Post by Auset on Feb 13, 2004 11:31:20 GMT -5
Slavery and a House Divided
Not merely an attempt to alarm the voters of Illinois, Abraham Lincoln's 1858 'House Divided Speech' was actually a warning that slavery might soon expand northward.
By Alexander Gigante for American History Magazine
On June 16, 1858, the nascent Illinois Republican party, meeting in convention at Springfield, declared Abraham Lincoln its "first and only" choice to challenge the incumbent U.S. senator, Democrat Stephen A. Douglas. The Illinois legislature would elect the state's U.S. senator in 1858.1 Therefore, the Republicans' declaration was unprecedented: A party convention never before had the temerity to suggest how the legislators should vote.2
The convention delegates reconvened that steamy evening after supper to witness another unprecedented event. In the 1850s it was still traditional for a candidate for office to adopt a disinterested posture, a role Lincoln himself played during the 1854 senatorial campaign.3 This time, however, he took a different tack, addressing the convention with a dramatic "declaration of purpose" that soon became known as his "House Divided Speech."4 Lincoln warned the delegates that legal and political developments during the preceding years had set the stage for the unthinkable: the extension of slavery northward. Lincoln's contemporaries criticized him for rashly predicting a revolutionary turn in the slavery crisis that supposedly would never have happened. In fact, a Supreme Court decision forcing the North to accept slavery in some form was much more of a possibility than his critics have appreciated. Had the war not intervened, proponents of slavery might well have used the courts to force slavery into the free states. In the words of historian Arthur Cole, "time has shown" that Lincoln "read the signs with...prescience."5
That June evening, Lincoln began his speech with a disturbing view of an America ever more divided by the slavery crisis:
In my opinion, [the current slavery agitation] will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed. "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. Have we no tendency to the latter condition?6
Lincoln's primary aim in the speech was to kill a growing flirtation between some East Coast Republicans, led by newspaper editor Horace Greeley, and the Democratic politician Stephen Douglas, who had suddenly gained stature as an anti-slavery leader after he split with President James Buchanan and southern Democrats over the proposed admission of Kansas as a slave state.7 Ironically, Douglas had opened the Kansas Territory to slavery with his sponsorship of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which repealed the Missouri Compromise's prohibition of slavery in the Louisiana Purchase north of 36ยบ 30' latitude. In late 1857, however, Douglas came out against the Kansas constitution under which the territory sought statehood because pro-slavery forces had engineered its adoption by fraudulently disenfranchising the anti-slavery majority of Kansas' settlers.
In December 1857 Lincoln first revealed his exasperation over Republican interest in Douglas, complaining in a letter about Greeley's New York Tribune "eulogizing, and admiring, and magnifying Douglas."8 His fellow Illinois Republicans--still coalescing into a unified party from disparate factions of Whigs, disaffected anti-slavery Democrats, Free Soilers, and American Know-Nothings--fully backed Lincoln because, in the words of historian Don E. Fehrenbacher, theirs "was an anti-Douglas party; opposition to Douglas formed the strongest tie uniting its diverse elements."9 Indeed, the convention delegates listening that evening in Springfield to Lincoln's dark vision of the slavery crisis had come together precisely to demonstrate that Illinois Republicans would not support Douglas.10
Many contemporaries attacked Lincoln for suggesting that slavery would somehow insinuate itself into free Northern states.11 Historian Authur C. Cole characterized them as "wont to assume that it furnished a goal for the revolutionary efforts of a reformer."12 Even some of his supporters found the speech "unfortunate."13 According to Lincoln biographer Benjamin P. Thomas, "t marked him as a radical when in fact he was a conservative."14
Apparently fearing that he had gone too far, Lincoln backtracked in the weeks following the speech. To the editor of a major Chicago newspaper, Lincoln stated that he was "mortified" that anyone might understand his speech as sanctioning interference "with slavery in the States where it exists."15 During his famous campaign debates with Douglas, the "Little Giant," that summer and fall, Lincoln was repeatedly on the defensive denying Douglas' charge that the speech was "in essence a plan to array section against section, to incite a war of extinction on 'negro equality' ground."16
Not merely an attempt to alarm the voters of Illinois, Abraham Lincoln's 1858 'House Divided Speech' was actually a warning that slavery might soon expand northward.
