Lincoln Makes His Case at Cooper Union

On February 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln addressed nearly 1,500 New Yorkers in the Great Hall of Cooper Union, a speech originally planned for Henry Ward Beecher's Plymouth Church in Brooklyn before organizers moved it into the city and put the Young Men's Central Republican Union behind it. Lincoln, still better known out west than in New York, had spent weeks building a dense, lawyerly argument that the framers of the Constitution never intended slavery to spread into the federal territories. He bought a new $100 suit for the occasion, and photographer Mathew Brady took his picture that same day, an image that would circulate widely as his candidacy grew. The speech ran past 7,000 words and closed with a line the crowd remembered long after the constitutional history faded.