The Speech Heard 'Round the World
- 1860 - The six-foot-four midwestemer cook the fert from New Jersey and loped up Broadway to his lodging at the Astor House across from City Hall. He was in town to deliver a speech, the venue for which had been shifted to Cooper Union from Plymouth Church in leafy Brooklyn Heights. He boarded another ferry for the obligatory visit to hear Henry Ward Beecher deliver his Sunday sermon there. He also dropped by City Hall, a den of Southern sympathy and pro-cotton lobbyists, anti-abolitionism, and talk of secession by the nation's largest city. On Monday, February 27, 1860, before delivering his first speech in the east- a speech that would transform him from a regional phenomenon into a national political figure- he bought a new top hat from Knox at Fulton Street and dropped by Mathew Brady's temporary studio at Bleecker Street to sit for (actually, he was photographed standing up, to reflect his full stature) a likeness that would introduce him to the nation in a first political portrait.In the annals of American political oratory, few speeches rival Abraham Lincoln's presidential audition at Cooper Union that night in eloquence and impact. The hall sat eighteen hundred and was only three-quarters filled, but the speech, in which the fifty-one-year-old Lincoln contrarily declared that "right makes might," would be reprinted and disseminated to every corner of the country. Lincoln's goal was twofold: to unequivocally denounce slavery and to improve his party's odds in the 1860 presidential campaign. He managed to win the plaudits of New York's Republican newspapers and outflank the state's favorite son. William H. Seward, for the nomination later that year (he also collected an impressive two-hundred-dollar fee). His performance would blunt expected Democratic margins in the city sufficiently to deliver New York State and its trove of electoral votes to Lincoln that November. (With typical understatement, he wrote his wife a few days after the speech that it "went off passably well.")Organizers of the speech were competing with other offerings that night, including a performance by Jenny Lind, P. T. Barnum's "Swedish Nightingale," at the Winter Garden. The Cooper Union tickets were twenty-five cents, and apparently, only one survives. It was bought at auction in 2005 by Edward Gillette, a Kansas City, Kansas, criminal defense and personal injury lawyer whose great-great-grand-father served as a Union officer during the Civil War.Cooper Union would figure twice more in Lincoln what-ifs. According to some uncorroborated accounts, the morning after his speech, Erastus Corning, a director of the New York Central, offered Lincoln an astounding ten thousand dollars a year to be the railroad's lawyer. "If Lincoln had accepted his offer," Edward Hungerford wrote in Men and Iron, "he unquestionably would have declined the presidency of the United States."Twice more he was invited to speak at Cooper Union but declined. The last time was at an April 11, 1865, meeting to commemorate the attack on Fort Sumter. Had he attended, he probably would have been unable to return to Washington in time for the Good Friday performance at Ford's Theatre that ended his life."Cooper Union was not just a speech," Harold Holzer, a Lincoln scholar, wrote. "It was a conquest--a public relations triumph, a political coup d'état within the Republican party, and an image transfiguration abetted by the press and illustrated by the most felicitous photo opportunity in American history.TEXT FROM SAM ROBERTS 101 OBJECTS
