Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy Vol. 24 Issue 3 (Spring 1997).

Excerpt:

Of all Lincoln’s speeches, whether greater or lesser, the only one that can be said truly to have changed the course of history, was delivered to the Republican State Convention in Springfield, Illinois, June 16, 1858. The utterances that have come down to us, graven in bronze and in stone, like the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural, are profound meditations on human experience. In the midst of the horrors of destruction and death, and amidst the turmoil of the passions of war, they are designed to reconcile us to our fate by discerning the hand of God in events that might otherwise seem merely chaotic. Although these speeches arise out of particular events at particular times, they draw back the curtain of eternity, and allow us, as time-bound mortals, to glimpse a divine purpose within a sorrow filled present, and tell us how our lives, however brief, can nonetheless serve a deathless end. The House Divided speech, however, was—perhaps more than any political address of the time — a causal agent in bringing about the terrible events over which Lincoln was destined to preside. Its theme is expressed in the biblical admonition that “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” In it Lincoln declared that he believed that this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

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