The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [87]
Early in 1860, the opportunity to lecture in New York City offered the chance to enhance his national standing. The invitation had been arranged by a group of New York Republicans hostile to William H. Seward, the frontrunner for the party’s nomination. They first asked Lincoln to speak at the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, where Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, perhaps the nation’s most prominent clergyman, held forth every Sunday. But when Lincoln arrived in New York he discovered that the venue had been moved to Cooper Institute in Manhattan. The institute had been founded the previous year by Peter Cooper, whose life, like Lincoln’s, seemed to exemplify the opportunities for social advancement offered to men of ambition by northern society. The son of a New York City craftsman and a coach-maker’s apprentice as a youth, Cooper had acquired great wealth as a railroad entrepreneur and industrialist. His institute provided education, free of charge, to aspiring workingmen and women. In 1876, at the age of eighty-five, convinced that the free-labor ideal was receding in post–Civil War America, Cooper would run for president as the candidate of the Greenback party.
On February 27, 1860, Horace Greeley of the Tribune, long Seward’s critic, helped escort Lincoln to the platform, and William Cullen Bryant, editor of the New York Evening Post and another member of the anti Seward faction, introduced him. When Lincoln rose to speak, the institute’s 1,800-seat Great Hall was filled almost to capacity, “crowded with distinguished Republicans” as well as “a considerable number of ladies.” Lincoln used the occasion to strike blows against two rivals for the presidency, Seward and Stephen A. Douglas, as well as Chief Justice Taney, and to demonstrate to a demanding eastern audience his command of the slavery question, commitment to Republican principles, and availability as a candidate should Seward falter.11
Lincoln framed the Cooper Institute speech as a response to Douglas’s article in Harper’s Magazine the previous fall, and especially its claim that popular sovereignty represented a continuation of the founders’ policy with regard to slavery. Lincoln spent much of the time preceding his trip in the Illinois State Library in Springfield, where he exhaustively researched the public statements, votes in Congress, and writings of men who had framed the Constitution. The result was a surprisingly scholarly presentation, complete, when published, with numerous footnotes. Lincoln concluded that the vast majority of the founders who expressed an opinion on the subject viewed slavery as an evil whose existence had to be tolerated but whose expansion could and should be prevented by Congress. Moreover, contrary to Taney’s ruling in Dred Scott that the Constitution recognized property in slaves, Lincoln pointed out that the document referred to slaves not as property but as “other persons,” and intentionally avoided using the words “slave” and “slavery.” If a conflict existed between “the rights of property” and “the rights of men,” Lincoln had written in 1859, precedence must go to the latter. Now he insisted that the founders held the same view.
“What is conservatism?” Lincoln asked. “Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?” On this basis, he insisted, Republicans were the conservative party. This familiar reassurance he considered doubly necessary in the wake of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, the previous November, when this deeply religious abolitionist and a band of nineteen followers seized the federal arsenal, hoping to spark a slave insurrection. Democrats, North and South, had blamed