Chapter 1 Lincoln at Cooper Union: “An Eminent Citizen of the West”

Abstract

As he neared the six-story Astor House dominating the block between Vesey and Barclay streets at the lower end of Hotel Row on Broadway, Lincoln passed a garish “temple of art.” This building housed impresario P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, situated diagonally across the street from the Astor House’s entrance. There is no record that Lincoln visited the museum during this trip, where he might have pondered “Icelandic giants, Patagonian women, dwarves, sea-serpents, albinos, and heaven only knows what else.”A new African side-show hoax dubbed “What Is It?” had opened, prompting one local Democratic wag to suggest that this grotesque oddity was “neither white man nor monkey, therefore Black Republican.”