Cooper Union in Manhattan has generally been known for three things. First, it’s a respected engineering and technical college. Second, it traditionally had free tuition and has been trying to recover that status. And third, as a matter of the school’s history, it is the site where Abraham Lincoln gave one of his most famous and consequential speeches. Given Wednesday’s events on the Cooper Union campus, the school’s leaders could stand to reread that speech.
Jeff Blehar, Zach Kessel, and Andy McCarthy have recounted the context of the harrowing harassment of Jewish students on the campus by anti-Zionist protesters who are, as usual, antisemites and who have acted in ways explicable only as antisemitism. The limp and mealymouthed response from Cooper Union president Laura Sparks, while it denounces this in general terms, is a masterpiece of moral evasion that fails utterly to identify the culprits or name antisemitism as the problem with terrorizing Jewish students:
Over the past few weeks, events affecting our community both near and far have created significant fear, unease, and unrest, and today, with the student protest on campus, the discord reached a new and unacceptable level at Cooper. . . . The devastation and loss of life in Israel and Gaza are tragic and the cause of deep pain and anger for people around the world and in our own community. The situation evokes disparate, deep emotions, strong views, and conflicting positions. But that does not excuse or condone disruptive, hateful, or threatening conduct.
Sparks should read her Lincoln.
To set the context: Lincoln spoke at Cooper Union on February 27, 1860. The speech was given in the dark shadow of John Brown’s raid, which had occurred in October 1859 and led to Brown’s hanging in December. The efforts to blame Republicans for Brown had claimed the Republican candidate for speaker of the House, John Sherman, in a controversy concluded at the beginning of February. Lincoln had made a nationwide reputation on the basis of nationally wired press reports (the first of their kind) of the Lincoln–Douglas debates (also the first of their kind) in 1858, in a Senate race Lincoln narrowly lost. The Cooper Union speech, as much as any event, proved that the rawboned, rough-hewn western stump orator could make his case in the biggest city of the East, and thus made Lincoln a credible presidential contender.
Much of the speech was given over to a critique of the 1857 Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court, which Lincoln dismantled in originalist terms with detailed reference to Founding-era history. But in the final third of this oration, the conclusion of which brought the house down, he faced the Brown issue and then challenged his audience to resist Southern, pro-slavery efforts to distort reality by making out the anti-slavery North as the aggressors after a decade of efforts by the South to expand slavery through federal legislation, national foreign policy, and Supreme Court decisions, all backed by the implicit threat of secession and sometimes the open use of violence when the South did not get its way. He began with a phrase that will sound all too familiar to today’s Israelis, condemned for seeking to defend themselves against aggressors who use their own civilian population as human shields:
A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!” To be sure, what the robber demanded of me — my money — was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle.
Lincoln then moved on to the nature of negotiations with people whose only demand is submission:
Even though the southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can. Judging by all they say and do, and by the subject and nature of their controversy with us, let us determine, if we can, what will satisfy them.
Will they be satisfied if the Territories be unconditionally surrendered to them? We know they will not. In all their present complaints against us, the Territories are scarcely mentioned. Invasions and insurrections are the rage now. Will it satisfy them, if, in the future, we have nothing to do with invasions and insurrections? We know it will not. We so know, because we know we never had anything to do with invasions and insurrections; and yet this total abstaining does not exempt us from the charge and the denunciation.
The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of [the Republican party in 1854], but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them. (Emphasis in original throughout)
He then moved on to the nub of the problem: the Slave Power demanded not just restraint but a public profession that the anti-slavery movement had no right to continue, and so long as that movement existed, they would blame it for everything:
These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly — done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated — we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.
Lincoln recognized that this approach had no end, and could not be appeased by anything less:
Demanding what they do, and for the reason they do, they can voluntarily stop nowhere short of this consummation. Holding, as they do, that slavery is morally right, and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full national recognition of it, as a legal right, and a social blessing.
Nor can we justifiably withhold this, on any ground save our conviction that slavery is wrong. If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality — its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension — its enlargement. All they ask, we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask, they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. Thinking it right, as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right; but, thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast our votes with their view, and against our own? In view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do this?
Seeing the stakes in these terms, Lincoln concluded that those who wished the free states to continue to exist as free states had no choice but to say out loud that the other side was wrong, and should not be allowed to expand, nor to demand some “middle ground between the right and the wrong” that would forever be elusive, “calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance”:
Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let 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. . . .
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.
Dare to do your duty as you understand it. And if you don’t understand it to stand foursquare without ambiguity or hedging against antisemites terrorizing Jewish students on your campus, resign and hand over authority to someone who does.