House Divided Speech

Summary

On the evening of 16 June 1858 the Illinois Republican state convention, meeting in the Hall of Representatives of the State House at Springfield, resolved that Abraham Lincoln was its first and only choice for the United States Senate against the Democratic incumbent, Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln answered with a carefully written acceptance speech that opened the campaign and set its terms. He begins with the question of where the nation stands and where it is heading. A policy launched more than four years earlier to end agitation over slavery has only inflamed it. Borrowing Jesus' words that a house divided against itself cannot stand, he predicts that the government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free: the Union will not fall, but it will become all one thing or all the other. The long middle of the speech argues that the nation is drifting toward the second outcome. Lincoln reviews the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and its doctrine of popular sovereignty, the delay of the Dred Scott case past the 1856 election, President Buchanan's call to accept the coming decision, and Douglas's declaration that he did not care whether slavery was voted down or voted up. He compares these acts to framed timbers cut by Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James (Douglas, Pierce, Taney, Buchanan) that fit together too exactly to be accidental, and he warns that one more decision could leave room for slavery in the free states themselves: Illinoisans might go to sleep and wake to find their state made slave by the Supreme Court. In the closing section he answers Republicans tempted to support Douglas, who had broken with Buchanan over the Lecompton constitution in Kansas. Douglas, he says, is a caged and toothless lion for this work, because he professes not to care about slavery at all. The cause must be led by its own friends, and if they stand firm, victory is sure to come. Friends thought the house-divided passage too radical, and Douglas used it throughout the debates that followed to call Lincoln a sectionalist. Lincoln lost the Senate seat, but the speech and the debates made him a national figure.

Top Lessons

• Naming the real question

  Lincoln's opening refuses the comfortable idea that the slavery question could be managed forever by compromise and indifference. He insists the nation must eventually decide what it is, and that a policy of not caring is itself a choice that favors slavery's spread.

• Building a case from circumstantial evidence

  Lincoln cannot prove that Douglas, Pierce, Taney, and Buchanan conspired, and he says so. Instead he lays out the sequence of events and lets the fit of the pieces, like timbers framed for one building, persuade his hearers that they share a common plan.

• Principle over convenient allies

  Some Republicans wanted to back Douglas because he had broken with Buchanan over Lecompton. Lincoln argues that a temporary ally who does not share the principle cannot be trusted with the cause, and that a party must be led by those whose hearts are in the work.

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