Content area
Full Text
On a stirringly hot evening, June 16, 1858, Abraham Lincoln, a former one-term congressman, stepped onto the raised platform of the legislative chamber in the state house at Springfield, Illinois, to accept the Republican Party's nomination to run for the U.S. Senate against the most famous Democrat in America-the incumbent, Stephen A. Douglas. At six feet, four inches, Lincoln towered over the packed hall, his head nearly level with the edge of the balcony. The nation was at a historic crossroads, and he had worked on this speech for weeks. He loved to recite poetry and delivered his poetic prose with unmatched rhetorical power. His body angular, his hands large and awkward, his voice strong but high-pitched, Lincoln quickly gained his audience's attention. "Slavery agitation" had convulsed American politics and exploded in guerrilla war in Kansas. "In my opinion," ventured Lincoln, "it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed." Then, in imagery familiar to his Biblereading listeners, he gave the crisis its unforgettable metaphor.
'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' 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. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new-North as well as South (1).
In much of the remainder of the thirty-minute speech, Lincoln contended that a conspiracy led by the Democratic Party's "chief bosses" sought to make slavery a national institution. He charged Douglas with not caring "whether slavery be voted down or voted up." For Lincoln, this was a choice history would no longer allow Americans to avoid. The southern, slaveholding political class would never forget Lincoln's use of that phrase, "ultimate extinction."
In the ensuing campaign, Lincoln and Douglas squared off over the great issues dividing the country, the westward expansion of slavery,...