Hey, everyone, it's Reid. Before we get started, I just want to remind everybody to not get sucked into the magical thinking.

There's a whole bunch of folks in this country, whether or not they live in Washington, DC, or New York, work in the media, they're big donors, they want you to think everything is normal.

It's not. Times have changed, and we have to change with them. This is not a fight guys between Republicans and Democrats. This is a fight between those that believe in democracy and those that would tear it down.

I need everybody to go to LincolnProject.us and sign up today to join this movement. If we do it together, we have the opportunity to decide what tomorrow looks like, but we can't get to tomorrow unless we win today.

Thanks again, everybody. And now on with the show.

Welcome back to the LincolnProject. I'm your host, Reid Gailan. Today, I'm joined by Stuart Stephens, senior advisor to the LincolnProject, and author of It Was All Alive. Stuart, welcome back.

Thanks Reid. Great to be here.

So today I want to talk about something that happened a long, long time ago, and that is Abraham Lincoln and his speech to the Cooper Union on February 27th, 1860.

It's also called the right mix might speech. And we're recording and streaming this episode on Friday the 24th. It'll drop sometime next week, but I want to start out by saying that one of the reasons why this particular speech steward is important to us, aside from the fact it is a notable and historic speech that really launched Lincoln's 1860 President.

We're also humbly named after him, but we were able to three years ago this week actually go to the Cooper Union and speak from the same podium that Lincoln delivered this speech to about 1500 people and discuss why we had launched the LincolnProject and really give our sort of opening gambit.

Remember, this is February 2020. This is pre COVID, right? We didn't know any of this was going to happen. It was a great event. We felt really good about it. We were going to take the show on the road and literally two weeks later, like the world shut down.

But Lincoln prior to this had been a one term member of Congress. He'd failed in a bid for the United States Senate against Douglas. The, you know, his opponent in the famous Lincoln Douglas debate Stephen Douglas Democrat also for Millinois.

And here he went in front of, you know, the grandees of New York City, including many people of the Republican Party, which had just been launched in 1854.

Right? This was a brand new party in Ripon, Wisconsin that essentially said slavery is wrong. Slavery should not be extended further into the States.

And split the Wigs, right? The Wigs went from being one of the two major parties to being dead in basically six years.

And so now Lincoln gives his first real opportunity of well researched, well thought out explanation as to why what the South was asking for was not about some reasonableness when it came to the institution of slavery.

But they wanted the South Southern States, slave holding states wanted what they wanted when they wanted it, how they wanted it. And they didn't want any argument about it.

And if they didn't get that, then they were threatening violence. They were threatening succession, which ultimately they did after Lincoln's election in November of 1860 and South Carolina seceded in the rest is history.

So before we started talking, though, a lot of the speech is about how the founders saw the founders and what I mean is the men who wrote and signed the Constitution felt about the institution of slavery.

The word slave slavery is never mentioned in the Constitution. They implicitly believe that it should not be extended into the States without federal authority that in federal territories that the United States government, the federal government had the authority to determine whether or not slavery could extend there.

But that so much like we see now that as time went on out of the 1700s, you know, the sort of age of American enlightenment. And now into the early 1800s when sectionalism became something more that were compromises, Missouri, you know, Kansas, Nebraska, everything else.

Now it became, you know, a cultural argument. This is a way of life. This is about freedom. This is about states rights, right? This is the 10th amendment. This is the 5th amendment.

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