Abraham Lincoln: “House Divided” Speech

About the Author

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a one-room log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky, to Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks. Lincoln's parents belonged to a Baptist church that opposed slavery. Young Lincoln was exposed to slavery when an influx of planters moved into central Kentucky. Unable to compete with the slave-owning planters and bested in court battles with competing land claimants, Thomas Lincoln took his family across the Ohio River into Spencer County, Indiana, in 1816. Two years later Lincoln's mother died, and Thomas married a Kentucky widow, Sarah Bush Johnston. Emotionally distant from his father, Lincoln gave his affections to Sarah, whom he called “Mother” for the rest of his life.

Regarded as a diligent farmworker, Lincoln spent his leisure time reading, a trait that earned him a reputation as a dreamy bookworm. In 1828, with another youth, he guided a flatboat loaded with farm produce 1,200 miles down the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers to New Orleans. In New Orleans, Lincoln saw large numbers of slaves and probably witnessed a slave auction. In March 1830 Lincoln's father moved to central Illinois. At age twenty-two, Lincoln left home, canoeing down the Sangamon River to the village of New Salem in Sangamon County, Illinois.

Lincoln received a minimal education at local “subscription schools,” where pupils paid a fee to study rudimentary arithmetic and reading. An avid reader, Lincoln sought out books wherever he could. He read the Bible, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and William Shakespeare's plays. His favorite book was Parson Weems's Life of George Washington, a romanticized account of the lives of the Founding Fathers. He also read and memorized the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and writings about the Federalist period. He revered the Founding Fathers and documents of the early republic. His favorite Founding Father was the economic nationalist Alexander Hamilton. The hardship and poverty of rural life made Lincoln a natural Whig. The “American System” of the Whig politician Henry Clay, which called for federal support for internal improvements like roads and canals, advocacy of protective tariffs to foster domestic industry, and support for a national bank, appealed to Lincoln's belief in an activist government.

Lincoln ran unsuccessfully for the Illinois Assembly in 1832 on a Whig program to make the Sangamon River navigable for steamboats. He was elected to the Illinois state legislature two years later. While serving on this legislature, he discovered the eighteenth-century English jurist William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, which he committed to memory. Deciding to pursue a career in law, Lincoln taught himself Chitty's Pleadings and Judge Story's Equity. Admitted to the bar in 1837, Lincoln moved to Springfield and began a partnership with John Todd Stuart. Lincoln was a generalist who argued cases from small property disputes to large railroad suits to capital murder. An expert at cross-examination, summary argument, and jury pleading, he gradually built a prosperous legal practice. Serving four terms in the state legislature, Lincoln emerged as an Illinois Whig Party leader. He made his first antislavery speech from the floor of the Illinois House in 1837. In 1844 he formed a partnership with a fellow Whig, William “Billy” Herndon, that lasted until Lincoln departed for Washington in 1861.

In 1839 Lincoln met Mary Todd, the daughter of prominent Kentucky slaveholders. They married in 1842 and had four sons: Robert Todd Lincoln (1843–1926), Edward Baker Lincoln (1846–1850), William Wallace Lincoln (1850–1862), and Thomas “Tad” Lincoln (1853–1871). Only Robert survived into adulthood. Lincoln lost many loved ones during his life: His mother, Nancy, died when he was nine; his brother, Thomas, died in infancy; and his sister, Sarah, died with her stillborn child.

Lincoln served a single term in the U.S. House of Representatives (1847–1849). He opposed the war with Mexico as an unconstitutional threat to expand slavery into new western territories. He challenged President Polk's justification for the war that American troops had been fired on while within their own territory. From the floor of Congress, Lincoln peppered Polk with a torrent of speeches called the “spot resolutions.” Knowing that American troops had been in disputed territory south of the Texas border, Lincoln demanded that Polk designate the “spot” where the fighting had occurred.

