How One Day in NoHo Changed Abraham Lincoln and the World
If you were a traveler from, say, Illinois spending a day in New York City, what would you choose to do? You almost certainly would not have had as successful a day as prairie lawyer and one-term congressman Abraham Lincoln, who, on February 27, 1860, was able to change his country-bumpkin image, become a leading presidential candidate, and eventually secure a future for the United States.
As 1860 dawned, the Illinoisan was best known in the East for the famed Lincoln-Douglas debates that were part of the race for the U.S. Senate in 1858, a contest he ultimately lost. Two years later, Lincoln had his eye on the presidency but had yet to declare when he decided to speak in New York for the first time, initially at the invitation of famed abolitionist Henry Ward Beacher, head of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church. By the time the potential candidate arrived in the city, the Young Men’s Central Republican Union became sponsor of the speech, and the venue was changed to the Cooper Institute, founded the year prior on Astor Place and later to be renamed the Cooper Union.
Lincoln landed in Manhattan on Saturday, February 25, and took a room at the Astor House on the corner of Broadway and Vesey Street. Early Sunday morning, he journeyed on the Fulton Street ferry, a.k.a. Beecher’s ferry, to the Brooklyn shores and Plymouth Church to hear a sermon by the minister. With the service over, Beecher came down to the pews to speak with Lincoln, drawing the audience’s attention to the ungainly giant. Hundreds of attendees shook his hand. Afterwards, Lincoln declined an invitation to join Henry C. Bowen, owner of the antislavery newspaper The Independent, at his home. “I am not going to make a failure at the Cooper Institute tomorrow night, if I can possibly help it. … It is on my mind all the time, and I cannot be persuaded to accept your hospitality at this time. Please excuse me and let me go to my room at the hotel, lock the door, and there think about my lecture.”
The next day, Lincoln’s first order of business was to visit the studio of Mathew Brady, one of the earliest and most famous photographers in American history, for a portrait at his studio at 643 Broadway at Bleecker Street. What Brady captured was transformational. “While Lincoln was denigrated in his campaign as little more than a bumpkin,” according to Roger Catlin in Smithsonian, “Brady’s photograph of a beardless Lincoln in a smart suit, his collar showing high so as to hide an unusually long neck, helped give him a sophisticated look that matched his timeless words.” The photo proliferated across all media that would have been available to a 19th-century campaign: prints, medallions, banners, and more. Frank Leslie’s Weekly and Harper’s Weekly, among other publications, made a full-page woodcut of the Brady portrait to illustrate Lincoln’s ascension as his party’s nominee. It was “the most important single visual record of his, or arguably any, American presidential campaign,” wrote historian Harold Holzer.
The photo also became the cover of another widely distributed and ultimately popular document: the published speech that Lincoln was to give later that evening.
The Great Hall of the Cooper Union was an appropriate, if perhaps intimidating, venue for such an important event. The hall was “not equaled by any room of a similar nature in the city or the United States,” one newspaper wrote, with dozens of gas-fed crystal chandeliers illuminating mirrored walls and red-leather swivel chairs. Under the glare of those lights, could Lincoln and his high-pitched voice and frontier twang survive the crowd of New Yorkers, according to Holzer (and others, of course) “the fastest-talking, best-dressed, and most demanding audience on the planet”?
To prepare for the speech, the lawyer committed to an extensive study of historical records; his goal was to keep likely Democratic nominee Douglas out of the White House, preventing slavery from spreading further across the nation, and to help ensure the horrid institution was on the path toward extinction.
For two hours that night, he presented his evidence with both commanding clarity and precision, building a compelling case that the nation’s founders intended the federal government to regulate slavery in the territories. Talking about the “39 framers of the original Constitution, and the 76 members of the Congress which framed the amendments thereto,” Lincoln said, “I defy any man to show that any one of them ever, in his whole life, declared that, in his understanding, any proper division of local from federal authority, or any part of the Constitution, forbade the federal government to control as to slavery in the federal territories.”
Interestingly, he noted that while the “founding fathers” were the key guide to rejecting the rise of slavery in American territories, they weren’t the last word: “I do not mean to say we are bound to follow implicitly in whatever our fathers did. To do so would be to discard all the lights of current experience — to reject all progress — all improvement. What I do say is, that if we would supplant the opinions and policy of our fathers in any case, we should do so upon evidence so conclusive, and argument so clear, that even their great authority, fairly considered and weighed, cannot stand; and most surely not in a case whereof we ourselves declare they understood the question better than we.”
He then went on to defend Republicans as upholding the Constitution while Democrats would tear it asunder: “You [those who want to maintain and spread slavery] will break up the Union rather than submit to a denial of your constitutional rights. That has a somewhat reckless sound; but it would be palliated, if not fully justified, were we proposing, by the mere force of numbers, to deprive you of some right, plainly written down in the Constitution. But we are proposing no such thing.”
“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. But no such right is specifically written in the Constitution. That instrument is literally silent about any such right. We, on the contrary, deny that such a right has any existence in the Constitution, even by implication.”
He ended his speech with a resounding call to fellow Republicans. “Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government nor of dungeons to ourselves,” he said, concluding with the most memorable line from the night, “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.”
The speech and Brady’s photograph turned a regional politician into a national leader. “Had Lincoln failed in New York,” Holzer wrote, “few might recognize today the nation he went on to defend and rededicate. 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.”
In 1861, then President-Elect Lincoln effectively expressed the same sentiment, telling the photographer when the two met in the nation’s capital, “Brady and Cooper Union made me president.”
Learn more about the role both the East Village and NoHo played in the struggle for civil rights in our video and on our Civil Rights and Social Justice Map.