Part III: Abraham Lincoln and New York City: A Surprising and Fateful Intersection

From the documentary, word for word:

At 11:30 on the morning of Saturday, February 25 1860, a tall gangly man in an ill fitting black coat and battered beaver skin hat, stepped off the Cortland Street ferry in Manhattan, a lawyer and ex congressman, little known outside of his home state of Illinois, he had come to New York hoping to bolster his slim chances of winning the Republican Presidential nomination. When no one met him at the dock on arrival Abraham Lincoln found his way alone to Astor House Hotel across from City Hall on Broadway.

On Sunday, the candidate took the ferry to Brooklyn to hear the Reverend Henry Ward Beacher rail against slavery; back in Manhattan he attended a minstrel show on the Bowery…roaring with delight at a new hit tune, written in Manhattan the year before called “Dixie”.

Everything was riding on the speech Lincoln was to give at the Cooper Institute on Monday. That afternoon, in a pouring rain, he stopped by Knox’s hat store on Broadway and traded in his old beaver skin hat for a shiny silk top hat, then crossed over to Matthew Brady’s studio to sit for a formal portrait

As evening came and the rain turned to snow, Lincoln began to worry about the turnout, but the NY press corp had done it’s work…and by 7:30 more than 1500 people had filled the great hall of Cooper Union to capacity to give the odd looking westerner with the high nasal voice, a hearing.

Stifled laughter rippled through the hall as the candidate began to speak, but the crowd grew quiet as he warmed to his theme….imploring his listeners with passionate logic to restrict the spread of slavery.

pretty soon I forgot his appearance, his clothes, and his peculiarities. Presently, forgetting myself, I was on my feet with arrest, yelling like a wild Indian , cheering this wonderful man.

The next morning , Lincoln woke to find himself a national celebrity. “No man” , Horace Greeley wrote in the NY Tribune, “ever before made such an impression on his first appeal to a New York audience”.

His speech had been reprinted in full in the daily papers and in pamphlets that were already making there way across the country, . together with reproductions of Matthew Brady’s photograph.

Looking back, Lincoln never forget what his 3 day sojourn in New York City had done for him…

“Matthew Brady and The Cooper Institute had made me President”

Imagine…Lincoln wore a beaver skin hat before leaving New York in 1860. He was an unknown at the time. Who knew that Lincoln’s Presidency would be so crucially interwined on the streets of New York.; such is the footprint that New York City has had on countless others.

On a personal note, I can report with glee that The Cooper Union is perfectly intact at this very moment. I have visited it on more than one occasion and it looks exactly as it did on the night of Lincoln’s speech over 150 years ago. It sits a few blocks east of Washington Square Park in the East Village of Manhattan.
When I visited there and glanced at the building and it’s passers by, I had no reason to believe that anyone in sight knew of it’s profound history, and that Abraham Lincoln himself had once held court in that very structure.

The Cooper Union is a private 4 year college with an enrollment of 939.

Note that at the time of this portrait in February of 1860, Abraham Lincoln had just turned 51.