One Searing Phrase: Abraham Lincoln’s “House Divided” Speech

Abraham Lincoln, 1863

“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:

“And if Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself; how shall then his kingdom stand?” (Matthew 12:24-25) [italics added]

Sometimes, a single searing phrase blasts our moral dilemmas into the open. In his “House Divided” speech, future president Abraham Lincoln woefully prophesized the United States of America’s oncoming calamity. The era faced a fundamental moral and political choice between slavery and freedom. Which way would the United States turn? Toward the light, or plunged into the darkness? No one knew.


Lincoln’s Warning

On June 16, 1858, Abraham Lincoln accepted the nomination to be United States senator from Illinois. Speaking in the old Illinois State Capitol, he warned that the United States of America could not be permanently divided into free States and slave states. Sooner or later, he predicted, the nation would become one or the other.

This led Lincoln to utter one of his most dramatic rhetorical passages. Rephrasing the Bible, he said:

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Most of his audience surely not only recognized Lincoln’s biblical allusion, but grasped its prophetic implications. Into what abyss was the United States of America falling due to the sin of slavery? Worse, was Satan divided against Satan? In other words, did the backwards, rural South and the ever-smug North conspire to perpetuate a wicked national philosophy? Did Lincoln not imply all of that?

Dred Scott

Now, in fact, most of Lincoln’s speech offered a technical discussion of the Dred Scott decision. As we recall from our history classes, Dred Scott was enslaved by a southerner who voluntarily took Scott to live in a state where slavery was illegal. After returning home, Scott secured an attorney and filed a lawsuit claiming that, since he had lived in a free state, not as a fugitive but under his master’s supervision, he was no longer a slave and was thus entitled to his freedom. An extremely conservative Supreme Court ruled otherwise on the shocking ground that no one of African descent could be a citizen of the United States. The court continued that no person of African descent could have standing to file a lawsuit against a white man in court. Completing the humiliation, the court further ruled that for the government to free an enslaved person would deprive the slave master of his rights under the Fifth Amendment.

This created a political problem. Favoring a moderate, gradual anti-slavery policy, the Republican Party of the 1850’s opposed allowing slavery to spread to any of the new territories that were eventually becoming states. Lincoln ruefully noted that the Dred Scott decision devastated that policy. The Dred Scott decision meant that Congress could not forbid slavery in any state or territory. At the same time, Lincoln knew that the Dred Scott decision by no means put an end to the slavery controversy:

“Agitation [on the slavery issue] has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’” [italics added]

Slavery was evil, he implied, and a nation could not endure half slave and half free. The Dred Scott case was the impetus, but Lincoln reified the controversy into a massive moral dilemma. The United States could not be all good and all bad at the same time. Indeed, he prophesied that the United States could either fall into the abyss of oppression, or free itself from slavery entirely. Yes, the Dred Scott decision had eliminated any middle course. More importantly, Lincoln’s biblical allusion confronted the nation with a moral controversy that would follow the United States through the coming horrors of the Civil War and the monstrous tragedies of racial oppression which followed, and which, we must remember, have not entirely evaporated.

Earlier Post: Abraham Lincoln and the Definition of "Liberty" 


Hope for the Future

Lincoln 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.”

Yet, of course, the Union did dissolve two short years later, reuniting only after enormous suffering. When the Civil War ended in 1865, more than half 600,000 Americans had died, my home state of Virginia was, like much of the South, reduced to starvation amongst smoldering ruins, and Lincoln’s successors still needed to figure out how to put the battered nation back together into one piece. The 13th Amendment to the Constitution seemingly settled the question—would the nation be half slave or half free?—but not until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was there any serious movement to implement the Declaration of Independence’s value that “all men are created equal.” (Indeed, not until the 19th Amendment in 1920 did women gain the right to vote.) 

Yet, despite the bitter times, Lincoln ended this famous speech by discussing the Republican Party’s rapid growth and expressing his hope that the (moderately) anti-slavery cause would, one day, triumph:

“The result is not doubtful. We shall not fail—If we stand firm, we shall not fail. Wise counsels may accelerate, or mistakes delay, but sooner or later the victory is sure to come.”

Lincoln expounded his ideas at greater length in the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates. Lincoln ultimately lost the 1858 senatorial election but won the presidential election in 1860. The rest is history.

Earlier Post: Abraham Lincoln, White Supremacist: The First Lincoln-Douglas Debate

Earlier Post: Abraham Lincoln, White Supremacist, Part 2: The Fourth Lincoln-Douglas Debate

In a complex irony, the Republican Party of 2023 is the party that stands against any expansion of civil rights.

 
Is Our House Still Divided?

Still, the repercussions of Lincoln’s dire warning reverberate today. Can a nation divided against itself long stand? For Lincoln’s biblical text also says, “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation.” Can a nation survive when divided against itself? When angry hordes, supported by public officials who should know better, attacked the United States Capitol with a mission to hang Congressional leaders and reinstate the losing presidential candidate? When a sitting member of Congress called for secession in 2023? Indeed, in 2023, is it “woke” for the descendants of slaves to have the chance to go to college or get good jobs? Should schoolchildren be shielded from the history of slavery? Should rogue police cite flimsy excuses to gun down the descendants of slaves on the street? That is, is our house still divided? More to the point, can it stand while divided? As was his habit, Lincoln spoke for the ages.

With one striking biblical sentence, Lincoln posed the nation’s ultimate challenge. The nation could not be half good and half evil, could not be half slave and half free. A nation that stands against itself has doomed itself. A crisis was coming, Lincoln warned, and no one could foresee its outcome with certainty. Each generation since has had a chance to respond. Or not.

Photo of Abraham Lincoln, 1863, Moses Parker Rice, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Image of Dred Scott, Missouri Digital Heritage