The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [65]
Lincoln’s point in the House Divided speech was not the imminence of civil war but that Illinois voters, and all Americans, must choose between supporting or opposing slavery. As he had since 1854, Lincoln identified not Congress or the courts but public sentiment as the key battleground where the fate of slavery would be decided. The entire conspiracy rested on Douglas’s effort to “mould public opinion” to accept the moral equivalence of freedom and slavery. Once that had been accomplished, northerners would join Douglas in not caring “whether slavery is voted down or voted up.” Here was the reason no Republican should consider supporting Douglas for reelection: “Our cause…must be intrusted to, and conducted by [those]…who do care for the result.”
Frederick Douglass later identified the House Divided speech as the moment when “the friends of freedom” recognized in Lincoln a “statesman” who could unite “all the moral and political forces [opposed to] the slave power.” Some of Lincoln’s friends feared the speech would injure his chances in central Illinois, enabling Democrats to portray him as a dangerous radical. But Lincoln, as always, chose his words with care. He wanted to draw a sharp distinction between himself and Douglas. To do so, as he had in the past, Lincoln invoked ideas common in antislavery circles while formulating the argument in his own distinctive way. Henry Clay, as Lincoln well knew, had used the words “ultimate extinction” as had such Republicans as David Wilmot, Salmon P. Chase, and Senator Solomon Foot of Vermont.14 The image of a “house divided” was hardly unfamiliar. It appears three times in the Bible, most prominently in Jesus’s rebuke to the Pharisees in the Gospel of Matthew. (When Douglas objected to its use in 1858, Lincoln replied that if “a question of veracity” existed, it lay not between himself and Douglas but “between the Judge and an authority of a somewhat higher character.”) Lincoln had, in a sense, anticipated the idea in his Lyceum speech of 1838, when he spoke of a future tyrant choosing between “emancipating slaves or enslaving free men.” He had employed the phrase itself as early as 1843 (referring to the Whig party, not the nation), and it had been invoked before 1858 by the antislavery minister Theodore Parker and by the proslavery writer George Fitzhugh.15
The idea that Pierce, Buchanan, Douglas, and Taney had entered into a proslavery conspiracy strained credibility, not least because of the bitter conflict between Buchanan and Douglas over Kansas. But by 1858, the notion of a vast plot to spread slavery throughout the nation had become standard fare in Republican circles. Lincoln considered the accusation so powerful a rhetorical weapon that he urged Republican editors not to refer to it during the campaign until he could directly confront Douglas with the charge. The Republican press, in Illinois and throughout the North, was already warning of a new Dred Scott decision that would make it illegal for states to prohibit the introduction of slaves. Newspapers identified as the likeliest candidate the Lemmon case, in which a New York court had freed eight slaves brought by their Virginia owners to New York City for shipment to Texas. In October 1857, an appellate court upheld the original decision, whereupon the state of Virginia appealed, pledging to take the case all the way to Taney’s Supreme Court. Many Republicans worried that the Court would use it to establish a nationwide right to slave “transit.” Lincoln did not mention the Lemmon case in his House Divided speech, but he referred to it in a footnote in the printed version of his 1860 Cooper Institute address. (The case had not yet come before the Court when the Civil War broke out and Virginia seceded, rendering it moot.)16
By the time of the House Divided speech, the idea that slavery and freedom were locked in mortal