A House-Divided

[maharba]

Your point was apparently well taken by both the South and by Lincoln's friends???>

Herndon and others rightly concluded that Lincoln was shooting himself in the foot with that House Divided speech. Sounded too much like wacky Wendell Phillips and other radicals. Phillips family had tried to have him commited to an insane asylum. And Herndon was right: Lincoln lost the senate run to Steven Douglas. So then, the South, the electorate of Illinois, and even Lincoln close friends did not like what they heard in the House Divided speech.

But Lincoln was far more savy than Wendell Phillips. He 'laid back' here, and added more, there. Gave the appearance of such and such now, then receded later on.

As Gene said, a great wrong needed to be righted. (Maharba, I wonder why you don't look critically at the Constitution or the DOI instead that hadn't explicitly endowed all humans with the same rights. >

You might be asking me to: place myself NOW and examining rights of all folks (including women, Indians, possibly then to sexually ambiguous folks and on). Or the notion might be to place myself BACK in time to 1858, and shouldn't I then
have ranged myself with folks wishing to toss out the Constitution and rather have disunion than 'a more perfect union' with the slavery South to continue on. The abolitionists concluded and clamored for the dissolving of the Union, and a new Constitution (probably with the South gone). But when the South seceded, then the same folks became super-patriots and just loved the Union again and their (revised again) vision of the Constitution.