He thought the country couldn’t remain half-free, and that it would end up becoming one or the other. To be clear, this wasn’t what Lincoln was saying. “And you could almost hear a collective gasp from people that he would actually come right out and say we’re going to have a civil war.” “As soon as he used those words ‘house divided,’ he articulated the fear that everybody had at that point that the slavery controversy was indeed going to lead to some kind of civil war,” Guelzo says. Many thought it had done too much, says Allen Guelzo, director of Civil War era studies at Gettysburg College and author of multiple books about Lincoln. The speech certainly got Republicans’ attention. Lincoln at the Lincoln-Douglas debate in 1858. “Douglas had been seeking a middle ground between North and South, some way of comprising on the slavery issue,” says Eric Foner, a history professor at Columbia University who has written several books about slavery and the Civil War. Yet Republicans weren’t too concerned about Lincoln’s race because they thought Senator Douglas, a Democrat, might be open to working with them against expanding slavery. In general, Democrats then were the party of the slave-holding south and Republicans were the party of the free north that opposed slavery’s expansion. Senate against one of the most important politicians in the country, Stephen A. Lincoln, then a relatively unknown politician, had just won the nomination to run for U.S. Lincoln’s now-famous “house divided” line, which is drawn from the Bible, was actually part of a campaign speech he delivered at the 1858 Illinois Republican State Convention. was so divided that many feared it would break out in civil war-a fear that Lincoln unwittingly stoked. Americans may differ sharply on issues like immigration and abortion, but there is no single issue that geographically and economically divides the country in the same way that slavery did in the 1850s. When Abraham Lincoln said “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” he wasn’t talking about the kind of political divisions common today.
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