Historical Context in House Divided Speech

The Republican party was formed in 1854 in response to the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. It was made up primarily of abolitionists, former Whigs, anti-slavery Democrats, and free soilers. The central focus of the party was to oppose the expansion of slavery and promote economic reform, and the “discordant” assortment of political alignments formed a tense truce around that platform. By presenting their shared triumphs in the previous election, Lincoln appeals to his fellow Republicans’ sense of unity and brotherhood. Though they come from different backgrounds, they find common ground in resisting slavery. Together, they will continue to “battle” against the Democrats and prevent the expansion of slavery.

The transatlantic slave trade, here referred to as the African slave trade, refers to the importation of slaves from Africa. It was formally outlawed in the United States in 1808, largely due to the influence and advocacy of Thomas Jefferson. However, the internal slave trade, or the buying and selling of currently owned slaves, continued to thrive long after the abolishment of the transatlantic trade. By the 1850s, the transatlantic slave trade was near-universally condemned, and even most Southerners viewed it as a distasteful relic of the past. However, a group of Southern secessionists, referred to as the Fire Eaters, advocated for reinstating it. Their motivation was less focused on reopening the slave trade and more focused on inflaming resentment between the North and South.

Douglas earned the nickname “Little Giant” due to his short physical stature and commanding presence. Lincoln, who stood a full foot taller than the 5’4” Douglas, subtly mocks Douglas by alluding to this nickname. By including the adverb “very” before the adjective “small,” Lincoln emphasizes Douglas’s short stature. The “Little Giant” nickname was meant as a show of respect to Douglas. However, many of his political detractors also targeted his height as a means of discrediting or belittling him, as Lincoln seems to do here.

The “little quarrel” that Lincoln refers to is the disagreement between Buchanan and Douglas over the ratification of the Lecompton Constitution. Many more moderate Republicans viewed this dispute as evidence that Douglas might break with the Democrats and become a Republican anti-slavery champion. However, Lincoln dismisses this possibility and frames the dispute as “little.” This diminishes the perceived magnitude of the disagreement and reinforces Douglas’s continued attachment to the Democrats.

Lincoln establishes the importance of a Republican victory in the upcoming election. If slavery is to be resisted, then the anti-slavery party must win office. However, some Republicans harbored hopes that Douglas might actually be on their side. His steadfast neutrality on the moral issues surrounding slavery made him a popular candidate for more moderate voters. Lincoln acknowledges this divide in voter sentiment by posing the question of how the Republican cause can best be advanced. The following paragraph proceeds to advocate against Douglas by portraying him as pro-slavery—or at least not strongly enough opposed to it.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Nelson (1792–1873) was one of the concurring judges in the Dred Scott decision. His reasons for rejecting Scott’s suit and ruling with the court differed from Taney’s. Unlike Taney, who was a staunch supporter of slaveowner rights, Nelson preferred a narrow, uncontroversial approach to law. Nelson’s concurring opinion did not address the unconstitutionality of the Missouri Compromise or black citizenship. Instead, it focused on the necessity of popular sovereignty and state’s rights. Lincoln’s direct quote from Nelson’s concurrence bolsters his ethos by establishing Lincoln as someone intimately familiar with the Dred Scott case. He also references having read the opinions of all nine justices, further positioning Lincoln as an informed speaker and legal scholar.

Supreme Court Justices John McLean and Benjamin Curtis were the two dissenting votes in the Dred Scott decision. Both were anti-slavery and saw the majority’s decision as an overreach of judicial power. They each wrote forceful dissenting opinions on the case, inspiring Chief Justice Taney to respond with an equally forceful majority opinion. Curtis became the only Supreme Court Justice in US history to resign on a matter of principle, citing the tense atmosphere in the court in the wake of the Dred Scott case. Lincoln poses a hypothetical scenario wherein either McLean or Curtis attempted to convince the court majority to specify that states could exclude slavery from their borders. Lincoln asserts that had such a scenario occurred, it is likely that Chief Justice Taney would have rejected the idea—just as Douglas did when Chase proposed amending the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

One of the rallying cries of proponents of popular sovereignty was that the policy allowed for the “perfect freedom” of the people of the territories. However, Lincoln notes that only allowing territories to include slavery is not truly freedom. Since the Dred Scott decision revoked the ability of territorial legislatures to exclude slavery, anti-slavery territorial residents have no “freedom” to advocate for their beliefs.

For the anti-slavery Republicans, the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott decision were major losses. However, throughout most of the early-to-mid 19th century, anti-slavery sentiment seemed like the dominant trend. Many of the border states between the North and South had abolished slavery, and the practice was falling out of favor in more urbanized regions of the South. However, beginning with the Compromise of 1850 and the strengthening of the Fugitive Slave Act, the anti-slavery cause began losing ground. For many Republicans, this trend likely did seem “dark and mysterious,” possibly indicating a shift in public sentiment. However, Lincoln asserts that his speech ought to have “thrown additional light” on the topic, showcasing how the Democratic administration conspired to manufacture these gains.