By Alexander Gigante for American History Magazine
On June 16, 1858, the nascent Illinois Republican party, meeting in convention at Springfield, declared Abraham Lincoln its "first and only" choice to challenge the incumbent U.S. senator, Democrat Stephen A. Douglas. The Illinois legislature would elect the state's U.S. senator in 1858.1 Therefore, the Republicans' declaration was unprecedented: A party convention never before had the temerity to suggest how the legislators should vote.2
The convention delegates reconvened that steamy evening after supper to witness another unprecedented event. In the 1850s it was still traditional for a candidate for office to adopt a disinterested posture, a role Lincoln himself played during the 1854 senatorial campaign.3 This time, however, he took a different tack, addressing the convention with a dramatic "declaration of purpose" that soon became known as his "House Divided Speech."4 Lincoln warned the delegates that legal and political developments during the preceding years had set the stage for the unthinkable: the extension of slavery northward. Lincoln's contemporaries criticized him for rashly predicting a revolutionary turn in the slavery crisis that supposedly would never have happened. In fact, a Supreme Court decision forcing the North to accept slavery in some form was much more of a possibility than his critics have appreciated. Had the war not intervened, proponents of slavery might well have used the courts to force slavery into the free states. In the words of historian Arthur Cole, "time has shown" that Lincoln "read the signs with...prescience."5
That June evening, Lincoln began his speech with a disturbing view of an America ever more divided by the slavery crisis:
In my opinion, [the current slavery agitation] will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed. "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. Have we no tendency to the latter condition?6
Lincoln's primary aim in the speech was to kill a growing flirtation between some East Coast Republicans, led by newspaper editor Horace Greeley, and the Democratic politician Stephen Douglas, who had suddenly gained stature as an anti-slavery leader after he split with President James Buchanan and southern Democrats over the proposed admission of Kansas as a slave state.7 Ironically, Douglas had opened the Kansas Territory to slavery with his sponsorship of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which repealed the Missouri Compromise's prohibition of slavery in the Louisiana Purchase north of 36ยบ 30' latitude. In late 1857, however, Douglas came out against the Kansas constitution under which the territory sought statehood because pro-slavery forces had engineered its adoption by fraudulently disenfranchising the anti-slavery majority of Kansas' settlers.
In December 1857 Lincoln first revealed his exasperation over Republican interest in Douglas, complaining in a letter about Greeley's New York Tribune "eulogizing, and admiring, and magnifying Douglas."8 His fellow Illinois Republicans--still coalescing into a unified party from disparate factions of Whigs, disaffected anti-slavery Democrats, Free Soilers, and American Know-Nothings--fully backed Lincoln because, in the words of historian Don E. Fehrenbacher, theirs "was an anti-Douglas party; opposition to Douglas formed the strongest tie uniting its diverse elements."9 Indeed, the convention delegates listening that evening in Springfield to Lincoln's dark vision of the slavery crisis had come together precisely to demonstrate that Illinois Republicans would not support Douglas.10
Many contemporaries attacked Lincoln for suggesting that slavery would somehow insinuate itself into free Northern states.11 Historian Authur C. Cole characterized them as "wont to assume that it furnished a goal for the revolutionary efforts of a reformer."12 Even some of his supporters found the speech "unfortunate."13 According to Lincoln biographer Benjamin P. Thomas, "t marked him as a radical when in fact he was a conservative."14
Apparently fearing that he had gone too far, Lincoln backtracked in the weeks following the speech. To the editor of a major Chicago newspaper, Lincoln stated that he was "mortified" that anyone might understand his speech as sanctioning interference "with slavery in the States where it exists."15 During his famous campaign debates with Douglas, the "Little Giant," that summer and fall, Lincoln was repeatedly on the defensive denying Douglas' charge that the speech was "in essence a plan to array section against section, to incite a war of extinction on 'negro equality' ground."16
