Lincoln at Cooper Union

By Harold Holzer

This book is a detailed breakdown of Lincoln's important but not widely-read speech at Cooper Union in New York City.

What's amazing to me about Lincoln's writing is how easy it is to read. I used to assume that things written in the 1800s were just hard to read, but Lincoln's words look like they could have been written today. He felt it was important to simplify his writing so that anyone could understand it. He kept his words and phrases short—though he also used long sentences to great effect.

This book analyzes one of Lincoln's most important, but least widely-read, speeches. Before he became president, Lincoln traveled East to give a speaker tour, and the highlight was his speech at Cooper Union. Since he was relatively unknown there, and because his speech went off so well, many agree that the Cooper Union speech helped him secure the Republican nomination for the presidency.

The book usefully gives the reader every bit of context that they might need to understand the speech. The line-by-line analysis of the speech represented a small portion of the book, and the rest was devoted to understanding the political and social dynamics of the country at the time. By the time I got to the analysis portion I knew what I needed to know in order to understand the speech itself.

◆ ◆ ◆

Reference

Holzer, H. (2006). Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President. United States: Simon & Schuster.