February 27, 2006 is the 146th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech in New York City.

It was the speech which, according to Harold Holzer, in his excellent book, Lincoln at Cooper Union, made Lincoln President.

Just two years before, Lincoln had run for Senator from Illinois. Notwithstanding his credible showing in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, he had been defeated. Had his speech at Cooper Union failed to impress, he would probably be a footnote in the history books today.

But the speech succeeded phenomenally, and the momentum propelled Lincoln to the Republican nomination and the White House.

Yet if the speech is so important, why is it so little known? According to Holzer, it is because the speech is the longest, most legalistic, and least poetic of Lincoln’s major speeches. In this he is correct. But it is nonetheless fascinating to see Lincoln at work as a lawyer, an orator and a rising and ambitious politician.

The gist of the speech was this: The Democrats insisted that the federal government had no power to exclude slavery from the territories. The Republicans said that it did.

The Democrats said that theirs was the position of the men who wrote the Constitution. That, they insisted, made them the conservatives, and made the Republicans radical innovators.

Lincoln’s reply to this argument was lawyerly, but masterful. He pointed to the thirty-nine signers of the Constitution who had expressed themselves on the slavery issue, and then pointed to a series of incontrovertible instances where the majority of these same men had upheld the right of the federal government to exclude slavery from the territories. Then came the kicker:

“But you say that you are conservative – eminently conservative – while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and the untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by ‘our fathers who framed the Government under which we live;’ while you with one accord reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new.”

Lincoln did not say that emancipation was within the power of the federal government. He didn’t have to. The pro- and anti-slavery factions both grasped instinctively that excluding slavery from the territories was the first step in a process that could end only in the abolition of slavery itself.

It was this recognition that made civil war inevitable the moment that Lincoln won the White House.