New Haven Museum
Presidents’ Day, which includes marking Lincoln’s birthday, may have passed weeks ago but Friday marks our own Honest Abe commemoration — of his connection to New Haven.
On this date in 1860 the future president stood in Union Hall, on Union Avenue roughly between Water and Fair Street, where High School in the Community now is located.
There he made a speech in which he drew parallels between the status of the working man and the status of the slave.
Allan Appel Photo
Site of Babcock’s Daily Palladium, built 1855.
It was an hour’s stemwinder at least, a performance by turns legalistic and also very funny. There was lots of applause, according to the account in the Daily Palladium, whose editor, James Babcock, was behind the invitation for Lincoln to visit.
In the speech Lincoln used humor, in his inimitable way, for serious ends: to explain not only the magnitude of the problem of slavery, but also the effects of slavery in social and economic terms but in the corrosive cost to the human mind and heart, of the slave-holder:
“Look at the magnitude of this subject! One sixth of our population, in round numbers — not quite one sixth, and yet more than a seventh, — about one sixth of the whole population of the United States are slaves!” Lincoln said. “The owners of these slaves consider them property. The effect upon the minds of the owners is that of property, and nothing else — it induces them to insist upon all that will favorably affect its value as property, to demand laws and institutions and a public policy that shall increase and secure its value, and make it durable, lasting and universal. The effect on the minds of the owners is to persuade them that there is no wrong in it. The slaveholder does not like to be considered a mean fellow, for holding that species of property, and hence he has to struggle within himself and sets about arguing himself into the belief that Slavery is right. The property influences his mind.”
Click here to read the full text of the speech.
He was riffing on and riding the instant fame of his speech at Cooper Union some days before in New York City. That’s where the Illinois politician, fairly unknown in the East, threw his hat in the ring and stepped onto the national stage, declaring slavery a moral wrong but taking a middle position on the “institution’s” continuance in the South; he was far less radical for slavery’s abolition than his fellow Republican competitor for the nomination, William H. Seward.
Still, in New Haven Lincoln left no doubt that he saw slavery as the great political and moral problem. It had not been solved and would not be as long as politicians continued to place “small cures for great sores” and “plasters too small to the wound.”
It was Lincoln’s first and only visit to New Haven, part of six days he was spending in Connecticut, bucking up the nascent Republican party in the Nutmeg State and putting himself out there to get its nomination for president in the 1860 election.
Lincoln arrived here at what is now the corner of Chapel and Union, at the then-great railroad station. He had just finished visiting his son Robert at Exeter in New Hampshire and making speeches in Norwich, Hartford, and other towns. The trains — and there were a lot of them at the time — seemed to convey Lincoln very efficiently.
His host in our burg was James Babcock, lawyer and publisher of the abolitionist New Haven Palladium, published at the Palladium Building on Orange Street, cheek by jowl still with that current zone of free expression in town, Pitkin Plaza.
Site of the commemorative plaques, now gone
Lincoln’s speech at Union Hall, which was thoroughly reported in the Daily Palladium, was marked years later by a brass plaque affixed to the wall of the then AT&T (now Frontier) building at the southwest corner of Court and State Street.
The plaque said (if memory serves) that on this site in 1860 candidate Abraham Lincoln gave an address in which he compared the fate of the slave to that of the working man.
Next to it was another plaque put up by the local Jewish community’s B’nai Brith fraternal organization, marking its founding in 1850 of its first lodge, near that site as well.
Alas, both plaques were stolen during the brass and copper theft epidemic. The screw holes in the concrete are the only vestiges.
After Lincoln spoke, Babcock hosted him for the evening at his home at 92 Olive Street. Then Lincoln went off to more stops in Providence and other points in New England before returning to Manhattan and then to Springfield, Ill. Months later he received the news of his election.
92 Olive likely stood on this site, now a parking lot at Olive and Court Street
Connecticut voters went big time for Lincoln and the Republicans in the 1860 election. In 1861 Lincoln appointed Babcock collector of customs for the port of New Haven. A rambling Victorian Gothic mansion owned by Babcock in Fair Haven Heights attests to his well-connectedness and success.
In 2010, there was a commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the March 6, 1860 address, in which high school kids went to the site of Union Hall and read portions of the speech.
The recent events in New York City, Ferguson, and elsewhere indicate the plasters on the wounds still don’t appear to be doing the job. Maybe on Presidents Days to come in New Haven, we could do worse than reading that speech publicly once again.