Lincoln mockingly refers to the popular sovereignty doctrine as “Senator Douglas’s ‘care not’ policy.” The implication is that Douglas is attempting to cultivate apathy amongst voters by claiming that popular sovereignty is the fairest means of deciding where slavery should be allowed. However, for Republicans and other anti-slavery groups, slavery is a moral issue. Therefore, popular sovereignty is not a doctrine of freedom and fairness, but a doctrine that explicitly supports the expansion of an immoral institution.

During the Bleeding Kansas period, Kansas elected a primarily pro-slavery territorial legislature. The election was a source of major controversy, with nearly half of the votes thought to be fraudulent. In response, anti-slavery free-staters formed their own unofficial legislature. They met in Topeka in 1855 and produced the Topeka Constitution, which would have established Kansas as a free state. In response, the controversially elected territorial legislature met in 1857 and drafted the Lecompton Constitution, which would have established Kansas as a slave state. When the Lecompton Constitution was brought before Congress, President Buchanan and the majority of Southern Democrats supported its passage. However, Northern Democrats, including Douglas, were uncomfortable with the rampant fraud surrounding the Kansas election. They ultimately sided with Republicans in rejecting the Lecompton Constitution.

In the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act’s passage, people on both sides of the slavery debate moved to Kansas in the hopes of steering it towards their desired courses. This mass migration resulted in a power struggle between the pro and anti-slavery factions, which led to a period of civil unrest often referred to as “Bleeding Kansas.” In the hopes of controlling the chaos, Governor Robert Walker called in federal military troops. In response, a group of anti-slavery academics, led by Yale professor Benjamin Silliman, wrote to President Buchanan in protest. They saw the military presence as a form of voter suppression. Buchanan responded to the letter by insisting that the military presence in Kansas was necessary to maintain order and enforce the Dred Scott decision.

Franklin Pierce (1804–1869) was the fourteenth President of the United States. He presided over and endorsed the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, viewing it as necessary in his bid to settle and develop the new territories. Pierce spent the majority of his presidency attempting to defuse tensions over slavery. He, along with many others, viewed the upcoming Dred Scott decision as the means by which the matter might finally be resolved. However, Lincoln frames Pierce’s pre-emptive endorsement of the decision as proof of a Democratic conspiracy: he implies that party leaders encouraged the public to accept the decision, “whatever it might be,” as a means of making themselves seem conciliatory when, in fact, they already knew what the decision would entail.

The 1856 presidential election featured three primary candidates: Democrat James Buchanan, Republican John C. Fremont, and American Party candidate Millard Fillmore. Though Buchanan won the election by a sizeable margin, he did not obtain 50% of the popular vote, which Lincoln refers to as a “clear popular majority.” Lincoln references this lack of a clear majority in order to undermine the idea that the majority of the United States was truly pro-slavery. Indeed, the combined total of votes for Fillmore and Fremont, both of whom were—to varying degrees—anti-slavery candidates, was greater than the total number of votes for Buchanan.

James Buchanan (1791–1868) was the fifteenth President of the United States. A Democrat, he aspired to end the conflict over slavery through compromise and frequently sided with the pro-slavery South in order to avoid inflaming secessionist sentiments. Lincoln refers to Buchanan’s election as “the second point gained” by the pro-slavery coalition, since it guaranteed the presidential endorsement of whatever the Supreme Court decided in the Dred Scott case. The short, clipped phrases Lincoln uses to introduce Buchanan’s election give the speech a sense of narrative motion. Lincoln emphasizes the passage of time in order to further highlight the suspect timing of the Dred Scott decision, which came shortly after Buchanan’s inauguration.

US Senator Lyman Trumbull (1813–1896) was known as a congressional agitator and staunch anti-slavery advocate. He would later become one of the co-authors of the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery across the United States. Lincoln here references a confrontation between Trumbull and Douglas in which Douglas—referred to here as “the leading advocate of the Nebraska bill”—refused to answer whether he believed that the people of the territories should be allowed to exclude slavery. By indicating that the decision should be left to the Supreme Court, Douglas anticipated the ruling in the Dred Scott decision that Congress cannot exclude slavery from a territory. Lincoln uses this interaction to bolster his claims surrounding governmental conspiracy by subtly implying that Douglas had foreknowledge of the Supreme Court decision.

