LINCOLN

The Chasm

1858

TWO DAYS AFTER JAMES HAMMOND’S DEPARTURE FROM WASHINGTON, another speech, from an unheralded source, made headlines and further charged the political firmament.

On June 16, 1858, Lincoln, then forty-nine, won the Republican Illinois State Convention’s nomination to run for a seat in the U.S. Senate against the Democratic incumbent, Stephen Douglas, forty-five. The goal was to win the votes not of the public, but of state legislators, who, just like in South Carolina, were responsible for picking the state’s U.S. senators. What made the prospect of this battle particularly magnetic was that Lincoln, at six-four, stood a foot taller than the Little Giant.

In an address that night closing the convention, Lincoln delivered one of his best—and perhaps most foolhardy—speeches, for it may well have cost him the Senate seat. It positioned him as a man unabashedly opposed to slavery, thereby raising concerns that he might be too much of a radical for the Illinois electorate. Upon hearing Lincoln read a draft of it in advance, his law partner, William Herndon, while acknowledging the rightness of its central construct, told him, “It is true, but is it wise or politic to say so?”

The speech targeted Douglas and his Kansas-Nebraska Act, which Lincoln denigrated as having reinflamed the conflict over slavery, hitherto quieted by the Missouri Compromise. The new policy, Lincoln told his audience, had been initiated to end the turmoil but instead had managed to increase it.

“In my opinion,” he said, “it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed”—

And here he deployed a familiar admonition attributed to Jesus in the New Testament gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

“‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’”

“I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.”

He cautioned that he did not expect the Union to dissolve, “but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

“It will become all one thing, or all the other.”

Lincoln emphasized that he was not seeking the abolition of slavery but rather hoped to reach a point where further expansion of it was halted and “where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction.” In Lincoln’s view, Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act had altered the landscape so as to make this outcome far less likely. He closed with a vow that the Republican Party, “over thirteen hundred thousand strong,” would not let slavery’s apostles win. “The result is not doubtful,” he said. “We shall not fail—if we stand firm, we shall not fail. Wise counsels may accelerate or mistakes delay it, but sooner or later the victory is sure to come.”

It was the start of a campaign during which he would deliver sixty-three major speeches, travel over four thousand miles by all manner of conveyance, and, with Stephen Douglas as his opponent, engage in what would become the single most famous debate cycle in the nation’s history.

Though he would lose the election, he gained immediate national prominence. And his use of that “house divided” admonition, attributed to Jesus, would forever stand out as a prescient warning of what was to come.

FOUR MONTHS LATER, WITH the midterm congressional elections of 1858 in full swing, another prominent speaker made an offering to the cross of division. Speaking on October 25, 1858, in Rochester, New York, Sen. William H. Seward delivered an attack on slavery that echoed Lincoln’s earlier “house divided” thesis but took it further, to a point where even Republicans backed away, fearing that his remarks were too divisive.

Seward took direct aim at the South’s argument that slavery was a beneficent system that protected the enslaved from the vicissitudes of the free market. “The slave system,” Seward countered, “is one of constant danger, distrust, suspicion, and watchfulness.” The free-labor system, on the other hand, “educates all alike, and by opening all the fields of industrial employment and all the departments of authority, to the unchecked and equal rivalry of all classes of men, at once secures universal contentment, and brings into the highest possible activity all the physical, moral, and social energies of the whole State.”

The two systems, he said, were incompatible, no matter how many “pretended compromises” Congress stooped to accept. “It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.” He specified that there was only one way to ensure that free labor prevailed. “The Democratic Party must be permanently dislodged from the government. The reason is, that the Democratic Party is inextricably committed to the designs of the slaveholders.”

He then led his audience onto more dangerous ground, deploying the images and language of war. “I know, and you know, that a revolution has begun,” he said. “I know, and all the world knows, that revolutions never go backward.” Citing the unprecedented growth of antislavery sentiment in Congress, he launched into his closing passage: “While the government of the United States, under the conduct of the Democratic Party, has been all that time surrendering one plain and castle after another to Slavery, the people of the United States have been no less steadily and perseveringly gathering together the forces with which to recover back again all the fields and all the castles which have been lost, and to confound and overthrow, by one decisive blow, the betrayers of the Constitution and Freedom forever.”

Just as Lincoln’s speech lodged the phrase “a house divided” into the American psyche, and Hammond’s speech the “cotton is king” thesis, so Seward’s speech deposited a phrase that would color political discourse for the next three climactic years: “an irrepressible conflict.”