with the rivals he had bested on his way. Moreover, some Republicans feared he could not win in November. Seward’s opponents hoped to open up the nomination by bringing a string of alternative candidates to the front-runner’s turf. Lincoln was only one (and by no means the most prominent) of those invited.

The paramount issue of the day was, of course, slavery, particularly the bitterly divisive contest over its future in the West. The Republican Party, not yet 6 years old in February 1860, was a coalition of antislavery Northerners. But no mainstream Republican supported the abolitionist goal of abruptly doing away with slavery; they regarded immediate abolition as an impossibly radical scheme. What they wanted was to keep the monster in its cage by banning it from the Western territories. They hoped that, so confined, it would eventually die a natural death. Southern slaveholders agreed with their enemies on this point -- slavery must expand or perish. The Southerners vehemently defended their “constitutional right” to take slavery into the West and vowed to break up the Union if this right was denied.

But was any such right granted by the Constitution? Lincoln decided to answer the question in his lecture. What had the Framers of the Constitution intended? Did they mean to give Congress power to regulate slavery in the territories? For weeks before his New York debut, he immersed himself in the journals of the Constitutional Convention and the proceedings of early Congresses. What he found in the historical record allowed him, as Holzer puts it, “to retrospectively recruit the founding fathers, including those who had owned slaves, to the antislavery cause.” Speech in hand, he made the wearisome three-day railroad trip to the Eastern metropolis.

No small part of his triumph that night was a dramatic reversal of the poor impression he had initially made on the audience. When the “ill at ease” speaker reached the podium, New Yorkers must have winced at the prospect of a grotesque backwoodsman about to suffer crushing humiliation. Lincoln was a strange-looking specimen, an “ungainly, oddly dressed giant,” Holzer writes. “His wrinkled black suit ballooned out in the back. His withered, long, dark neck jutted upward from a comically loose collar that looked several sizes too big. Wiry black hair flew out in all directions, unable to hide enormous ears jutting akimbo from his leathery face.” His high-pitched voice carried well but contained a hillbilly twang he’d picked up as a boy in southern Indiana. Yet when this “weird, rough, and uncultivated” Westerner began to speak, he was transformed. The audience was carried away with admiration for the “iron chain of his argument,” his “unanswerable disposition of the great agitating questions.” “For an hour and more,” a listener recalled, “he held his audience in the hollow of his hand.”

Lincoln demonstrated that most of the 39 signers of the Constitution had voted for federal control over slavery. He argued that the Framers had regarded it as a moral blight and a tragic contradiction of the republic’s promise of liberty and equality. But because slavery in the Colonies was a far older institution than the new nation, they had reluctantly left it alone in fashioning a government that could encompass all the states. They had expected it would die away in time, fulfilling at last the statement in the Declaration of Independence that all are created equal. That was why the Republican Party’s free-soil mission was not only constitutionally justified but also the only way to assure the survival of American democracy. Little that Lincoln said that night was new, but the audience (and, more important, the hundreds of thousands who soon read the speech in newspapers and pamphlets) agreed that no one had ever put the antislavery message more clearly or forcefully. When he finished, the ovation was “wild and prolonged.”

His New York victory did not immediately catapult Lincoln to the political front ranks. When the Republican Convention met in May, he was one of 11 possible nominees that Harper’s Weekly pictured in a double-page engraving; most still expected Seward to get the nod. But when the delegates assessed the various vulnerabilities of the prospects, he stood out as the most electable candidate. He won the nomination on the third ballot.

“Lincoln at Cooper Union” provides the best account of a speech the author believes has been unjustly neglected. Yet while the book does raise Cooper Union to a more conspicuous place in the canon, it’s not hard to see why it has been overshadowed by Lincoln’s more famous productions. In the Cooper Union address, he deliberately avoided the lofty eloquence that distinguished his greatest speeches and public papers. Instead, Holzer writes, “he offered a laboriously researched, studiously legalistic, and dispassionately restrained antislavery treatise.” Splendid prose is always more memorable than legal treatises. The daunting length of the speech has also worked against it; it took an hour and a half to deliver. The audience’s rapt attention is both a tribute to his oratorical gifts and an indication of just how central a place politics held in a society in which 80% of those eligible voted in the election of 1860.

Yet the key to the relative obscurity of the Cooper Union address may be that it was quickly overtaken by events that made its masterful arguments irrelevant. Slavery had split the long dominant Democratic Party into Northern and Southern factions, each fielding its own candidate. Lincoln swept the North and won the election with only 39% of the popular vote. Seven Deep South states left the Union in their outrage over the nation’s first avowedly antislavery president. The new president’s determination to preserve the Union led to the attack on Ft. Sumter and the secession of four additional slave states, these from the Upper South. When the Civil War broke out, there was little motive to debate the legality of slave labor in territorial Nebraska or New Mexico. The old questions of slavery’s future and the supremacy of federal over state authority would soon find definitive resolution on thousands of battlefields. By the end of 1865, both slavery and the possibility of secession were gone forever. Lincoln’s Cooper Union address was, in effect, eclipsed by the war it had helped to bring about. *