“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.”
Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address, February 27, 1860

Before Lincoln presented 1,500 New Yorkers with his detailed argument that the Founding Fathers understood Congress to have the power to restrict slavery, and that most viewed slavery as an evil that should not be expanded, he was a regional figure who had failed in his 1858 bid as a Senate candidate.

Lincoln’s view that there could be no moral “middle ground” between right and wrong on the expansion of slavery, together with his refutation of Southern accusations that Republicans were radicals or threats to the Union, so inspired his audience—and the wider public who learned of it through subsequent newspaper coverage—that it elevated him to national prominence.
His ringing call for Americans to have faith and moral courage in their convictions led to his securing the 1860 Republican presidential nomination, his election to the presidency, and a legacy that made people proud to be American.