Postcard Thursday: Abraham Lincoln

Earlier this week, February 27, was the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's famed "Right Makes Might" speech at the Cooper Union. We've blogged about this event before (reprinted below) and the speech -- and Mathew Brady's famous photo of Lincoln -- are crucial parts of our Abraham Lincoln chapter in Footprints in New York.

Another image we talk about in that chapter is the one above that shows the moment of the president's death. (And is not reproduced in the book, alas.) As we write, the image

shows the president in repose at the lodging house across the street from Ford’s Theatre. The Lincolns and their friends, Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris, had gone to the theater on the night of his assassination to see Laura Keene—who Mary Todd Lincoln had enjoyed seeing in New York—in Our American Cousin. 

In the print, Robert and Mary Todd Lincoln bury their faces in hand- kerchiefs; young Tad Lincoln clings to his mother’s skirts. To one side, many members of Lincoln’s Cabinet look on. The demand for these prints—as well as scenes of Booth’s attack in the Lincolns’ box at Ford’s Theatre—was massive, and Currier & Ives went into overtime production... [and the images] was available for purchase a mere nine days after Lincoln’s death, an unheard of production schedule in 1865.

Rewind the story five years and we find a very different Abraham Lincoln--a small-town lawyer and sometime congressman trying to make a name for himself. 

On Monday, February 27, Lincoln woke [in Manhattan] to find the Republican-controlled newspapers stirring up anticipation for his speech. Some of his hosts, members of the Young Men’s Central Republic Union, called on Lincoln at the Astor Hotel, where they were embarrassed to find him disheveled, dressed in “a suit of black [that was] much wrinkled. . . . His form and manner were indeed very odd, and we thought him the most unprepossessing public man we had ever met.” 

Later that day, Lincoln headed up Broadway to Mathew Brady’s photography studio.... Brady and his assistants posed Lincoln standing, his right hand resting on a stack of books to show his erudition; behind him sits a classical pillar, a similar trope found in many formal portraits and statuary. 

After the photo was taken, Brady retouched it in the darkroom, including fixing Lincoln’s wandering left eye. He couldn’t, however, do anything to make his jacket fit any better—Lincoln’s right shirt cuff sticks out far beyond his sleeve—nor could he do anything to smooth out the future president’s wrinkled suit.

That evening, Lincoln addressed a huge audience at Cooper Union. Industrialist and inventor Peter Cooper had built the school just a year earlier as a free institution of higher learning. The Great Hall remains one of the largest lecture halls in New York, and, as anticipated, Lincoln drew a standing-room crowd. 

The speech, today most commonly known as the Cooper Union Address, was divided into three sections. In the first, Lincoln laid out a lawyerly argument that the thirty-nine signers of the Constitution—“our fathers who framed the Government under which we live,” he called them (quoting his antagonist, Senator Stephen Douglas)—were against the expansion of slavery. In the second section, Lincoln addressed Southerners directly, admonishing them for being the ones stirring up dissent:

"Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please. . . . You will rule or ruin in all events."

Lastly, speaking to the Republicans in the hall, Lincoln tried to hold to a moderate line. He was against slavery, but argued that “wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is” without allowing it to spread to the territories. 

Lincoln closed with the stirring lines that would soon be repeated in newspapers across the country—in all capital letters, as if he were shouting: 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.

While Cooper Union is still going strong, Mathew Brady's portrait studio where he shot the Lincoln portrait is long gone. However, if you find yourself in Tribeca, a building that housed another Brady studio still stands at 369 Broadway. There's no sign or marker, but it's worth taking a look next time you're in the neighborhood.

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Read more about NYC history in

 

Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

Postcard Thursday: The Cooper Union Address

This Saturday, February 27, marks the 156th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's famous Cooper Union Address, also known as his "Right makes Might" speech, which is widely credited with earning him the Republican nomination in 1860.

As we write in the Abraham Lincoln chapter in Footprints in New York:

On Monday, February 27, Lincoln woke [in Manhattan] to find the Republican-controlled newspapers stirring up anticipation for his speech. Some of his hosts, members of the Young Men’s Central Republic Union, called on Lincoln at the Astor Hotel, where they were embarrassed to find him disheveled, dressed in “a suit of black [that was] much wrinkled. . . . His form and manner were indeed very odd, and we thought him the most unprepossessing public man we had ever met.” 

Later that day, Lincoln headed up Broadway to Mathew Brady’s photography studio.... Brady and his assistants posed Lincoln standing, his right hand resting on a stack of books to show his erudition; behind him sits a classical pillar, a similar trope found in many formal portraits and statuary. 

