A House Again Divided

On this day in 1858, a relatively unknown Abraham Lincoln delivered a speech that will affect the political quickening of our “rebirth of freedom” in America. 

His words will stir a sleeping nation to begin forming its inchoate thoughts into conscious awareness of the decisive issue of his time. The speech is called the “House Divided” speech and it is one of a small handful of oratorical benchmarks in the history of human liberty. 

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 delivered this speech in Springfield, Illinois at the old State Capitol Building just after accepting the Republican nomination for the Senate of the United States. In essence, the House Divide Speech is the first of nine speeches, each given in one of the 9 Congressional Districts of Illinois which will culminate in the great Lincoln-Douglas debates.

In those days, senators were not elected directly by the people as they are today. They were selected by their political colleagues in the state legislatures, by the men (in those days they were only men) who knew them best, who interacted with them on a daily basis and could vouch personally for their character. That meant that only the most talented and respected of peers went on to serve in the United States Senate in Washington, DC. 

Today the 17^th Amendment has changed all that. Today rather than having Daniel Websters and Henry Clays and Charles Sumners whose words and actions resound in national memory across the centuries, we have tawdry little demagogues like Kamala Harris, Mitt Romney and Elizabeth Warren who transparently lie to simple people to whore themselves out for a vote. In the old days, that wasn’t necessary. Senators were answerable to a different constituency. And besides, it didn’t work as easily as it does today. You had to pass muster with those who understood the issues back in the state Capital—and expected something substantive. It meant that you needed to be a statesman, the best and brightest of your political class—you had to have knowledge and something at least like character.

That was Abe Lincoln. 

Even though Abe was a relative unknown amongst ordinary workaday folk, he was deeply respected by those who had heard him speak and had read his many published commentaries on the question of the Constitution and slavery. He was a dedicated op-ed contributor. No one, literally no one, in America was better able to make the legal and constitutional case for freedom than Abraham Lincoln. If you’ve read his speeches, you know what I mean. If you want to understand the man and how he appeared from nowhere, grasp this: he was more eloquent and more insightful than the most dedicated abortionists, better at reasoning than the greatest constitutional scholars. He knew his stuff. Because he had thought about it. He understood the subtleties and legal nuances and the difficulties of the political landscape. He was the smartest man in the room when it came to this single issue. Those few who understood the stakes, even those with greater reputations and formal learning, who really understood the complexities, would eventually come to the opinion that Abraham Lincoln was the best. 

The House Divided Speech marks the genius of the man, it marks him as one of those rare humans who understands the nature of humanity, and the nature of history. 

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. 

This is the first thundering salvo in the counteroffensive to reclaim our nation from the corruption of a political and judicial class that had distorted the clear meaning of our Declaration and our Constitution. It proclaimed in no uncertain terns that everything was on the line in the question of slavery. 

Right up to Lincoln’s inauguration three year later, that same political class will enlist every lie, defamation, and political intrigue to destroy the man. They will even enlist “science” in its rebellion against the self-evident truths of our Republic. 

Lincoln was the great challenge to the fetid Supreme Court that had ruled in Dred Scott in contradiction to law and fact, that “there was no right that a black man had, that a white man was obliged to respect.” This despite the undeniable history  that black men had participated in political society in America since the founding of the Republic. 

That was the Supreme Court of 1857. 

And here I wish to make comparisons. 

It is the same Supreme Court today. Lawless and rewriting law. Like the Taney Court of 1857, today’s court is lawless and edging us closer to national calamity. Not because it has created a “new right” but because it has bypassed the authority of “We the People” in governing ourselves. 

That same Court today is essentially the same lawless body that gave us Dred Scott, Plessy and Korematsu and Roe. It rules according to its own prerogative and not the Constitution. Witness the recent decision of Bostock v. Clayton City, where the court rewrote the meaning of biological sex as it appeared in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Sex was understood to mean male and female. That is what it still means. Just a day ago, by judicial fiat, sex came to mean one’s gender preference. It is ruling contrary to the plain meaning of words. 

Just like Dred Scott. 

This is what a House Divided looks like.  

