Lincoln's Undivided Speech
I made it a little further and they are talking about Lincoln's "House Divided" speech in 1858. It lost him the race for senate, but some think it may have won him presidency later.
so perverted in this attempted use of it as to amount to just this: That if any one man, choose to enslave another, no third man shall be allowed to object.
Of course, southerns would never forget this line about it becoming permanently one thing or another ... you can see how they viewed it and why they took afront. But his speech is that exactly the opposite was already happening ... that we were falling into being one thing - a slave state.
"A house divided against itself cannot stand."
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
He argues it will go one way or the other and that between the sham elections in KS that made it a slave state and now the dread scott decision he thinks we are heading toward being a slave nation. He talks about the danger of the "sacred right of self-government" being:so perverted in this attempted use of it as to amount to just this: That if any one man, choose to enslave another, no third man shall be allowed to object.
Of course, southerns would never forget this line about it becoming permanently one thing or another ... you can see how they viewed it and why they took afront. But his speech is that exactly the opposite was already happening ... that we were falling into being one thing - a slave state.
We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free; and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State.
To meet and overthrow the power of that dynasty, is the work now before all those who would prevent that consummation.
This is what we have to do.
Comments