After the photo was taken, Brady retouched it in the darkroom, including fixing Lincoln’s wandering left eye. He couldn’t, however, do anything to make his jacket fit any better—Lincoln’s right shirt cuff sticks out far beyond his sleeve—nor could he do anything to smooth out the future president’s wrinkled suit.

That evening, Lincoln addressed a huge audience at Cooper Union. Industrialist and inventor Peter Cooper had built the school just a year earlier as a free institution of higher learning. The Great Hall remains one of the largest lecture halls in New York, and, as anticipated, Lincoln drew a standing-room crowd. 

The speech, today most commonly known as the Cooper Union Address, was divided into three sections. In the first, Lincoln laid out a lawyerly argument that the thirty-nine signers of the Constitution—“our fathers who framed the Government under which we live,” he called them (quoting his antagonist, Senator Stephen Douglas)—were against the expansion of slavery. In the second section, Lincoln addressed Southerners directly, admonishing them for being the ones stirring up dissent:

"Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please. . . . You will rule or ruin in all events."

Lastly, speaking to the Republicans in the hall, Lincoln tried to hold to a moderate line. He was against slavery, but argued that “wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is” without allowing it to spread to the territories. 

Lincoln closed with the stirring lines that would soon be repeated in newspapers across the country—in all capital letters, as if he were shouting: 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.

While Cooper Union is still going strong, Mathew Brady's portrait studio where he shot the Lincoln portrait is long gone. However, if you find yourself in Tribeca, a building that housed another Brady studio still stands at 369 Broadway. There's no sign or marker, but it's worth taking a look next time you're in the neighborhood.

* * * *

Read more about NYC history in

 

Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

Mathew Brady's Lincoln Portrait

On February 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln gave his famous "Right Makes Might" speech at Cooper Union. That same day, he went over to famed photographer Mathew Brady's studio at Broadway and Bleecker Street where he sat for an official campaign portrait. Lincoln would later credit the speech and the photo with making him president.

One of the skills that made Brady such an acclaimed photographer was his ability to retouch in the darkroom. In this Lincoln portrait, lines are erased from the candidate's face and his wandering left eye is straightened.

While Brady's Tenth Street studio is gone, the building that housed his downtown studio still exists at 359 Broadway, an area that is rich with Civil War-era architecture.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post misstated at which of Brady Studios Lincoln sat for his portrait. It could not have been the studio at Broadway and Tenth Street (despite what you may read in various reputable sources), since that studio did not open until later in 1860.

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Read more on Lincoln and New York in Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

In case you’ve missed this news, today marks the centennial of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire—one of the deadliest industrial fires in American history and a turning point for worker’s safety and unionization in America.

The factory was predominantly staffed with young women who lived in Little Italy and the Lower East Side, and when we are giving walking tours of those neighborhoods, our clients are sometimes surprised to discover that the factory was in Greenwich Village. So much of that neighborhood—including the Asch Building, where the fire occurred—is now dominated by NYU that it is easy to forget that the stretch of the Village on both sides of Broadway was once a vital part of New York’s garment industry.

In Inside the Apple we dedicate an entry to the fire. We note:

Long before the fire broke out, the factory was infamous for its poor labor practices. In 1909, New York’s largest job action, known as the “Uprising of the 20,000” began when workers walked off the job at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. For months, the majority of the city’s shirtwaist factories were crippled by the strike, but the factory owners refused to budge. Though the International Ladies Garment Workers Union brokered a settlement in 1910 that stopped short of forcing the recognition of their union, the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, refused to agree to it. The factory’s workers went back to work having gained few concessions.

On the day of the fire, a Saturday, only about half of the factory’s 500 employees had come to work. Just as the afternoon shift was ending, a fire broke out on the eighth floor. Typical of garment centers of the day, the factory floor was a virtual tinderbox, with clothes, scraps of cloth, and unswept trimmings everywhere. When the fire started, the majority of the workers on the eighth and tenth floors were able to escape,* but those on the ninth floor had been locked in. This was done, some speculated, to cut down on unauthorized breaks, though it is also likely that it kept union organizers off the factory floor. Soon the elevators stopped working, which meant that the only remaining exit was the fire escape. Tragically, the fire escape had been poorly installed and maintained, and when too many young women began to climb down, it collapsed beneath their weight, sending them plunging to their death. The rest of the women on the ninth floor were then faced with jumping out of windows or waiting to burn to death. Many chose the former, raining down on the assembled crowd from above. The fire department did arrive, but as their ladders reached no higher than the sixth floor, it did little to save the women. In the end, 146 women died, most of them at the scene—some were only thirteen years old.

