ABRAHAM LINCOLN AT COOPER INSTITUTE HON. JOSEPH HODGES CHOATE UST forty-nine years ago, in this very month of February, JUST on this very spot, before just such an audience as this, which filled this historic hall to overflowing, I first saw Abraham Lincoln, and heard him deliver that thrilling address which led to his nomination at Chicago three months afterwards and to his triumphant election in November. The impression of that scene and of that speech can never be effaced from my memory. After his great success in the West, which had excited the keenest expectation, he came to New York to make a political address-as he had supposed at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, and it was only when he left his hotel that he found he was coming to Cooper Institute. He appeared in every sense of the word like one of the plain people, among whom he always loved to be counted. At first sight there was nothing impressive or imposing about him. Nothing but his great stature singled him out from the crowd. His clothes hung awkwardly on his gaunt and giant frame. His face was of a dark pallor, without a tinge of color. His seamed and rugged features bore the furrows of hardship and struggle. His deep-set eyes looked sad and anxious. His countenance in repose gave little evidence of that brain-power which had raised him from the lowest to the highest station among his countrymen. As he spoke to me before the meeting opened, he seemed ill at ease, with that sort of apprehension that a young man might feel before facing a new and strange audience whose critical disposition he dreaded. Here were assembled all the noted men of his party-all the learned and cultured men of the city, editors, clergymen, statesmen, lawyers, merchants, critics. They were all most curious to hear him. His fame as a powerful speaker had come out of the West. When Mr. Bryant presented him on this platform, a vast sea of eager, upturned faces greeted him, full of intense curiosity to see what this rude son of the people was like. He was equal to the occasion. When he spoke he was transfigured before us. His eye kindled, his voice rang, his face shone and seemed to light up the whole assembly as by an electric flash. For an hour and more he held his audience in the hollow of his hand. His style of speech and manner of delivery were severely simple. The grand simplicities of the Bible, with which he was so familiar, were distinctly his. With no attempt at ornament or rhetoric, without pretence or parade, he spoke straight to the point. It was marvellous to see how this untutored man, by mere self-discipline and the chastening of his own spirit, had outgrown all meretricious arts and had found his own way to the grandeur and the strength of absolute simplicity. He spoke upon the theme which he had mastered so thoroughly. He demonstrated with irresistible force, the power and the duty of the Federal Government to exclude slavery from the Territories. In the kindliest spirit he protested against the threat of the Southern States to destroy the Union if a Republican President were elected. He closed with an appeal to his audience, spoken with all the fire of his aroused and inspired conscience, with a full outpouring of his love of justice and liberty, to maintain their political purpose on that lofty issue of right and wrong which alone could justify it, and not to be intimidated from their high resolve and sacred duty, by any threats of destruction to the government or of ruin to themselves. He concluded with that telling sentence which drove the whole argument home to all our hearts, "Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it." That night the great hall, and the next day the whole city, rang with delighted applause and congratulation, and he who had come as a stranger, departed with the laurels of a great triumph. Alas! in five years from that exulting night we saw him again for the last time in this city, borne in his coffin through the draped streets. With tears and lamentations a heartbroken people accompanied him from Washington, the scene of his martyrdom, to his last resting place in the young city of the West, where he had worked his way to fame. The great events and achievements of those five years, seen through the perspective of the forty that have since elapsed, have fixed his place in history forever. It is the supreme felicity of the American people, in the short period of their existence as a nation, to have furnished to the world the two greatest benefactors, not of their own time only, but of all modern history. Washington created the nation and is known the world over as the Father of his Country. Lincoln came to be its saviour and redeemer-to save it from self-destruction, and to redeem it from the cancer of slavery which has been gnawing upon its vitals from the beginning. If it had been put to the vote of the forty-four nations assembled at the Hague for the first time in the world's history, representing the whole of civilization, Christian and Pagan, to name the two men who in modern times had done the most to promote liberty, justice, civilization, and peace, I am sure that with one voice they would have acclaimed these two greatest of Americans. Let their names stand together for all time to come. A LINCOLN AS A LABOR LEADER REV. LYMAN ABBOTT BRAHAM LINCOLN won his reputation and achieved his service for the nation by the solution of the labor problem of his time-slavery. How can we apply the principles he inculcated and the spirit he exemplified in solving the labor problem of our time? This is the theme to which I ask your attention this afternoon. For it would be useless for me to attempt to repeat the story of his life, or essay an analysis of his character. This has been so eloquently done by the Chairman of this meeting in his address before the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution in 1900, and by Carl Schurz in his well-known essay, that the repetition of their service would be needless if it were possible; and for me would be impossible if it were needed. I might as well attempt to reconstruct a Saint-Gaudens statue of Lincoln with my clumsy hand, as with my faltering tongue to re-sing the song or re-tell the story so often sung and so often told. Instead, I shall venture to repeat, from the well-known Ode of Lowell, his portrait of the Great Emancipator, and then pass on to my chosen field: "Nature, they say, doth dote, For him her Old-World molds aside she threw, Of the unexhausted West, With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true. How beautiful to see Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed, Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead; One whose meek flock the people joyed to be, standing like a tower, Our children shall behold his fame, The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man, Nearly half a century ago, a young man just entering on my professional career, I came to Cooper Institute to hear the Western orator whose debate with Douglas had given him a national reputation. Some of his friends had broached to him the subject of a nomination to the presidency. "What," he replied, "is the use of talking of me when we have such men as Seward and Chase, and everybody knows them, and scarcely anybody outside of Illinois knows me? Besides, as a matter of justice is it not due to them?" His friends, more sanguine than he was about himself, had resolved that he should be known, and had arranged for some Eastern speeches by him. This Cooper Union speech was the first given in this Eastern campaign. My recollection of the scene is little more than a memory of a memory. The long hall with the platform at the end, not at the side as now; the great, expectant, but not enthusiastic crowd; the tall ungainly figure, the melancholy face, the clear carrying voice, the few awkward gestures. I had been accustomed to the dramatic and impassioned oratory of Henry Ward Beecher. I was an admirer, not of the principles, but of the perfect literary finish of Wendell Phillips' rapier-like conversations with his audiences. I listened to a speech that night as passionless, but also as convincing, as a demonstration in Euclid's Geometry, as clear and cogent, but also as absolutely without oratorical ornament of any description. So much, with some effort, I recall. But no effort would enable me ever to forget the new impulse which that great personality imparted to my youthful imagination. From that moment I, who before that time had been a Seward Republican, became an enthusiastic Lincoln Republican, and have stayed converted |