The Speech

Cooper Union Institute

Cooper Union Institute

Historian Benjamin Thomas wrote: “All day on February 27, 1860 Lincoln was entertained at the Astor House as a visiting celebrity. That night, despite a snowstorm, fifteen hundred persons filed into Cooper Union, the largest assemblage ‘of the intellect and culture of our city’ since the days of Clay and Webster, according to Horace Greeley. The famous editor, once an ally of Seward and Weed, but no their avowed enemy, sat conspicuously on the platform, to which Lincoln was conducted by the prominent New Yorker lawyer David Dudley Field and the celebrated literary figure William Cullen Bryant, editor of the New York Evening Post. Cheers rang out as the towering Midwesterner, known to his audience as Douglas’s most formidable antagonist, was escorted down the aisle.”1 In attendance were some of the most important New Yorkers in the media including book publisher George Palmer Putnam; Samuel Sinclair, publisher of the Tribune; and Theodore Tilton, future editor of the Independent.
According to Andrew A. Freeman, “Cooper Union’s doors were opened on November 2, 1859, as a free night college for working men and women, the first private institution of its kind in the United States. Its other facilities were a library which became New York’s first free reading room, and an auditorium called the Great Hall where free lectures sponsored by Cooper Union were given and public meetings were held.”2 It was in the Great Hall where the great speech by Mr. Lincoln was delivered.
Journalist-politician Henry J. Raymond recalled that New Yorkers “filled the large hall…to overflowing, with an audience which comprised many ladies. William Cullen Bryant presided, assisted by numerous prominent politicians. He presented Mr. Lincoln to the audience with a few appropriate remarks. Mr. Lincoln was quite warmly received, and delivered an address which at times excited uncontrollable enthusiasm. It was at once accepted as one of the most important contributions to the current political literature of the day…”3 The New York Herald reported: “The tax of twenty-five cents per capita did not — as it very frequently does — act as a preventative for the visitor.”
Also in attendance was an Illinois friend and attorney, Mason Brayman. According to historian David H. Leroy, Mr. Lincoln “arranged for Brayman to sit in the back of the auditorium with instructions to raise his tall hat on a cane if the speaker’s voice was not sufficiently audible. Thus, no man was in a better position to see, or hear, Lincoln’s improbable, meteoric rise to the presidency than Mason Brayman.”4
William Cullen Bryant’s biographer, Harry Houston Peckham, wrote: “As the dapper, gray-bearded cullen Bryant escorted the uncouth, beardless rustic giant to the speaker’s chair, his sense of humor must have been quietly tickled by the incongruity of the scene; the raw frontiersman towered a good eight inches about the polished metropolitan editor.”5 In his introduction, Bryant said: “I see a higher and a wiser agency than that of man in the causes that have filled with a hardy population the vast and fertile region which forms the western part of the valley of the Mississippi; a race of men who are not shamed to till their acres with their own hands, and who would be ashamed to subsist by the labor of the slave. These children of the West, my friends, form a living bulwark against the advances of slavery, and from them is recruited the vanguard of the armies of Liberty. One of them will appear here before you this evening.”6
The New York Herald reported: “Mr. Lincoln is a tall, thin man, dark complexioned and apparently quick in his perceptions. He is rather unsteady on his feet, and there is an involuntary comical awkwardness which marks his movements while speaking. His voice, though sharp and powerful at times, has a frequent tendency to dwindle into a shrill and unpleasant sound. His enunciation is slow and emphatic and a peculiar characteristic of his delivery was a remarkable mobility of his features, the frequent contortion of which excited the merriment which his words alone could not well have produced.”7 The Herald printed the entire text of Mr. Lincoln’s speech and noted that many women were in the crowd, which swelled until “the large hall was about three-quarter full.”8
Observer George Haven Putnam wrote: “The first impression of the man from the West did nothing to contradict the expectation of something weird, rough, and uncultivated. The long, ungainly figure upon which hung clothes that, while new for this trip, were evidently the work of an unskillful tailor; the large feet, and clumsy hands of which, at the outset, at least, the orator seemed to be unduly conscious; the long, gaunt head, capped by a shock of hair that seemed not to have been thoroughly brushed out, made a picture which did not fit in with New York’s conception of a finished statesman. The first utterance of the voice was not pleasant to the ear, the tone being harsh and the key, too high.”9
Historian Benjamin Thomas wrote: “Lincoln felt nervous when he was introduced. He feared that his Western mannerisms and quaint rural accent might be amusing to sophisticated Easterners. He felt uncomfortably conscious of his new broadcloth suit, which did not seem to hang right and looked rumpled from his long trip. But his audience were with him from the start, and he soon thought only of convincing them.”10 Mr. Lincoln’s law partner, William H. Herndon, recalled, “On his return home Lincoln told me that for once in his life he was greatly abashed over his personal appearance. The new suit of clothes which he donned on his arrival in New York were ill-fitting garments, and showed the creases made while packed in the valise; and for a long time after he began his speech and before he became ‘warmed up’ he imagined that the audience noticed the contrast between his Western clothes and the neat-fitting suits of Mr. Bryant and others who sat on the platform. The collar of his coat on the right side had an unpleasant way of flying up whenever he raised his arm to gesticulate. He imagined the audience noticed that also.11
Observer Joseph H. Choate, who wrote a biography of Mr. Lincoln several decades later, noted: “He appeared in every sense of the word like one of the plain people among whom he loved to be counted. At first sight there was nothing impressive or imposing about him; his clothes hung awkwardly on his giant frame; his face was of a dark pallor without the slightest tinge of colour; his seamed and rugged features bore the furrows of hardship and struggle; his deep-set eyes looked sad and anxious; his countenance in repose gave little evidence of the brilliant power which raised him from the lowest to the highest station among his countrymen; as he talked to me before the meeting he seemed ill at ease.”
Choate observed; “When he spoke, he was transformed; his eye kindled, his voice rang, his face shone and seemed to light up the whole assembly. For an hour and a half he held his audience in the hollow of his hand. His style of speech and manner of deliver were severely simple. What Lowell called ‘The grand simplicities of the Bible,’ with which he was so familiar, were reflected in his discourse….It was marvelous to see how this untutored man, by mere self-discipline and the chastening of his own spirit, had outgrown all meretricious arts, and found his own way to the grandeur and strength of absolute simplicity.”12
George H. Putnam wrote: “As the speech progressed, however, the speaker seemed to get into control of himself; the voice gained a natural and impressive modulation, the gestures were dignified and appropriate, and the hearers came under the influence of the earnest look from the deeply-set eyes and of the absolute integrity of purpose and of devotion to principle which were behind the thought and the words of the speaker. In place of a ‘wild and wooly’ talk, illuminated by more or less incongruous anecdotes; in place of a high-strung exhortation of general principles or of a fierce protest against Southern arrogance, the New Yorkers had presented to them a calm but forcible series of well-reasoned considerations upon which their action as citizens was to be based.”13 The New York Tribune reported first on Mr. Lincoln’s appearance and then on his effect on the audience:
He was tall, tall — oh, how tall, and so angular and awkward that I had, for an instant, a feeling of pity for so ungainly a man. His clothes were black and ill-fitting, badly wrinkled — as if they had been jammed carelessly into a small trunk. His bushy head, with the stiff black hair thrown back, was balanced on a long and lean stock, and when he raised his hands in an opening gesture I noticed that they were very large.
He began in a very low tone of voice as if he were used to speaking out of doors and was afraid of speaking too loud. He said, ‘Mr. Cheerman” instead of ‘Mr. Chairman,’ and employed many other words with an old-fashioned pronunciation. I said to myself: “Old fellow, you won’t do. It is all very well for the wild west, but this will never go down in New York.”
But pretty soon, he began to get into his subject: he straightened up and made regular and graceful gestures. His face lighted as with an inward fire; the whole man was transfigured. I forgot his clothes, his personal appearance, and his individual peculiarities. Presently, forgetting myself, I was on my feet with the rest, yelling like a wild Indian, cheering this wonderful man. In the close [sic] parts of his arguments, you could hear the gentle sizzing of the gas burners. When he reached a climax, the thunders of applause were terrific.
It was a great speech. When I came out of the hall, my face glowing with excitement and my frame all aquiver, a friend, with his eyes aglow, asked me what I thought of Abe Lincoln, the rail-splitter. I said, ‘He’s the greatest man since St. Paul!’ And I think so yet.14,

