all we ask they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right and our thinking it wrong is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. Thinking it right, 5 as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition as being right; but thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast our votes with their view, and against our own? In view of our moral, social, and political responsiIo bilities, can we do this?

Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will pre15 vent it, allow it to spread into the national Territories, and to overrun us here in these free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances 20 wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored-contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong: vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man; such as a policy of "don't care on a question about which all true men do care; such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance; such as invocations to 30 Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said and undo what Washington did.

25

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government, nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the 5 end dare to do our duty as we understand it.

NOTES

THE SPRINGFIELD SPEECH

June 16, 1858

On the evening after he had received from the Republican State Convention its unanimous nomination for the United States Senatorship, Mr. Lincoln opened his campaign with this address. Because of its deliberate preparation and the radical character of some of its doctrines, it became the cardinal statement of the Republican position in the campaign of 1858, and the center of the most bitter attack of Mr. Lincoln's opponents. Indeed its utterance may be said to have marked the beginning of the final phase of the antislavery agitation which culminated in the War of the Rebellion. It had as much to do as any other single utterance with Lincoln's ultimate rise to national leadership.

I: 12. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. We can now appreciate with difficulty the sensation produced first throughout the state of Illinois, and later throughout the entire country by the first paragraph of this address containing the famous allusion to the "house divided against itself." To the conservative friends of slavery and of freedom alike, it seemed a deliberate incitement to sectional strife. "At the North, nine men out of ten," says J. T. Morse (Life of Lincoln, vol. i. p. 115), cared less for any principle, moral or political, than they did for the discovery of some course whereby this unwelcome conflict between slavery and freedom could be prevented from dis

66

247

organizing the course of daily business." Mr. Lincoln's words, therefore, were at the beginning of the campaign the delight of his political enemies and the dismay of his friends. But in his judgment the time was ripe.

Mr. Lincoln, as Republican leader of his state, had been led for some time to expect his nomination. His entire address of acceptance was prepared beforehand with the utmost care. When it was complete, Mr. Lincoln read it for criticism to his law partner, Mr. William H. Herndon. After the words "A house divided against itself cannot stand," Herndon, who was an abolitionist, remarked, "It is true, but is it politic to say so?" Lincoln replied: "The proposition is true and has been for six thousand years. I want to use some universally known figure expressed in simple language, as universally well known, that may strike home to the minds of men in order to raise them up to the peril of the times."

66

66

Reading the address later before a group of a dozen friends, he asked each for his opinion. Only one endorsed it; one characterized it as ahead of its time"; another as a fool utterance." The conservative vote it was urged would be alienated. But Herndon, who was of the number, exclaimed, “Lincoln, deliver that speech as read, and it will make you President." To his critics Lincoln replied, "Friends, this thing has been retarded long enough. The time has come when these sentiments should be uttered; and if it is decreed that I should go down because of this speech, then let me go down linked to the truthlet me die in the advocacy of what is just and right.”

The nobility of such language is manifest when we consider Lincoln's intense ambition for the Senatorship, the uncertain strength of the anti-slavery sentiment in the state, and the fact that he knew he was leading his party into unknown paths. The joy with which the doctrine of this opening paragraph was