Cooper Union speech

[2] In the speech, Lincoln elaborated his views on slavery by affirming that he did not wish it to be expanded into the western territories and claiming that the Founding Fathers would agree with this position.

The journalist Robert J. McNamara wrote, "Lincoln's Cooper Union speech was one of his longest, at more than 7,000 words.

"[3] Horace Greeley's New York Tribune hailed it as "one of the most happiest and most convincing political arguments ever made in this City.

In February 1860, he was invited to speak at Henry Ward Beecher's church in New York, which he very excitedly accepted.

He had a new suit fitted (at the cost of $100 (about $3,000[5] in current dollars)) and went to great pains to write a sophisticated and well-researched speech.

New York Evening Post editor William Cullen Bryant provided a warm introduction.

Lincoln's ungainly appearance, ill-fitting suit, and shrill voice gave an initially poor impression to listeners, but he soon warmed up, and his oratory improved.

[8] By supporting slavery, Lincoln claims that the Democrats are in opposition to the teachings of the founding fathers and "reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new."

In the first section, in response to a statement by Illinois Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln asks rhetorically, "What is the frame of government under which we live?"

He addressed the single-mindedness of the Southern Democrats: Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us.

He also tried to show that the Southern Democrats' demand to secede from the Union if a Republican were to be elected president was like armed robbery: "the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle" from that of a robber.But you will not abide the election of a Republican president!

A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!

"The third section, addressed to fellow Republicans, encourages level-headed thinking and cool actions, doing "nothing through passion and ill temper": We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone.

In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them.Lincoln states that the only thing that will convince the Southerners is to "cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right", supporting all their runaway slave laws and the expansion of slavery.

Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.In his speech last autumn, at Columbus, Ohio, as reported in The New York Times, Senator Douglas said: "Our fathers, when they framed the Government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better than we do now."

I so adopt it because it furnishes a precise and an agreed starting point for a discussion between Republicans and that wing of the Democracy headed by Senator Douglas.

But he has no right to mislead others, who have less access to history, and less leisure to study it, into the false belief that "our fathers who framed the Government under which we live" were of the same opinion—thus substituting falsehood and deception for truthful evidence and fair argument.

When you make these declarations, you have a specific and well-understood allusion to an assumed Constitutional right of yours, to take slaves into the federal territories, and to hold them there as property.

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us.

A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!"

Senator Douglas' new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private.

Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored—contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man — such as a policy of "don't care" on a question about which all true men do care — such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance — such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washington did.

Here the politician known as frontier debater and chronic jokester introduced a new oratorical style: informed by history, suffused with moral certainty, and marked by lawyerly precision.

"[12] Holzer wrote about Lincoln's speech in New York City: Had Abraham Lincoln failed at his do-or-die debut in New York, he would never have won his party's presidential nomination three months later, not to mention election to the White House that November.

It can be argued that without Cooper Union, hence without Lincoln at the helm, the United States might be remembered today as a failed experiment that fractured into a North American Balkans.

He delivered a learned, witty, and exquisitely reasoned address that electrified his elite audience and, more important, reverberated in newspapers and pamphlets alike until it reached tens of thousands of Republican voters across the North.

[13]Writing about his visit to Lincoln's speech place at Cooper Union and the meaning of this place for Lincoln's career and legacy, Holzer states that "only at the Great Hall of Cooper Union can audiences so easily inhale Lincoln's presence too—there to imagine not the dying but the living man, not the bearded icon of myth but the clean-shaven, fresh-voiced political original who conquered all New York here on the way to the White House and immortality.