Scott Johnson of Powerline blog has a post commemorating the birth of Abraham Lincoln today. He quotes Lincoln’s famous 1858 “house divided” speech, calling it “one of the most incendiary speeches in American history;” one that propelled the prairie lawyer to the White House. Maybe so (it was perceived differently at the time), but it was also one of Lincoln’s most misleading, particularly its most quoted lines:
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—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.
Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.
Lincoln is here repeating a meme of the New England radicals—that the country was menaced by a shadowy conspiracy they called The Slave Power. This malign cabal would stop at nothing to re-impose slavery all over the country, and was well on its way to doing it. It had to be stopped by any means at hand—you had to get it or it would get you. This is exactly what Lincoln is saying here.
As such it falls into the category of scare propaganda like Red Scares or Brown Scares. The Southern slaveholders did not have, nor were ever likely to have, the political muscle to make slavery legal in the rest of the country. Only the year before the US Supreme Court had decided, in Dred Scott, that slavery was a matter for the states and not the federal government. Making slavery legal nationwide would have at the very least required a constitutional amendment, which was unlikely to have gotten off the ground.
As with all scares, however, there were germs of truth. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was extremely divisive and was used by Northern Abolitionists as an example of how The Slave Power was pushing its insidious tentacles into free states. It was also true that some Southern slaveholders dreamed of a vast slave empire that stretched across Central America and the Caribbean, and some—the filibusters—even tried to implement it. Still, it was a big jump from returning lawful property across state lines to the re-imposition of slavery in free states; and the filibuster expeditions, such as the one under William Walker, were more fit for a comic opera than serious statecraft.
Slave Power scares might have played well in New England, but not in the Midwest, where abolition was a less pressing topic. Stephen Douglas won the senatorial election of 1858 by a comfortable margin, after which Lincoln moderated his rhetoric. By 1860 he had changed his tune entirely and, as president, expressly offered to preserve slavery in the South as the price of coopting secession. Four years later the house of state did cease to be divided—but it was done at the point of a bayonet.
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