* Blanck and Harris, the owners, were able to get up to the roof and escape from there.

A number of events are commemorating the fire and its aftermath:

·         Today at 10:00 a.m., a parade will begin at the south end of Union Square Park and wend its way to the site of the Asch Building (today called the Brown Building), where there will be speeches by the mayor and others. Marchers in the parade will carry 146 shirtwaists on poles, one to commemorate each woman who died.

·         If you are interested in where these young women lived, the Bowery Boys put together a post that maps out all of their homes, some of them in outer boroughs. Many of those places will have the names of victims inscribed in chalk on the sidewalk courtesy of Ruth Sergel and a group of volunteers; see www.streetpictures.org for more information.

·         Today at 7:00 p.m. in the Cooper Union’s Great Hall, join artists, storytellers, and others for “100 Years After: The Triangle Fire Remembered and Rethought.”

·         PBS aired a documentary on the fire earlier this month on American Experience; it is available to stream online at http://video.pbs.org/video/1817898383/.

·         HBO’s documentary, Triangle: Remembering the Fire is being shown on CNN this Saturday, March 26, at 11:00PM (EST), so that anyone with basic cable can see it.

·         NYU’s Grey Art gallery has an exhibition through July 9 entitled Art, Memory, Place, that commemorates the fire and its victims.

·         The New York Times has provided a number of interesting articles and blog entries in the past few days, including a look at how the fire shaped the lives of such public servants as Frances Perkins and an article about how the fire was one of the first big tragedies captured by photojournalists.

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Read more about the Triangle fire in
Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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Cooper Mania: Free access into the Great Hall at Cooper Union and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum

Two great architectural spaces in New York are having free events this week and next that will grant you access to some of the city’s great interior spaces. (If you are not already worn out from last weekend’s openhousenewyork events.*)

On Thursday, October 15, the Cooper Union is continuing their year-long celebration of their 150th birthday with “Great Evenings in The Great Hall: Science and Technology,” a multimedia lecture featuring such notables as Adam Gopnik, Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus, and a slew of writers and actors. The Cooper Union was founded by industrialist and inventor Peter Cooper, to whom we devote a chapter in Inside the Apple. Among Cooper’s many notable accomplishments, he patented edible gelatin (a by-product of his glue factory), thus giving the world Jell-O. When Cooper Union opened, its Great Hall (where the lecture will be held) was the largest auditorium space in the city and in 1860 it was the site of Abraham Lincoln’s famous “Right Makes Might” speech, which was instrumental in garnering him the Republican nomination and the presidency.

Then, starting on Monday, October 19, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum is opening doors free of charge for a week to celebrate National Design Week.

The Cooper-Hewitt was founded by Amy, Eleanor, and Sarah Hewitt who were daughters of Mayor Abram Hewitt (more on him in a later post) and granddaughters of Peter Cooper. It is housed in the former home steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and the house is the subject of another chapter in Inside the Apple.

So, grab your copy of the book and head out to enjoy these two wonderful spaces!

* Many thanks to those who were able to join us for our exploration
of Gramercy Park with openhousenewyork;
we look forward to doing similar tours in the future.

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February 27, 1860: Lincoln at Cooper Union

A lot of our posts recently seem to have focused on the East Village and we return there again today to celebrate the 149th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s “Right Makes Might” speech at Cooper Union.

Lincoln had been invited to address the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, but the parish—led by noted abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher*—realized that the crowd would be too large for their Orange Street home and the speech was rebooked for the Great Hall at the Cooper Union. The Great Hall had opened only two years earlier and was one of the largest public gathering spots in the city.

In the speech, which historian Harold Holzer persuasively argues made Lincoln president, the “noted political exhorter and prairie orator” (as the New York Times called him the next day) forcefully laid out his case for barring the spread of slavery into the territories. Afterwards, the New York Tribune wrote: “No man ever before made such an impression on his first appeal to a New York audience.”

It was a busy day for Lincoln. In addition to the speech, he had his photograph taken by Mathew Brady. Both the speech and the photograph were distributed across the country, significantly raising Lincoln’s profile. According to McSorley’s lore, Peter Cooper brought Lincoln around for beer after the speech. This is unlikely. Instead, Lincoln went to the Athenaeum Club with some members of the Young Men's Central Republican Union for dinner.

The complete text of Lincoln’s speech can be read at http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/cooper.htm.

* We’ll visit the Plymouth Church in a future post.

For more about Abraham Lincoln, Cooper Union, and the city during the Civil War, be sure to pick up a copy of our book Inside the Apple.

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