Lincoln’s reading of history led him to a dramatically different conclusion, namely that many of the founders sought to limit slavery’s expansion, a view he presented in its fullest form in his Cooper Union Address (1860). He discovered that twenty-one of the thirty-nine signers of the Constitution were on record for banning or restricting slavery in the territories. Both Washington and Jefferson, as well as sixteen signers, endorsed the Northwest Ordinance, which prohibited slavery north of the Ohio River. Jefferson had even wanted to ban slavery in all the new territories.
