Commentary
On June 16, 1858, addressing Republicans who had that day chosen him to run for the Senate, Abraham Lincoln gave his famous “house divided” speech. His audience would have recognized at once the source of his thematic sentence, “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” as it appears in all three synoptic gospels of the New Testament.Lincoln immediately followed that statement with this opinion, “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half-slave and half-free.”
