A House Divided

On the evening of June sixteenth, eighteen fifty-eight, Abraham Lincoln stood in the Hall of Representatives inside the old State Capitol building and delivered the speech that would define the decade that followed. He had just accepted the Republican nomination for United States Senate. His opponent would be Stephen Douglas, the most powerful Democrat in the country.

Lincoln opened with a passage many in the audience would have recognized from the Gospel of Mark. '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.' Lincoln's advisors had warned him the speech was too radical, that it would sink his campaign before it started. They were not entirely wrong.

He lost the Senate race to Douglas that November. But the debates with Douglas across Illinois that summer, and this opening salvo, were printed in newspapers from Boston to New Orleans. They made Lincoln a national figure.

Two years later, at the Republican National Convention in Chicago, the delegates chose him as their presidential candidate. The House Divided speech had done its work. The Old State Capitol itself has its own layered history.

Built between eighteen thirty-seven and eighteen forty, it served as Illinois's seat of government for thirty-six years. Lincoln practiced law here before the Illinois Supreme Court, served his final legislative term here, and in May of eighteen sixty-five, his body lay in state in this chamber, so that the people of Springfield could say goodbye. Tens of thousands of mourners filed through.

Today the building has been meticulously restored to its eighteen-sixty appearance.