During the 1850s, the US Supreme Court was overseen by Chief Justice Roger Taney (1777–1864), who succeeded Chief Justice John Marshall in 1836. In later writings, Taney and several other members of his court expressed the belief that their 7-2 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford would settle the “slavery agitation” sweeping the nation. However, their predictions proved false, and the ruling led to near-universal outrage amongst Northerners. Even moderates believed that the court had overreached by barring African Americans from obtaining citizenship and declaring the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional.

“Squatter sovereignty” is a derisive name for the controversial doctrine of popular sovereignty. Popular sovereignty dictates that the US territories should decide through the popular vote whether to enter the Union as slave or free states. Its leading advocate was Stephen A. Douglas. Proponents of slavery referred to popular sovereignty as “the sacred right of self government.” Opponents of slavery, like Lincoln, viewed it as a thinly veiled means of spreading slavery to the territories. By using the term “squatter sovereignty,” Lincoln aligns himself with the anti-slavery cause and also disparages his opponent’s key philosophy.

Though he is not named until the latter half of the speech, Lincoln focuses much of his address against his primary opponent in the Illinois senatorial election, Stephen A. Douglas (1813–1861). Douglas was a prominent politician in the 1850s due to his co-authorship of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Lincoln frequently refers to Douglas indirectly as “the author of the Nebraska bill.” A Northern Democrat, Douglas was notoriously neutral about slavery from a moral standpoint, instead preferring to consider it from the perspectives of property rights and constitutional law. Lincoln attempts to frame Douglas as one of the “chief architects” of the pro-slavery gains in recent years. He cites Douglas’s support for both the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott decision as evidence of Douglas’s pro-slavery sentiments, implicating him in a broader conspiracy aimed at expanding the practice to the territories.

“The Dred Scott decision” refers to the 1857 Supreme Court Case Dred Scott v. Sandford, which Lincoln addresses at length later in the speech. Dred Scott, a slave, was taken by his owner from slave territory into free territory. Scott then sued his owner, claiming that he was automatically freed upon being taken into free territory. The Supreme Court ruled against Scott’s bid for freedom and also introduced three new legal precedents: People of African descent cannot be citizens of the United States and therefore cannot sue in federal court; the federal government cannot ban slavery in new territories, making the Missouri Compromise, which had banned slavery north of the 36° 30′ parallel, unconstitutional; and the federal government has no right to free slaves.

Lincoln asks a rhetorical question, confronting his audience with a startling possibility: As opposed to slavery’s being abolished or remaining contained to the South, recent events have paved the way for it to expand into the North as well. Up until the 1850s, the balance between slave states and free states had been carefully maintained. The North had tentatively resigned itself to allowing slavery to continue in the established South, with their focus instead shifting to stopping its expansion into new regions. However, after the Kansas-Nebraska Act was enacted, Northern anti-slavery sentiments were inflamed. Lincoln appeals to pathos by asking his audience to confront the implications of the recent pro-slavery political shift, invoking their fears surrounding its expansion.

The adjective “ultimate” refers to something that either occurs at the end of a process or is the ideal outcome in a given circumstance. The noun “extinction” means to cease to exist. This diction suggests that slavery’s “ultimate extinction” is both an imminent and desirable outcome. Though Lincoln was against slavery from a moral and political standpoint, he did not identify as an abolitionist. However, his assertion that slavery’s “ultimate extinction” would “place the public mind” at “rest” signaled to proponents of slavery that Lincoln wished to abolish the practice everywhere—including the established slave-owning South. This phrase was frequently parroted by Lincoln’s political detractors as a means of polarizing more moderate Republicans and swing voters.

As Kansas and Nebraska were being formally settled in the early 1850s, debates sparked in Congress over the expansion of slavery into these new territories. Several pro-slavery Southern politicians refused to vote on important infrastructural legislation unless slavery was legalized in Kansas and Nebraska. Lincoln employs parallelism in the phrase “avowed object and confident promise” to add a mocking rhythm to his condemnation of the “policy” that was implemented to end this “agitation.” By crafting a memorably parallel phrase using assertive diction, Lincoln creates contrast with the next sentence, which outlines the failure of that “confident promise.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) delivered the so-called House Divided speech on June 16th, 1858, at the Illinois Republican State Convention to an audience of around 1,000. Lincoln issued these statements in acceptance of his nomination to run as the Republican candidate for a US Senate seat in the 1858 election. Prior to 1854, Lincoln identified as a Whig, serving in the Illinois House of Representatives for four terms and the US House of Representatives for one term. He left politics in 1850 to resume his career as a lawyer, but re-entered the field as a Republican after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act expanded slavery and dissolved the Whig party. He ultimately lost in the 1858 Illinois Senatorial election to the incumbent Democrat, Stephen A. Douglas. However, Lincoln successfully won the presidency in 1860 thanks to the notoriety he obtained from both the “House Divided” speech and the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates.