On this date in 1860, Abraham Lincoln spoke in New York City at Cooper Union Hall. Lincoln had come to national attention through his series of debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858, though he ultimately lost the race to become United States Senator from Illinois, but it was his speech at Cooper Union that made him a viable candidate for the Republican nomination for President in 1860.
The speech was sponsored by the Young Men's Central Republican Union and was the third in a series, the first two given by Francis Blair, a founder of the Republican party and later advisor to President Lincoln, and Cassius M Clay, an abolitionist Republican from Kentucky.
Cooper Union, private college in Manhattan, was founded the previous year by Peter Cooper. Lincoln spoke on a snowy night, in the Great Hall, located in the basement of the Union building, to an audience of 1,500.
His address was one of the longest speeches he ever gave. It lacks the soaring eloquence and memorable quotable sections of many of his other remarks but it was rhetorically effective for its purposes, designed as a political speech to help his campaign for the nomination, though this is never mentioned in the address.
The speech consists of three parts. The first, reviewing the historical evidence regarding whether the federal government had the power to ban slavery in the territories, the second addressed to those in the South, with the final section a message to Republicans.
Lincoln starts by defining the question he seeks to answer:
Does the proper division of local from federal authority, or anything in the Constitution, forbid our federal government to control as to slavery in our federal territories?
Lincoln has a threefold purpose in answering the question. First, to convincingly make the case that nothing forbids the federal government from controlling slavery in the territories; second to convey his personal belief in the wrongness of slavery, and third, concluding that the Constitution does not allow the federal government to interfere with slavery within the states where it already exists. It is not an abolitionist speech.
The speech was also made in the context of the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision, three years earlier, in which Chief Justice Taney declared that blacks, whether free or slave, were not citizens of the United States, and raised the possibility that the Court could eventually declare state constitutions banning slavery to be unconstitutional.(1)
In the first section, Lincoln reviews in detail the actions by the Continental Congress in banning slavery in the Northwest Territories, of the actions and inactions of the Constitutional Convention regarding slavery, and of the early Congressional sessions with regard to the treatment of the territories, with a particular emphasis on the role of those who had previously served in the Continental Congress and Constitutional Convention, in the course of which Lincoln rebuts Taney's fanciful history lesson in Dred Scott.(2)
Here's an example of Lincoln's methodology:
In 1789, by the first Congress which sat under the Constitution, an
act was passed to enforce the ordinance of ’87, including the
prohibition of slavery in the Northwestern Territory. The bill for this
act was reported by one of the “thirty-nine,” Thomas Fitzsimmons, then a
member of the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania. It went
through all its stages without a word of opposition, and finally passed
both branches without yeas and nays, which is equivalent to a unanimous
passage. In this Congress there were sixteen of the thirty-nine fathers
who framed the original Constitution. They were John Langdon, Nicholas
Gilman, Wm. S. Johnson, Roger Sherman, Robert Morris, Thos. Fitzsimmons,
William Few, Abraham Baldwin, Rufus King, William Paterson, George
Clymer, Richard Bassett, George Read, Pierce Butler, Daniel Carroll,
James Madison.
This shows that, in their understanding, no line dividing local from
federal authority, nor anything in the Constitution, properly forbade
Congress to prohibit slavery in the federal territory; else both their
fidelity to correct principle, and their oath to support the
Constitution, would have constrained them to oppose the prohibition.
Again, George Washington, another of the “thirty-nine,” was then
president of the United States, and as such approved and signed the
bill; thus completing its validity as a law, and thus showing that, in
his understanding, no line dividing local from federal authority, nor
anything in the Constitution, forbade the federal government to control
as to slavery in federal territory.
He begins his second section in this manner:
And now, if they would listen—as I suppose they will not—I would address a few words to the southern people.
In speeches before this, and during the war, Lincoln uses language much more conciliatory towards the south.(3) But here, speaking to a Republican audience as he seeks to become the party's presidential nominee, he's being a little more snarky.
He goes on to chastise the south for its references to "Black Republicans", and refutes their accusation that Republicans are a sectional party. Lincoln then moves on to turn the southern argument that they are the conservatives and Republicans the revolutionaries on its head, asserting that it is the south that is revolutionary while Republicans take the same position as the Founders.
But you say you are conservative—eminently conservative—while we are
revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is
conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new
and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the
point in controversy which was adopted by “our fathers who framed the
government under which we live”; while you with one accord reject, and
scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting
something new.
Lincoln closes this section:
But you will break up the Union rather than submit to a denial of your constitutional rights.
That has a somewhat reckless sound; but it would be palliated, if not
fully justified, were we proposing, by the mere force of numbers, to
deprive you of some right, plainly written down in the Constitution. But
we are proposing no such thing.
When you make these declarations, you have a specific and
well-understood allusion to an assumed constitutional right of yours to
take slaves into the federal territories, and to hold them there as
property. But no such right is specifically written in the Constitution.
That instrument is literally silent about any such right. We, on the
contrary, deny that such a right has any existence in the Constitution,
even by implication.
Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the
government unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the
Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us.
You will rule or ruin in all events.
Lincoln starts the final section;
A few words now to Republicans. It is exceedingly desirable that all
parts of this great confederacy shall be at peace, and in harmony, one
with another. Let us Republicans do our part to have it so. Even though
much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ill temper. Even
though the southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us
calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate
view of our duty, we possibly can. Judging by all they say and do,
and by the subject and nature of their controversy with us, let us
determine, if we can, what will satisfy them.
The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not
only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let
them alone.
But while the federal government cannot interfere with slavery in the existing states, Lincoln emphasizes that the price of convincing the south that Republicans will act consistently with the Constitution is too high because it would require ceasing "to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right." He then elaborates:
And this must be done thoroughly—done in acts as well as in words.
Silence will not be tolerated—we must place ourselves avowedly with
them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced,
suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in
politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We
must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We
must pull down our free state constitutions. The whole atmosphere must
be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery before they will
cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.
Lincoln ends with these words:
Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances
wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored—contrivances such
as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain
as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead
man—such as a policy of “don't care” on a question about which all true
men do care—such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to
disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling not the sinners but
the righteous to repentance—such as invocations to Washington,
imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washington
did.
Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations
against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the
government nor of dungeons to ourselves. 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.
You can find the entire speech here.
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(1) In the wake of the Scott decision, the Department of State ceased issuing passports to free blacks, a practice quickly reversed by Lincoln after he became president.
(2) Taney's opinion is perhaps the first great example of the application of the legal philosophy of a living constitution along with a rejection of what we would call today originalism.
(3) You can bookend Lincoln's political career with these more understanding sentiments. First, from his 1854 Peoria Speech, marking his return to politics prompted by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and second, from his Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865.
When southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the
origin of slavery, than we; I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that
the institution exists; and that it is very difficult to get rid of it,
in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I
surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to
do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to
do, as to the existing institution.
If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him?
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