INTRODUCTORY NOTE

THE address delivered by Lincoln at the Cooper Institute in February, 1860, in response to the invitation of certain representative New Yorkers, was, as well in its character as in its results, the most important of all of his utterances.

The conscientious study of the historical and constitutional record, and the arguments and conclusions based upon the analysis of this record, were accepted by the Republican leaders as constituting the principles and the policy to be maintained during the Presidential campaign of 1860, a campaign in which was involved not merely the election of a President, but the continued existence of the republic.

Under the wise counsels represented by the words of Lincoln, the election was fought out substantially on two contentions:

First, that the compact entered into by the Fathers and by their immediate successors should be loyally carried out, and that slavery should not be interfered with in the original slave States, or in the additional territory that had been conceded to it under the Missouri Compromise; and, secondly, that not a single further square mile of soil, that was still free, should

be left available, or should be made available, for the incursion of slavery.

It was the conviction of Lincoln and of his associates, as it had been the conviction of the Fathers, that under such a restriction slavery must certainly in the near future come to an end. It was because these convictions, both in the debates with Douglas and in the Cooper Institute speech, were presented by Lincoln more forcibly and more conclusively than had been done by any other political leader, that Lincoln secured the nomination and the presidency. The February address was assuredly a deciding factor in the great issue of the time, and it certainly belongs, therefore, with the historic documents of the republic. G. H. P.

NEW YORK, September 1, 1909.

CORRESPONDENCE WITH LINCOLN, NOTT,

AND BRAINERD

(From Robert Lincoln)

Manchester, Vermont,

DEAR MAJOR Putnam:

July 27, 1909.

Your letter of July 23rd reaches me here, and I beg to express my thanks for your kind remembrances of me in London. I am much interested in learning that you were present at the time my father made his speech at Cooper Institute. I, of course, remember the occasion very well, although I was not present. I was at that time in the middle of my year at Phillips Exeter Academy, preparing for the Harvard entrance examination of the summer of 1860. . . . After the Cooper Institute address, my father came to Exeter to see how I was getting along, and this visit resulted in his making a number of speeches in New England on his way and on his return, and at Exeter he wrote to my mother a letter which was mainly concerned with me, but which did make reference to these speeches. . . . He said that he had had some embarrassment with these New England speeches, because in coming East he had

anticipated making no speech excepting the one at the Cooper Institute, and he had not prepared himself for anything else. . . . In the later speeches, he was addressing reading audiences who had, as he thought probable, seen the report of his Cooper Institute speech, and he was obliged, therefore, from day to day (he made about a dozen speeches in New England in all) to bear that fact in mind.

I consider it very desirable that the report of Mr. Lincoln's speech, embodying the final revision, should be preserved in book form. . . . The text in the pamphlet now in your hands is authentic and conclusive. Mr. Lincoln read the proof both of the address and of the notes. I am glad that you are to include in your reprint the letters from Mr. Lincoln, as these letters authenticate this copy of the address as the copy which was corrected by him with his own hand. . . .

The preface to the address, written in September, 1860, has interest because it shows what we thought of the address at that time. Your worthy