Come to Cooper Union
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
On the evening of February 27, 1860, a near capacity crowd gathered inside the Great Hall at the Cooper Union in New York City. Nearly 1,500 New Yorkers curious about the man from Springfield, Ill., came to hear him speak. In a brilliantly vivid recounting of the 7,700-word address in his book “Lincoln at Cooper Union,” Harold Holzer persuasively argues that it was this speech that made Abraham Lincoln president.
The speech focused on the one great issue of the day — whether the federal government had the power to limit the expansion of slavery in the new territories. Lincoln delivered it with a cogency and passion that won over the Eastern crowd.
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