With Malice Toward None

The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Exhibition    

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Inspired by newspaper accounts of Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address, New England Republicans asked Lincoln to speak in their states. He made a whirlwind tour, appearing in eleven cities in twelve days. Lincoln’s frustration at having to prepare at least nine different speeches during his tightly packed campaign through New England is clearly evident in this letter to Mary Todd. He was not accustomed to such sophisticated audiences who would have read his prior speeches in newspapers. His reputation with words preceded him and he worried that he might have little new to say.
* Currently on Exhibit

(Transcription)

If I had foreseen it I think I would not have come East at all. The speech at New-York, being within my calculation before I started, went off passably well, and gave me no trouble whatever. The difficulty was to make nine others, before reading audiences, who have already seen all my ideas in print


<p>Inspired by newspaper accounts of Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address, New England Republicans asked Lincoln to speak in their states. He made a whirlwind tour, appearing in eleven cities in twelve days. Lincoln’s frustration at having to prepare at least nine different speeches during his tightly packed campaign through New England is clearly evident in this letter to Mary Todd. He was not accustomed to such sophisticated audiences who would have read his prior speeches in newspapers. His reputation with words preceded him and he worried that he might have little new to say.</p>