Footnotes

  1. Benjamin Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, p. 202.
  2. Andrew A. Freeman, Abraham Lincoln Goes to New York, p. 79.
  3. Henry Raymond, editor, Life and Public Services of Abraham Lincoln, p. 84.
  4. Frank J. Williams, William D. Pederson, and Vincent J. Marsala, editor, Abraham Lincoln: Sources and Style of Leadership, p. 158 (David H. Leroy, “Lincoln and Idaho: A Rocky Mountain Legacy”).
  5. Harry Houston Peckham, Gotham Yankee: A Biography of William Cullen Bryant, p. 144.
  6. Melvin L. Hayes, Mr. Lincoln Runs for President, p. 26.
  7. Don C. Seitz, Lincoln the Politician, p. 160-161.
  8. Oliver Carlson, The Man Who Made News: James Gordon Bennett, p. 297.
  9. George Haven Putnam, Abraham Lincoln: The People’s Leader in the Struggle for National Existence, p. 45-46.
  10. Benjamin Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, p. 202.
  11. William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, Herndon’s Life of Abraham Lincoln, p. 369.
  12. Joseph H. Choate, Abraham Lincoln, p. 22.
  13. George Haven Putnam, Abraham Lincoln: The People’s Leader in the Struggle for National Existence, p. 45-46.
  14. Melvin L. Hayes, Mr. Lincoln Runs for President, p. 27-28.