Our Constitution is not a common law document. It is not “created” by judges.  Precedence is nice, but the fixed point of authority in our Republic is written laws with actual, fixed meaning. If the meaning of words is not fixed, not anchored in something, then there is no point to having a written Constitution. Law becomes only precedence—if even that—and merely the last decision handed down by the latest antinomian jurist. The text and words of the Supreme Law must be the supreme law, otherwise, we stumble into the declension that we are ruled by the judgements of the Supreme Court. 

And this cannot be under any rational construction of self-government. 

The Roberts Court, like the Taney Court, holds the meaning of words as play things in the hands of Pharisees. The text no longer decides. The judges do. 

The lawlessness of the Supreme Court was one of the root cause of the Civil War. The court had ruled, and once it had, it contradiction to plain meaning, there was no place for political dialog to go, except to form into regiments. 

If we are to remain a republic, legal decisions must operate within a coherent view of representative democracy. Sorry Justice Roberts, the continuity and consistency of the court is not the primary thing—despite your fastidious need to legitimize the illegitimate. The understood original meaning of the Constitution is the fixed point of reference, not your intrusive interpretation in the case book. Why? Because if the words don’t rule—you do. And the people and the Constitution do not. No matter how badly you want to save face, or smooth over the political difficulties of our time by forcing the Constitution into conformity with gnostic legal reasonings. You must return to the text, not the preceding decision.  In a republic, incoherence in the law is remedied by lawmakers, not judges. In little things perhaps. But you are ruling in matters far exceeding your authority. 

We have the same court today that cast firebrands into the haystack of the republic in 1857. We have the same lawlessness in the Democratic Party that resorted to terror and force to keep power. Then, the conflagration that followed cost 700,000 lives. 

The House is divided. Now. Again. And the question is where will the thing tend. 

What Lincoln said was true. Even if he is a dead white male who’s been gone for 160 years. 

There is no satisfactory compromise with evil. Its ambition is imperial. We are either locked in the gravity of truth and being pulled into light, or we are slowly wandering like a spinning dead planet into the darkness. There is no middle position. We ultimately are tending toward one thing or the other. 

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. 

There is no stasis in the trajectory of history. Man is either moving toward the verities or away from them. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of an arc of history. And I believe in it, just as he did, but he had a better opinion of man than I. 

I do not believe that truth is so powerful that men are pulled into it. History is rife with man’s hatred and rejection of truth. That is what we did at the Porch of Pontius Pilate. 

The same choice is before us now. We can see the manifestation of rebellion in the streets of our country. Mankind is not disposed to be pulled toward justice. If that were so, Christ’s work would not have require death. Men have only the power to acknowledge truth, to genuflect before it and become its servant. Or we can reject it, and make ourselves master. 

But if and when we do acknowledge truth, the trajectory of history changes, not because of the gravitation force of truth, but because men who are obedient to truth, in spite of terror and lies move toward light. 

It was no different then, than now. 

Those who were wedded to darkness worked to keep Lincoln off the ballot, Lincoln didn’t even appear on the ballot in 10 southern states, because no one who loved their life would dare openly campaign for the man. Campaign materials and political tracts were destroyed by operatives within the Postal Office (like YouTube and Facebook and the administrative agencies of government). The Democrats accused Lincoln of things he never said or advocated. There was a visceral, irrational hatred of the man, threats of assassination, threats of violence against those who supported him. Political terrorism. 

Does any of this sound familiar? 

And ultimately came the conspiracy to make war on the law itself, on the Constitution, by civil insurrection, called the Civil War.

It is the same Democratic Party. 

It steals elections, sabotages and threatens the free expression of ideas, and deliberately lies about its opponents. Most important is that that Party of 1858 believed—and the Party of 2020 continues to believe—that race is the defining characteristic of personhood. That rights are things assigned to people by the ruling elite, whether through courts or states, rather than being the natural, intrinsic, God-given properties of humanness. 

Since that political order is contrary to “self-evident truth,” law and fact are obliterated by terror or legal fiat. This explains the insatiable need to subjugate and destroy in that part of the divided house. Discussion and debate are despised in favor of lawlessness. Read the editorial pages of the New York Times and Washington Post—the need to intimidate, dominate and defame is the recurring feature of the same powers of darkness that now, just like then, is the party of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. 

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.