Lincoln at Cooper Union : The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President

by Harold Holzer

• ISBN13: 9780743224666
• ISBN10: 0743224663
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-04-27
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Summary

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. De

Author Biography

Harold Holzer has authored, co-authored, and edited twenty-two books on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, including The Lincoln Image, Lincoln Seen and Heard, Dear Mr. Lincoln: Letters to the President, Lincoln as I Knew Him, and Lincoln on Democracy. He has won a number of awards, including the Lincoln Diploma of Honor from Lincoln Memorial University, and the Civil War Round Table's Nevins-Freeman Award, and sits on historical advisory boards for a number of the nation's Civil War museums. Holzer, who is vice president for communications and marketing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, serves also as co-chairman of the U.S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, and as founding vice chairman of The Lincoln Forum. He lives in Rye, New York.

Table of Contents

Contents

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

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Excerpts

Introduction Among the many tantalizing "what ifs" of the Civil War era -- what if Stonewall Jackson had survived past 1863; what if George G. Meade had pursued the shattered Confederate army after Gettysburg; what if Abraham Lincoln had eluded assassination -- is one question that must precede all the others. What if Lincoln the aspiring presidential candidate had failed his first, grueling, decisive test of political and oratorical skills in New York City?In fact, it is entirely possible that had he not triumphed before the sophisticated and demanding audience he faced at New York's Cooper Union on February 27, 1860, Lincoln would never have been nominated, much less elected, to the presidency that November. And had Lincoln not won the White House in 1860, the United States -- or the fractured country or countries it might otherwise have become without his determined leadership -- might today be entirely different.This is the story of that momentous speech: its impetus, preparation, delivery, reception, publication, calculated reiteration, and its enormous, perhaps decisive, impact on that year's presidential campaign. It seeks to ask and answer the question from which historians have long shied: Why did this voluminous, legalistic, tightly argued, fact-filled address prove so thrilling to its listeners, so irresistible to contemporary journalists, and such a boost to Lincoln's political career? How exactly did it transform its author from a relatively obscure Illinois favorite son into a viable national contender for his party's presidential nomination?To find the answers required deep investigation into original reports and recollections and the shunning of the many, but fleeting, mentions of the speech in modern biographies, which have shed little light on the Cooper Union enigma.For all of its universally acknowledged importance, Lincoln's Cooper Union address has for years enjoyed a peculiar reputation. It is widely understood to have somehow propelled Lincoln to the presidency. Yet it has been virtually ignored by generations of historians, most of whom have relegated it to the status of exalted footnote. Cooper Union remains, vexingly, the best known of Abraham Lincoln's speeches that no one seems to quote or cite; the most important of his addresses whose importance no one can quite explain beyond simply reiterating its importance; and the most famous of his speeches that almost no one today ever reads.Myth and misunderstanding have conspired further to obscure Lincoln's accomplishment as thickly as the dense fog that enshrouded New York City only a few weeks before his arrival. Generally, when it has been mentioned at all, the Cooper Union speech has been celebrated for the wrong reasons, while its true virtues have oddly been ignored.One thing may be said with certainty. Had Lincoln failed at his nerve-wracking, physically exhausting, do-or-die New York debut, history would long ago have relegated his name to the trash heap of obscurity. In the words of a twentieth-century song, had he not made it here, he might not have made it anywhere. He would never have won his party's presidential nomination three months later, or the bitter election that followed six months after the convention. He would never have confronted the agonizing choice between war and peace -- to accept secession or fight to preserve the Union. And he would never have enjoyed the opportunity to strike a fatal blow against slavery, or to refashion American democracy into the global example he believed to be its rightful destiny. He would, to twist his own, later words, have "escaped history" altogether.As far as his subsequently earned, exalted place in political literature -- which Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Edmund Wilson, among others, have celebrated -- it is probably fair to say that without Cooper Union first, there would have been no Gettysburg Address, no Second Inaugural