Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made a President

On the evening of February twenty-seventh, eighteen sixty, a tall, ungainly Illinois lawyer walked onto the stage of the Cooper Union Great Hall and looked out at an audience of New York's most influential Republicans, the editors, attorneys, merchants, and politicians who would determine whether a western candidate had a future in national politics. He had traveled by overnight train. He had borrowed money for the trip. He could not, accounts suggest, afford a new suit.

What happened over the next two hours was one of the most consequential performances in the history of American politics.

Abraham Lincoln had spent weeks preparing an argument so meticulous, so thoroughly grounded in the specific language and voting records of the Constitutional Convention, that it could not be attacked on factual grounds. His subject was the federal government's authority to restrict the expansion of slavery into new territories. His method was to demonstrate, founder by founder, vote by vote, that the men who wrote the Constitution had themselves voted to exercise that authority, and that the slaveholders' states' rights argument was therefore not a defense of the founders' intentions but a betrayal of them.

The audience had arrived expecting a curiosity, a prairie politician making his introduction to the eastern establishment. They left convinced they had heard something historic. When Lincoln concluded, '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 hall erupted.

Horace Greeley's New York Tribune printed the speech in full the following morning. It was reprinted as a pamphlet and distributed across the country. When the Republican National Convention met in Chicago in May, Lincoln, who had been considered a long shot against William Seward, won the nomination on the third ballot.

No one knows for certain that Cooper Union won Lincoln the nomination. What is known is that before that evening, he was not a serious candidate. After it, he was.