On this date, November 13, 1859, Abraham Lincoln agreed to give a speech at Cooper Union in lower Manhattan in New York City. History suggests this is the speech that made Lincoln president.
Except he wasn’t actually agreeing to a speech at Cooper Union. In his letter to James A. Briggs, with whom he has previously corresponded about the event, he agreed to give a political speech at what he thought would be the famous Plymouth Church across the river in Brooklyn. Under the leadership of its first minister, Henry Ward Beecher, Plymouth was a center of anti-slavery activism at this time, and speaking there was sure to raise Lincoln’s profile as the still new Republican party moved toward picking its presidential nominee. If the Beecher name sounds familiar, it’s because his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, authored perhaps the most influential book of the time, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Originally invited to speak in late fall 1859, Lincoln agreed if the date could be pushed off until February to accommodate his political and legal schedule. The final date was set for February 27, 1860. Briggs eventually realized that coaxing an audience across the potentially frigid East River in the dead of winter may be problematic and thus sought to pass off sponsorship of the speech to the Young Men’s Central Republican Union, which moved it back to Manhattan. Considerable confusion arose in communicating this fact and it was only after he arrived in New York that Lincoln understood he would speak at Cooper Union instead of Plymouth Church. He hurriedly edited his speech for what he assumed would be a less religious audience.
I discussed the content of the speech here but suffice to say it went well for Lincoln. Earlier that day he had his photo taken at the studio of Mathew Brady, later acknowledging that the speech and Brady’s photograph made him president.
Having already planned to visit his son Robert at Phillips Exeter Academy after Cooper Union, he graciously accepted an offer to give a speech in Providence, Rhode Island on his way to New Hampshire. That idea quickly escalated into at least a dozen speeches in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Connecticut before he could make his way back to Illinois. This was Lincoln’s second, and last, trip to New England, having stumped through eastern Massachusetts for the successful Whig presidential nominee Zachary Taylor in 1848. This time Lincoln was stumping more on his own behalf and promoting the now Republican party view that slavery must not extend into the western territories. Again, he was well-received, and this time the New England electoral votes were comfortably in Lincoln’s corner (as they would be also in 1864).
As they say, the rest is history. Cooper Union, the Brady photograph, and the release of the Lincoln-Douglas debates in book form all contributed to making Abraham Lincoln the best candidate for president in 1860.
And the war came.
For those looking for more information on the Cooper Union speech, I highly recommend the 2009 book by Lincoln historian Harold Holzer called, aptly enough, Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President.
[Photo by Mathew Benjamin Brady – US Library of Congress, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25065667]
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David J. Kent is President of the Lincoln Group of DC and the author of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America and Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America.
His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.
