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had. Before February 1860, New Yorkers viewed Lincoln as a “rough-and-ready Western lawyer,” while the Cooper Union speech showed him “the sinewy reasoner, the well-equipped thinker.” The difference, the paper claimed, was the vulgar opinion of the East had been wrong about Lincoln but correct about Bryan. Lincoln did not have to change his character to win over New Yorkers. Bryan, however, “had to force a sea-change upon himself” and to “assume virtues he had not.” But the greatest difference, the Post editorial concluded, lay in the fact that “Lincoln could appeal to the patriotic instinct and the sense of national honor, while his foolish young imitator has to argue for the cause of private dishonesty and public disgrace.” This last was a dig at the Democratic silver platform more than Bryan himself, and it revealed that much of the criticism directed at the candidate really had more to do with the issue of the gold standard versus bimetallism. Yet the Post only echoed what virtually all the New York papers concluded about the speech. The Journal might claim Bryan’s likeness to Lincoln, but few in the city would have accepted that comparison. Bryan was no Lincoln, and the Cooper Union speech, one of the greatest unknown speeches in American history, soared high above the Boy Orator’s pedestrian effort.

Just as the Bryans did on August 14, Lincoln, too, had sat for a portrait while visiting New York. Lincoln visited the studio of Matthew Brady, destined within only a few years to become the greatest contemporary chronicler of the Civil War. Before his nomination for the presidency, before his controversial election without appearing on any Southern ballot, before Fort Sumter and four years of Civil War, and more than five years before his assassination, the Lincoln who visited New York in 1860 looked impossibly young. In his Brady photo, he is clean-shaven, with sunken, hooded eyes that give him a grave, unhappy look. The photo was taken just three weeks before William Jennings Bryan was born.

WITH BRYAN ALREADY on the ropes, the knockout punch was still to come. And the punch would come from within his own party. In a move calculated to shift attention away from Bryan completely, the Democratic Honest-Money League had arranged for William Bourke Cockran to be the keynote speaker at yet another rally to be held in Madison Square Garden on Tuesday night, less than a week after Bryan’s speech there. In choosing a foil to Bryan, New York could not have found a better man than Cockran. If Bryan had only recently been labeled the Boy Orator of the Platte, Cockran had long been viewed as one of America’s leading public speakers. Even across political lines, the admiring New York press was already assuming that where Bryan had failed, Cockran would succeed.

Cockran had gained an international reputation through his oratory that was rare for a man who never advanced beyond local New York politics. The record of people praising Cockran’s speeches is almost endless. A British member of Parliament called Cockran “the most eloquent orator of his time among the English-speaking peoples, if not all nations.” Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential military aide and close companion, Archie Butt, once wrote, “One is fascinated by his power of oratory. Leonine always in his appearance, he looks like a lion ready to spring when he is speaking. His voice is like a low rumble of thunder, then has the sweetness of the lute in it. I had not heard him for years, but the moment he uttered his first sentence I felt that he had grown both in power and in sympathy.” In 1910 Butt still served as aide to Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft. Riding home together after Cockran’s speech, Taft turned to his aide and said, “Archie, you now see the difference between declamation and oratory. I believe Cockran is the greatest orator using the English language today.”

Cockran also made a deep impression on the young William Jennings Bryan when they first met at the 1884 Democratic National Convention, when Bryan was only twenty-four. Although Cockran