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| Field name | Value |
|---|---|
| Collection Reference Number | GLC02533 |
| From Archive Folder | Documents Relating to 1857 |
| Title | Fragment of the "House divided" speech on slavery, Dred Scott, and Kansas |
| Date | ca. December 1857 |
| Author | Lincoln, Abraham (1809-1865) |
| Document Type | Miscellany |
| Content Description | A single page beginning "Why Kansas is neither the whole, nor a tithe of the real question." Written before the debates with Stephen A. Douglas, apparently in response to that Senator's Dec. 9, 1857 speech in opposition to Buchanan's State of the Union address (as suggested by Don Fehrenbacher, "House Divided," 89 ff.). Nicolay and Hay date the metaphor from Oct. 1858 while Basler assigns it to May 1858. Unpublished and unrecorded. Current dating is based upon Don E. Fehrenbacher's hypothesis that this speech responds to Stephen A. Douglas's speech in the Senate of 1857 Dec. 9 (Prelude to Greatness, chap. 4). |
| Subjects | Slavery Dred Scott President Bleeding Kansas African American History Politics Government and Civics Congress Law Election US Constitution Supreme Court Freedom and Independence Civil Rights |
| People | Lincoln, Abraham (1809-1865) |
| Place written | Springfield, [?] |
| Theme | The Presidency; Government & Politics; Slavery & Abolition; African Americans; Law |
| Sub-collection | The Gilder Lehrman Collection, 1493-1859 |
| Additional Information | The critical issues dividing the nation--slavery versus free labor, popular sovereignty, and the legal and political status of African Americans--were brought into sharp focus during the 1858 campaign for U.S. Senator from Illinois. The campaign pitted a little-known lawyer from Springfield named Abraham Lincoln against Senator Stephen A. Douglas, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1860. Lincoln had been born in 1809 and had grown up on the wild Kentucky and Indiana frontier. At the age of 21 he moved to Illinois where he worked as a clerk in a country store, became a local postmaster and lawyer, and served four terms in the lower house of the Illinois General Assembly. A Whig in politics, he was elected in 1846 to the House of Representatives, but his stand against the Mexican War made him too unpopular to win reelection. After the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, Lincoln reentered politics, and in 1858, the Republican party nominated him to run against Douglas for the Senate. Lincoln accepted the nomination with the famous biblical words: "A house divided against itself cannot stand." Lincoln proceeded to argue that Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision were part of a conspiracy to make slavery lawful "in all the States, old as well as new--North as well as South." The following fragment, which dates from before the June 1858 Republican Convention, offers an early formulation of the ideas that Lincoln advanced in his House Divided speech. |
| Copyright | The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History |
| Module | Settlement, Commerce, Revolution and Reform: 1493-1859 |