Roughly dated December 1857, this document is a partial fragment of Abraham Lincoln’s famous “House Divided” speech, a draft that exhibits much of his rhetoric and ideas in an early, somewhat unrefined form. The final speech was given six months later on 16 June 1858, at a meeting of over a thousand delegates in Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln was nominated to run for senator of that state by his Republican colleagues.

  

Two of the speech’s most well-known lines can be found in this early draft exactly as they would appear in the final version, one being: “I believe this government can not endure permanently, half slave, and half free.” But the speech gets its name from arguably the most famous quote, “A house divided against itself can not stand,” which originated from several passages in the Bible – most notably in Mark 3:25, when Jesus says, “And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”

 

The speech (and senator nomination) marked the beginning of a political struggle between Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, with the former vying for the latter’s seat in the United States Senate. The underdog in the fight, Lincoln was a relatively unknown lawyer at the time who had previously worked in politics after being elected to the House of Representatives in 1846. But after taking a stand against the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), Lincoln failed to win re-election and stayed out of politics until the passing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 prompted him to return. This act created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, and allowed white male settlers to determine whether those states would advocate slavery or not (known as popular sovereignty).

Lincoln was opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, along with the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision (1857), which decreed that African Americans could not be classed as American citizens regardless of whether they were free or enslaved. His argument was that the two acts were part of a conspiracy to make slavery legal “in all the States, old as well as new – North as well as South.” Lincoln’s push for senator ultimately failed, and Douglas went on to become the front-runner for the Democrat presidential nomination in 1860.

While the radical “House Divided” speech gave Lincoln’s opponents ample political ammunition to use against him, it also helped make the public aware of the issues surrounding slavery and the division in government, which no-doubt contributed to his election as President in 1861. The speech was a turning point for Lincoln, setting the stage for the next seven years of American politics. This early version provides a fascinating insight into how Lincoln formed and articulated the ideas that would define his political career.

 

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