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“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln said, echoing the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, as he began his now famous acceptance speech at Springfield. Straightaway, he set forth an instantly accessible image of the Union as a house in danger of collapse under the relentless pressure of the slavery issue. “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free,” he continued. “I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”

Supporters and opponents alike believed that with his image of a house that could not “endure, permanently half slave and half free,” Lincoln had abandoned the moderate approach of his Peoria speech four years earlier in favor of more militant action. His argument, however, remained essentially unchanged: slavery had seemed on the road to gradual extinction until the fateful passage of the Nebraska bill gave it new momentum. His call for action was no more radical than before—to “arrest the further spread” of slavery and “place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief” that it was back where the framers intended it, “in course of ultimate extinction.” The true change since the Peoria speech was not in Lincoln’s stance but in the designs of proslavery Democrats, who, he charged, had cunningly erected a new proslavery edifice to destroy the framers’ house of democracy.

Lincoln deftly illustrated what he, like Seward, considered a plot to overthrow the Constitution. Whereas Seward cited the days of the English king, Charles I, with an oblique reference to the Roman emperor Nero, to present a tableau of a tyrant’s coronation, Lincoln delineated the conspiracy with an everyday metaphor. “When we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places by different workmen—Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, for instance,” Lincoln explained, “and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house…all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places…we find it impossible to not believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.” With these timbers in place, Lincoln warned, only one other “nice little niche” needed to be “filled with another Supreme Court decision,” declaring that the constitutional protection of private property prevented states as well as territories from excluding slavery from their limits. Then, in one fell swoop, all laws outlawing slavery in the Northern states would be invalidated.

If “the point of this rather elaborate [house] metaphor seems obscure today,” the historian James McPherson observes, “Lincoln’s audience knew exactly what he was talking about.” The four conniving Democratic carpenters were Stephen Douglas, architect of the lamentable Nebraska law and vocal defender of the Dred Scott decision; Franklin Pierce, the outgoing president who had used his last annual message to underscore the “weight and authority” of Supreme Court decisions even before the Court had completed its deliberations in the Dred Scott case; Roger Taney, the Chief Justice who had authored the revolutionary decision; and James Buchanan, the incoming president who had strongly urged compliance with the Supreme Court decision a full two days before the opinion was made public. Working together, these four men had put slavery on a path to “become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.”

Reminding his audience that Douglas had always been among the foremost carpenters in the Democratic plan to nationalize slavery, Lincoln made it clear that the Republican cause must be “intrusted to, and conducted by its own undoubted friends—those whose hands are free, whose