as he talked to me before the meeting, he seemed ill at ease, with that sort of apprehension which a young man might feel before presenting himself to a new and strange audience, whose critical disposition he dreaded.  It was a great audience, including all the noted men—­all the learned and cultured of his party in New York editors, clergymen, statesmen, lawyers, merchants, critics.  They were all very curious to hear him.  His fame as a powerful speaker had preceded him, and exaggerated rumor of his wit—­the worst forerunner of an orator—­had reached the East.  When Mr. Bryant presented him, on the high platform of the Cooper Institute, a vast sea of eager upturned faces greeted him, full of intense curiosity to see what this rude child of the people was like.  He was equal to the occasion.  When he spoke he was transformed; his eye kindled, his voice rang, his face shone and seemed to light up the whole assembly.  For an hour and a half he held his audience in the hollow of his hand.  His style of speech and manner of delivery were severely simple.  What Lowell called “the grand simplicities of the Bible,” with which he was so familiar, were reflected in his discourse.  With no attempt at ornament or rhetoric, without parade or pretence, he spoke straight to the point.  If any came expecting the turgid eloquence or the ribaldry of the frontier, they must have been startled at the earnest and sincere purity of his utterances.  It was marvellous to see how this untutored man, by mere self-discipline and the chastening of his own spirit, had outgrown all meretricious arts, and found his own way to the grandeur and strength of absolute simplicity.

He spoke upon the theme which he had mastered so thoroughly.  He demonstrated by copious historical proofs and masterly logic that the fathers who created the Constitution in order to form a more perfect union, to establish justice, and to secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity, intended to empower the Federal Government to exclude slavery from the Territories.  In the kindliest spirit he protested against the avowed threat of the Southern States to destroy the Union if, in order to secure freedom in those vast regions out of which future States were to be carved, a Republican President were elected.  He closed with an appeal to his audience, spoken with all the fire of his aroused and kindling conscience, with a full outpouring of his love of justice and liberty, to maintain their political purpose on that lofty and unassailable issue of right and wrong which alone could justify it, and not to be intimidated from their high resolve and sacred duty by any threats of destruction to the government or of ruin to themselves.  He concluded with this telling sentence, which drove the whole argument home to all our hearts:  “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.”  That night the great hall, and the next day the whole city, rang with delighted applause and congratulations, and he who had come as a stranger departed with the laurels of great triumph.