Lincoln's House Divided Speech

[David Lockmiller]

Was the Civil War Inevitable?
by David W. Blight (Sterling professor of history at Yale University as well as the director of its Gilder Lehrman Center for the study of slavery and abolition.)
New York Times
December 21, 2022

Excerpt on Lincoln's House Divided Speech:

Lincoln did not explicitly employ the term “Slave Power,” but he gave it many other names. He said that the Nebraska doctrine and the Dred Scott decision together had become a “piece of machinery” in the hands of Southerners and their Northern Democratic allies. Lincoln insisted that his audience see what he saw: clear “evidences of design, and concert of action, among its chief bosses” to give slavery an eternal future in America. These designers — the Slave Power — had one primary goal since 1854: to open “all the national territory to slavery.” The idea of popular “self-government” had been rendered “perverted” by this organized cartel, such that under law, “if any one man choose to enslave another, no third man shall be allowed to object.”

In stark terms, Lincoln had become the moderate as alarmist, a conspiracy theorist in his own right, alerting his tribe of the struggle ahead. Such blunt warnings had become mainstream rhetoric for Republicans by this point. 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.” Here Lincoln darkly predicted that “such a decision is all that slavery now lacks of being alike lawful in all the states.” Lincoln believed that such a decision was “probably coming” and that the only way to stop it was by organizing and voting, such that the “power of the present political dynasty shall be met and overthrown.”