The war with Mexico was popular in Illinois, and Lincoln's attacks on Polk were turned against him. He chose not to run for reelection in order to concentrate on building his legal practice. In 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act “awakened” him. By voiding the Missouri Compromise and threatening to spread slavery to new territories, the act rekindled old sectional divisions and destroyed the Whig Party. Lincoln joined with Conscience Whigs and former Free-Soil Party and Liberty Party members to form the Republican Party in 1854. In 1858, jumping at the chance to directly confront Douglas as an abettor of slavery, Lincoln ran for the U.S. Senate. The campaign featured the “House Divided” Speech and the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Lincoln lost the election, but the campaign vaulted him to a leadership position in the Republican Party nationally and led indirectly to his presidential nomination in 1860.

Lincoln carried all the northern states in the election of 1860. Months before his inauguration, the seven cotton states of the lower South seceded. In his First Inaugural Address on March 4, 1861, Lincoln reassured the South that he had no intention of interfering with slavery where it existed and urged the seceded states to rejoin the Union. He swore to honor his constitutional duty to preserve the Union while making it clear that he would not tolerate secession. Lincoln's hand was forced in April 1861 when Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor was made to surrender to Confederate forces. He called for seventy-five thousand troops to retake federal forts, protect the capital, and preserve the Union, which in his view remained intact in the face of an internal rebellion. The resulting state of war forced North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas to join the Confederacy.

Until September 1862 Lincoln's aim was to restore the states in rebellion to the Union. By summer 1862 the North's poor showing on the battlefield and its limited war aims combined to push France and Great Britain to the edge of recognizing the Confederacy. At the same time, radicals in his own party insisted that the war could not be won without striking at the South's massive slave-labor force, which kept the rebel armies fed and provisioned. On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that as of New Year's Day, 1863, all slaves in states still in rebellion would be free. The Emancipation Proclamation changed the overall aims of the war from preserving the Union to ending slavery. No European power would side with a rebellion to preserve slavery.

In spring 1863 Lincoln issued a call to enlist black troops to fight for the Union. These moves enraged the slave South and moralized the North. By war's end, more than 186,000 blacks, both free and slave, would serve in the U.S. military. The shift in the overall aims of the war disrupted production in the South, as slaves received word that their freedom was at stake and began to desert the plantations. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, delivered on November 19, 1863, is the clearest statement of Lincoln's changing views on the aims of the war. The address joined a recommitment to the ideal of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal with a novel emphasis on a “new birth of freedom,” referring to the abolition of slavery.

In July 1863 Union victories at Gettysburg in the East and Vicksburg on the Mississippi River turned the tide of the war. The emergence of Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman as aggressive Union generals and the shift in the war aims from reunion to reconstructing the Union without slavery combined to provide light at the tunnel's end. When Grant's forces bogged down in bloody fighting around Petersburg, Virginia, and Sherman stalled at the gates of Atlanta, however, war weariness demoralized the North. By late August 1864, Lincoln was secretly conceding the upcoming election to the Democratic challenger, General George B. McClellan. Then news broke that Atlanta had fallen, giving Sherman a direct path to the sea and into South Carolina, and Lincoln's fortunes changed. He was easily reelected to a second term in November 1864.

With the war's end in view, Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address on March 4, 1865, captured the change in Lincoln that took place during the four years of war. In tones echoing John Brown, Lincoln cast the war in the light of divine retribution visited upon the nation, both North and South, for the mortal sin of slavery. At the same time, he invoked a vision of a peace without vindictiveness. On April 9, 1865, General Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House in Virginia, and Joseph E. Johnston's army in North Carolina quickly followed suit. The Articles of Surrender made no mention of treason or punishment and helped to assure that there was no continuing guerrilla warfare.

On Friday, April 14, 1865, Lincoln was fatally shot at Ford's Theatre in Washington while attending a performance of Our American Cousin with his wife and two guests. He died of a head wound the next day. The assassin was the well-known actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth. The task of framing a policy for reconstructing the former slave states would be left to Lincoln's successors.