Lincoln

Yesterday, flipping through the channels, I came across Sam Watterson giving Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address. It was fantastic. The speech is a piercingly precise work of logic, and Watterson delivered it with passion that brightened up its faded eloquence considerably. The event was organized by Harold Holzer, who has published a new book about the Cooper Union Address. It would be nice if Watterson and another actor could perhaps reenact a Lincoln-Douglas debate some time.

[L]et us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored—contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man—such as a policy of “don’t care” on a question about which all true men do care—such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance—such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washington did. Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. 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.