The Formative Period
divined the situation and its imperious needs and with a sure voice sounded the keynote of victory. "A house divided against itself," he said "cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free." With characteristic directness he added that he did not expect it to fall and did not expect it to become all slave.
That utterance, one of the most epochal in the history of America, was made on June 17, 1858. It was made in the course of Lincoln's acceptance of the Republican nomination for the United States senatorship from Illinois as the competitor of Stephen A. Douglas who was seeking reelection. Months afterward, on October 25th, Seward adopted and repeated the same thought in a speech at Rochester, N. Y. in which he spoke of the "irrepressible conflict" which meant that the United States would "sooner or later become entirely a slaveholding nation or entirely a free labor nation." But in June Seward and others were not yet ready for that declaration. Nor were they inclined to approve Lincoln's candidacy against Douglas. They were so pleased with the revolt of Douglas and the Anti-Lecompton Democrats against the administration that they would have let Douglas be reelected to the Senate without opposition that he might continue there his hostility to Buchanan and thus increase the dissensions in the Democratic party.
Lincoln was wiser. He discerned the desirability of opposing Douglas on moral grounds and also on grounds of the most practical political strategy. On moral grounds he did not purpose that the Republican party should permit a man to be elected to the Senate unchallenged on a platform of indifference to slavery.
24
