Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [151]
At the Astor House, Lincoln met Mayson Brayman, a fellow lawyer who had lived in Springfield for some years before returning to his native New York. “Well, B. how have you fared since you left Illinois?” Lincoln asked. “I have made one hundred thousand dollars and lost all,” Brayman ruefully replied; “how is it with you, Mr. Lincoln?”
“Oh, very well,” Lincoln said. “I have the cottage at Springfield and about $8,000 in money. If they make me Vice-President with Seward, as some say they will, I hope I shall be able to increase it to $20,000, and that is as much as a man ought to want.” Lincoln’s sights, however, were not trained on the vice presidency, and politics, not riches, were his object.
That February afternoon, Lincoln paid a visit to the studio of the photographer Mathew Brady on Broadway. When Brady was posing him, he urged Lincoln to hike up his shirt collar. Lincoln quipped that Brady wanted “to shorten [his] neck.” The resulting three-quarter-length portrait shows the fifty-one-year-old Lincoln standing before a pillar, the fingers of his left hand spread over a book. Prominent cheekbones cast marked shadows across his clean-shaven face. The delicate long bow of his upper lip contrasts with the full lower lip, and the deep-set gaze is steady and melancholy. This photograph, circulated widely in engravings and lithographs in the Northeast, was the first arresting image many would see of Abraham Lincoln.
Nearly fifteen hundred people came to hear “this western man” speak in the great hall at Cooper Union. He had bought a new black suit for the occasion, but it was badly wrinkled from the trip. An observer noticed that “one of the legs of his trousers was up about two inches above his shoe; his hair was disheveled and stuck out like rooster’s feathers; his coat was altogether too large for him in the back, his arms much longer than his sleeves.” Yet once he began to speak, people were captivated by his earnest and powerful delivery.
Lincoln had labored to craft his address for many weeks, extensively researching the attitudes of the founding fathers toward slavery. He took as the text for his discourse a speech in which Senator Douglas had said of slavery: “Our fathers, when they framed the Government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now.” Fully endorsing this statement, Lincoln examined the beliefs and actions of the founders, concluding that they had marked slavery “as an evil not to be extended, but to be tolerated and protected only because of and so far as its actual presence among us makes that toleration and protection a necessity.”
In the preceding months, tensions between North and South had continued to escalate, with each section joining in a “hue and cry” against the other. The troubling scenario that Lincoln had observed nearly two decades earlier, during the battle over temperance, had come to pass. Denunciation was being met by denunciation, “crimination with crimination, and anathema with anathema.” To have expected either side to respond differently once the rhetoric had heated up, Lincoln warned during that earlier battle, “was to expect a reversal of human nature, which is God’s decree, and never can be reversed.”
At Cooper Union, as he had done in his celebrated Peoria speech