“House Divided” speech

A speech made by Abraham Lincoln to the Illinois Republican convention in 1858. In the speech, Lincoln noted that conflict between North and South over slavery was intensifying. He asserted that the conflict would not stop until a crisis was reached and passed, for, in a biblical phrase Lincoln used, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” He continued: “I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”

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For the remainder of the “House Divided” speech, Lincoln shifted to a vigorous attack on the Dred Scott decision.

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Four months after Lincoln gave his “House Divided” speech, Senator William Seward of New York delivered a speech in Rochester in which he said the country had become a “theater,” staging a drama between “two radically different political systems.”

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Before ending the “House Divided” speech, Lincoln stated the deepest Republican and free-soil fear, especially in the wake of Dred Scott: that a new case would emanate from the border states, or even a free state, that would challenge whether any state could lawfully “exclude slavery from its limits.”

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In his famous 1858 “House Divided” speech about slavery and the fracturing nation, Abraham Lincoln borrowed from a biblical passage found in the Gospel of Matthew: “And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.”

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It was Lincoln’s powerful “House Divided” speech, delivered in 1858 during his unsuccessful bid for the Senate.

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