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Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Born on a farm in Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln grew up in poverty with minimal formal education. After his family moved to Illinois, he operated a general store and read law in his spare time. He was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1836 and went into private practice. He joined the Whig Party and served one term as a US representative between 1847-49, after which he returned to his law practice.
When the Whig Party split over the issue of slavery in 1854, Lincoln joined the anti-slavery Republicans, who founded a new political party. He unsuccessfully sought a seat in the US Senate that year and again in 1858, when his debates against Stephen Douglas brought him national prominence. His election as president in 1860 spurred seven southern states to secede and form the Confederate States of America, which proclaimed its existence less than a month before Lincoln took office.
Lincoln led the United States throughout the Civil War, and won reelection in 1864. Shortly after Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender brought an end to the war, Lincoln became the first US President to be assassinated.
Cooper Union Address (1860)
When Abraham Lincoln spoke at the Cooper Union Institute in February 1860, he was a candidate for the Republican nomination for president. Lincoln’s main objective was to show that the Republicans were not radicals or revolutionaries for opposing slavery, as their opponents had claimed. Instead, they sought to pursue the values enshrined in the Constitution. Lincoln did this in the context of criticizing the Supreme Court’s holding in Scott v. Sanford that the Constitution did not authorize Congress to abolish slavery in US territories acquired after 1787. Lincoln considered a series of votes taken by the Constitution’s framers over the period between 1787 and 1820 to show that 21 of 23 framers who made recorded votes believed that the Constitution imposed no limits on such actions. Lincoln expressed the hope that the Supreme Court would reconsider this part of its decision upon review of the historical record.
According to Lincoln, the Republicans’ appeal to framers’ intent made them the true conservatives. The Southern Democrats, who supported a variety of proposals to protect slavery in perpetuity, were thus radicals because their actions were at odds with the principles upon which the Constitution was based. Having refuted the Southerners’ interpretation, he concluded that the only way to appease Southerners would be to “cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right,” something that would violate the “moral, social, and political responsibilities” of the Republicans. Lincoln’s rousing refutation of the Southerners’ demand for compromise gained him substantial attention and is widely seen as a pivotal moment in Lincoln’s campaign for the Republican nomination.
…In his speech last autumn, at Columbus, Ohio, as reported in “The New-York Times,” Senator Douglas said: “Our fathers, when they fram