page_title: Cooper Union speech
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Cooper Union speech / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: Cooper Union Foundation Building, built 1853-1859, designed by Frederick A. Peterson. The place of Leon Trotsky public meetings in 1917.
context_page_description: The Cooper Union speech or address, known at the time as the Cooper Institute speech, was delivered by Abraham Lincoln on February 27, 1860, at Cooper Union, in New York City. Lincoln was not yet the Republican nominee for the presidency, as the convention was scheduled for May. It is considered one of his most important speeches. Some historians have argued that the speech was responsible for his victory in the presidential election later that year.
  In the speech, Lincoln elaborated his views on slavery by affirming that he did not wish it to be expanded into the western territories and claiming that the Founding Fathers would agree with this position. The journalist Robert J. McNamara wrote, "Lincoln's Cooper Union speech was one of his longest, at more than 7,000 words. And it is not one of his speeches with passages that are often quoted. Yet, due to the careful research and Lincoln's forceful argument, it was stunningly effective."
  Horace Greeley's New York Tribune hailed it as "one of the most happiest and most convincing political arguments ever made in this City. ... No man ever made such an impression on his first appeal to a New-York audience."
context_section_description: Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer called the Cooper Union address "Lincoln's watershed, the event that transformed him from a regional leader into a national phenomenon. Here the politician known as frontier debater and chronic jokester introduced a new oratorical style: informed by history, suffused with moral certainty, and marked by lawyerly precision."
  Holzer wrote about Lincoln's speech in New York City:
  Had Abraham Lincoln failed at his do-or-die debut in New York, he would never have won his party's presidential nomination three months later, not to mention election to the White House that November. Such was the impact of a triumph in the nation's media capital. Had he stumbled, none of the challenges that roiled his presidency would ever have tested his iron will. […]
  Moreover, had Lincoln failed in New York, few might recognize today the nation he went on to defend and rededicate. It can be argued that without Cooper Union, hence without Lincoln at the helm, the United States might be remembered today as a failed experiment that fractured into a North American Balkans.
  Instead, Abraham Lincoln did triumph in New York. He delivered a learned, witty, and exquisitely reasoned address that electrified his elite audience and, more important, reverberated in newspapers and pamphlets alike until it reached tens of thousands of Republican voters across the North. He had arrived at Cooper Union a politician with more defeats than victories, but he departed politically reborn. [...]
  
  At the Cooper Union, Lincoln became more than a regional curiosity. He became a national leader.
  Writing about his visit to Lincoln's speech place at Cooper Union and the meaning of this place for Lincoln's career and legacy, Holzer states that "only at the Great Hall of Cooper Union can audiences so easily inhale Lincoln's presence too—there to imagine not the dying but the living man, not the bearded icon of myth but the clean-shaven, fresh-voiced political original who conquered all New York here on the way to the White House and immortality."
caption: The Cooper Union (2007)
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