Convention of States is encouraging everyone to not merely read the United States Constitution, but also to study it--just as Founding Father John Jay advised.
Knowledge of the Constitution and its architects is important when articulating the COS mission to legislators, allies, and potential supporters.
There is perhaps no finer example of the fruits of such study as the exemplary 7,000-word speech at Cooper Union delivered by Abraham Lincoln in New York City on February 27, 1860.
In a gas-lit hall, Lincoln electrified the Cooper Union audience. His speech--a tightly-composed argument based upon the premises that the Constitution forms the U.S. government and that the Framers of the Constitution opposed the expansion of slavery through word and deed--transformed him from a regional figure of note to a serious contender for the presidency.
Lincoln researched and wrote his address without the convenient clicks of a mouse and without so much as a private secretary or a single research assistant.
Amid his combing through whatever resources he could unearth in Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln was mediating squabbles within the Illinois Republican Party, keeping regional speaking engagements, trying cases (his primary source of income), and attempting to publish the famed debates with his foe for the 1858 U.S. Senate seat and foil for Cooper Union, Stephen A. Douglas.
Lincoln researched with the goal to answer arguments that favored the concept of Popular Sovereignty. Lincoln zeroed in on speeches and an essay Douglas published in the popular periodical Harper’s that emphasized Douglas’s faulty interpretation of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and his erroneous claim that the Founders wished the individual states to decide the expansion of slavery.
He turned Douglas’s assertion that “Our fathers, when they framed the Government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better than we do now” into a lance against him.
Author and historian Harold Holzer’s book Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President is a magnificent resource for explaining the context of Lincoln’s speech, its political risks and ramifications, and the sensation of its aftermath. It also tells a fascinating tale about Lincoln’s visit to the studio of photographer Mathew Brady.
Holzer notes the multitude of texts Lincoln consulted during his preparation, particularly the words of the Framers themselves. Lincoln closely scrutinized volumes such as The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution as Recommended by the General Constitution at Philadelphia, in 1787, the four-volume Commentaries on the Constitution, and early versions of the Congressional Record (then known as the Annals of Congress), and the Congressional Globe.
Lincoln haunted the law library at the Illinois capitol building to imbibe from Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, the autobiography of Thomas Jefferson, and the papers of George Washington and James Madison.
His labor was best described by his law partner William H. Herndon:
“He searched through the dusty volumes of congressional proceedings in the State Library, and dug deeply into political history. He was painstaking and thorough in the study of his subject.”
The speech is best read in its entirety, and Holzer’s book is recommended without reservation.
Lincoln’s research permitted him to articulate some salient facts about the Founders and their views on the expansion of slavery:
“The sum of the whole is, that of our thirty-nine fathers who framed the original Constitution, twenty-one – a clear majority of the whole – certainly understood that no proper division of local from federal authority, nor any part of the Constitution, forbade the Federal Government to control slavery in the federal territories.”
Lincoln’s research led him to conclude that, in the main, the Founders were against slavery and that Douglas and the Democratic Party would “reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new.”
The product thrilled his audience in New York and catapulted Lincoln to the nomination of the Republican Party for president and to the White House–defeating, among others, Stephen A. Douglas.
Close study of the Constitution, its Framers, and the votes of those Framers may not enable supporters of COS to compose and deliver exquisite equivalents to the Cooper Union address. Few individuals in history have as skillfully combined research, logic, and literary genius as Abraham Lincoln.
Yet such thorough study will arm us with the facts about Article V-- a vital part of the inheritance that those brilliantly prescient framers bequeathed to us--as we state our case in every legislature in the land.
We can embody the spirit of Lincoln’s peroration in New York City that late February evening in 1860:
“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.”
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