Lincoln Unites the Divided House

 On June 16th 1858 in Springfield Illinois, Abraham Lincoln gave his famous “House Divided” speech. The “house” was “the nation” but the word “house” better suited Lincoln’s purpose. He wanted to put an end to “slavery agitation” but he complained that the Federal Government’s Kansas-Nebraska Act had not ended but increased the agitation. “I believe,” he said, “that 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.” Stephen Douglas, Lincoln’s opponent in the election of 1858 for US Senator from Illinois, warned that Lincoln was calling for “a war of sections, a war of the North against the South, of the free states against the slave states”. Seven years later more than 600,000 Americans from the north and the south had died fighting one another in 8000 fights including 384 major battles all over “America” but “the nation” survived whole and now free of slavery, although the man who had first proclaimed that a division existed in the union had been assassinated. There had certainly been political division over slavery but there had been no division at all in the “house” over the question of whether the 34 states of the union were sovereign or not. In 1861 all the states were sovereign but by 1865 state sovereignty as it existed before the war was gone, wiped off the American share of the North American continent by the Civil War along with slavery. 

Daniel McNeill

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