In addition to newspaper and magazine reporters, photographer Mathew Brady also looked forward to Abraham Lincoln’s campaign trip to New York City on February 27, 1860.
On that date Lincoln delivered his Cooper Union address, the most important speech of his 1860 presidential campaign.
“Mathew Brady first photographed Abraham Lincoln on February 27, 1860, the day Lincoln addressed a large Republican audience in the modern lecture hall at Cooper Union in New York.
Over the following weeks, newspapers and magazines gave full accounts of the event, noting the high spirits of the crowd and the stirring rhetoric of the speaker.
Artists for Harper’s Weekly converted Brady’s photograph to a full-page woodcut portrait to illustrate their story of Lincoln’s triumph, and in October 1860, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly used the same image to illustrate a story about the election.”
— “Abraham Lincoln”
National Portrait Gallery
Mathew Brady’s photograph of Abraham Lincoln on the day of his speech at the Cooper Union, February 27, 1860. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress
“….This much is certain: Had Abraham Lincoln failed at his do-or-die debut in New York, he would never have won his party’s presidential nomination three months later, not to mention election to the White House that November. Such was the impact of a triumph in the nation’s media capital.
….Abraham Lincoln did triumph in New York. He delivered a learned, witty, and exquisitely reasoned address that electrified his elite audience and, more important, reverberated in newspapers and pamphlets alike until it reached tens of thousands of Republican voters across the North. He had arrived at Cooper Union a politician with more defeats than victories, but he departed politically reborn.
….As a bonus, Lincoln’s Cooper Union appearance also inspired the most important single visual record of his, or arguably any, American presidential campaign: the image-transfiguring Mathew Brady photograph made earlier that same day. Its subsequent reproduction and proliferation in prints, medallions, broadsides, and banners did as much to herald the ‘new’ Abraham Lincoln as did reprints of the speech itself.
Supposedly, when Lincoln, now president-elect, encountered the photographer in Washington the following year, he volunteered: ‘Brady and Cooper Union made me president’….”
— “The Speech That Made The Man”
American Heritage, Winter 2010
Newspapers published Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech throughout the presidential campaign. The following excerpt comes from the June 8, 1860 edition of The Jeffersonian Democrat.
You can learn more about Mathew Brady and his photographs in this Smithsonian Magazine video:
Comments