The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [88]
But there was more to the Cooper Institute speech than an erudite, legalistic exposition of history. In remarkably forceful language, Lincoln accused the South of planning to “destroy the Government” unless it prevailed on “all points in dispute between you and us.” The implication was clear: the North would not let it do so. As he had done so often, Lincoln denied that Republicans planned to interfere with slavery where it existed. But, he continued, southerners remained unpersuaded. What would convince them? “This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right…. [A] sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong.” This Republicans would not do. The address concluded with a clarion call for the party not to abandon its bedrock beliefs in the face of threats of secession and charges of radicalism. Lincoln had been experimenting with dramatic perorations at least since March 1859, when he ended a speech in Chicago with the words “Stand by your principles; stand by your guns; and victory complete and permanent is sure at the last.” Now, he closed with far more resonant language: “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.”12
The Cooper Institute speech was an immediate success. It quickly appeared in pamphlet form and four major New York newspapers, with a combined circulation of 150,000 readers, reprinted it in its entirety. They included the pro-Douglas Herald, which charged Lincoln with offering a selective reading of history. If the founders were as antislavery as Lincoln claimed, it observed, “they took a very curious way of showing it, by holding slaves themselves, and by drawing up a pro-slavery constitution.” On the other hand, although he continued to favor Edward Bates of Missouri for the Republican nomination, Horace Greeley called the speech “one of the happiest and most convincing political arguments ever made in this city.” Immediately after its delivery, Lincoln traveled to New England, where he reiterated the same ideas, often in the same language he had employed at Cooper Institute, adding, as well, the free-labor arguments he had not mentioned in New York.13
“Mr. Lincoln,” Harpers Weekly would observe a few months later, “was comparatively unknown to the people of this section of the Union” until the Cooper Institute address and his New England tour. He returned to Illinois widely viewed as a presidential candidate—still a dark horse, but a possibility nonetheless. Shortly before his departure for New York, the Chicago Republican editor John Wentworth offered sage advice: “Look out for prominence. When it is ascertained that no one of the prominent candidates can be nominated, then ought to be your time.” And by May 1860, when the Republican convention assembled in Chicago, it had become clear that all the leading candidates suffered from serious liabilities. Seward was undoubtedly the country’s most prominent Republican, the man whose election, one supporter wrote, would “effectually symbolize the triumph of our cause.” But because of his long career of opposition to slavery and his “higher law” and “irrepressible conflict” speeches that seemed to suggest a lack of regard for the constitutional protections of slavery, Seward had acquired a reputation for radicalism. Republicans in Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Illinois feared he could not carry their states and would drag down local candidates with him. Moreover, Seward’s outspoken efforts years earlier to bring immigrants into the Whig party had made him anathema to nativists,