By John B. Manbeck
a Brooklyn historian Special to The Brooklyn Eagle

President Obama has elevated the image of Lincoln past former clichés that had diminished “Honest Abe.� With this year’s inspired pre-inauguration whistle stop train journey to Washington, D.C., the public re-conceived Lincoln’s triumphant victory march to the capital. But just as Lincoln faced new dilemmas, Obama also will be challenged. Lincoln’s call to arms sounded when he accepted an invitation to Brooklyn in 1859.

Embedded on the arm of a fourth row pew in the Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims on Cranberry Street is a brass plate indicating where President Abraham Lincoln sat during a sermon by The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. This day of the bi-centennial of Lincoln’s birth has significant overtones because of President Obama’s associations with him.

Lincoln, an icon for the current president, only visited Brooklyn one time, in 1860. Yet his influence and symbolism resounded in New York for the next five years. The year before, having returned to his legal practice after a term in the U.S. House of Representatives, Lincoln had been invited to speak at Plymouth Church on “The Founding Fathers’ attitude toward slavery,� according to Bud Livingston (President Lincoln’s Third Largest City: Brooklyn and the Civil War) and online sources. Encouraged by the success of his slavery debates (“a house divided against itself cannot stand�) with Stephen Douglas in 1858, Lincoln looked for wider exposure.

He accepted the invitation but, by the next February, the venue was changed to Manhattan’s Cooper Union because of the expected crowds. However, on February 26, the Sunday before his famous speech, he sat in Pew Number 89 of the Congregational Plymouth Church for a Beecher sermon.

At Cooper Union, Lincoln was joined on the dais by two newspaper editors, William Cullen Bryant of the New York Post and Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune. The audience of 1500 listened to the 51-year-old candidate expound on the evils of slavery, an argument that won him the nomination.

Lincoln’s administration affected the cities of Brooklyn and New York differently for the speech was interpreted in divergent ways. While slavery had been abolished in New York State in 1829 and colonies of free blacks settled in Weeksville in Brooklyn, attitudes about slavery divided citizens. Pockets of abolitionists protesting slavery agitated across the North and in Europe.

The city of New York, politicized by Tammany Democrats, gloried in racist copperhead attitudes and pleas for a negotiated peace. Some sympathies rested with the South because of commercial ties in textiles and finance. The early Brooklyn Eagle published pejorative editorials about blacks, particularly Frederick Douglass.

Many of the difficulties emerged from conflicts between immigrants and blacks, both low on the economic ladder. Irish, fleeing the famines of 1845 and 1852, had been feared by Protestant Whigs and later Republicans who predicted the new Catholics would introduce a “foreign state,� the Vatican, with the Pope as a dictator. The anti-immigrant Know-Nothing party arose in upstate New York from these threats. At the same time, both the Irish and newly freed blacks competed for similar service jobs. Of these New York issues, Lincoln was largely ignorant although he visited the city six times.

After the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act permitting territories to vote on slavery, abolitionists from New York and Brooklyn, including Mr. Beecher, stirred controversy with speeches and recruitment of agitators. In both 1856 and 1860 Beecher held mock slave auctions at the church with former slaves purchased from a southern auctioneer. His sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, had published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852.

With the election of Lincoln in 1860, South Carolina seceded and the Civil War started the next year. But New Yorkers and Brooklynites rallied and volunteered in the initial call to arms. Some New Yorkers claimed slavery as the cause of the conflict and that blacks were responsible. In August, 1862, protesters tried to burn a South Brooklyn tobacco warehouse owned by the Lorillard family “in which negroes were employed.� But in October of the same year, a crowd at the Brooklyn Academy of Music enthusiastically endorsed support of an emancipation doctrine from the president.

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