Lincoln's Cooper Union Speech

On this day, February 27, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln gave a speech in a New York City hall known as Cooper Union. (It still stands and looks pretty much as it did 156 years ago.) That may not sound like much, but most historians consider it the key event that led to his election as U.S. President.

Until the Cooper Union address, Lincoln was known, if known at all, as a minor Republican politician from Illinois who had very little success. The last time he had held elective office was 11 years earlier as an undistinguished one-term Congressman.

In the Cooper Union address, Lincoln showed his genius for research and speech-making. As Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer has written:

"...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."