Launching a national political career: Lincoln and the House Divided

doi:10.1075/aic.7.07ch7

In:Political Argumentation in the United States: Historical and contemporary studies
David Zarefsky
[Argumentation in Context 7] 2014
► pp. 125–154

Get fulltext from our e-platform

Download Book PDF

Lincoln and the House Divided

Launching a national political career

Published online: 24 September 2014

https://doi.org/10.1075/aic.7.07ch7

The most important need Abraham Lincoln faced as the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois in 1858 was to distinguish himself sharply from the incumbent, Stephen A. Douglas, to lessen the risk that Republicans would support Douglas as the best means to achieve their own goals. The House Divided Speech can be understood as a response to this need. He asserted that the country was tending toward nationwide slavery as the result of a conspiratorial effort and that Douglas was part of the plot. He attempted to make these claims credible in the absence of direct evidence by employing a number of rhetorical moves ranging from abductive reasoning to the use of vivid images and metaphors. The conclusion suggested that if Douglas was not an active conspirator, he was at least an unwitting dupe. Although not successful in winning Lincoln a Senate seat, the speech helped to launch his national political career.

References (37)

Angle, P.M. (Ed.) (1991 [1958]. The complete Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Basler, R.P. (Ed.) (1953). The collected works of Abraham Lincoln. 8 vols. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Briggs, J.C. (2005). Lincoln’s speeches reconsidered. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Burke, K. (1937). Attitudes toward history. Boston: Beacon Press.

Burlingame, M. (2008). Abraham Lincoln: A life. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Davis, D.B. (1969). The slave power conspiracy and the paranoid style. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Donald, D. (1995). Lincoln. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Eemeren, F.H. van, Grootendorst, R. & Snoeck Henkemans, A.F. (2002). Argumentation: Analysis, evaluation, presentation. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Fehrenbacher, D.E. (1962). Prelude to greatness: Lincoln in the 1850s. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

. (1978). The Dred Scott case: Its significance in American law & politics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Foner, E. (1970). Free soil, free labor, free men: The ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press.

Govier, T. (1987). A practical study of argument. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Graber, M.A. (2006). Dred Scott and the problem of Constitutional evil. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Harris, W.C. (2007). Lincoln’s rise to the presidency. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.

Herndon, W. & Weik, J. (1930). Herndon’s Lincoln. New York: Albert & Charles Boni.

Holt, M.F. (1978). The political crisis of the 1850s. New York: Wiley.

. (1999). The rise and fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian politics and the onset of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press.

Holzer, H. (2004). Lincoln at Cooper Union: The speech that made Abraham Lincoln president. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Howe, D.W. (1979). The political culture of the American Whigs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Johannsen, R.W. (1973). Stephen A. Douglas. New York: Oxford University Press.

. (1991). Lincoln, the South, and slavery: The political dimension. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Leff, M.C. (1983). Rhetorical timing in Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech. The Van Zelst Lecture in Communication. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University.

Lehrman, L.E. (2008). Lincoln at Peoria: The turning point. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole.

Levine, B. (1992). Half slave and half free: The roots of civil war. New York: Hill & Wang.

Nevins, A. (1950). The emergence of Lincoln: Douglas, Buchanan, and party chaos, 1857–1859. New York: Scribners.

Perelman, Ch. & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1969). The new rhetoric: A treatise on argumentation (J. Wilkinson & P. Weaver, Trans.) Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. (Originally published in French in 1958.)

Pfau, M.W. (1999). The house that Abe built: The “House Divided” speech and Republican Party politics. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 2:625–651.

. (2005). The political style of conspiracy. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.

Potter, D.M. (1976). The impending crisis, 1848–1861. New York: Harper and Row.

Richards, L.L. (2000). The slave power: The free North and Southern domination, 1790–1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Silbey, J.H. (2005). Storm over Texas: The annexation controversy and the road to civil war. New York: Oxford University Press.

Walton, D.N. (2004). Abductive reasoning. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

White, R.C. Jr. (2009). A. Lincoln: A biography. New York: Random House.

Wilentz, S. (2005). The rise of American democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. New York: Norton.

. (2009). Who Lincoln was. The New Republic, July 15, pp. 24–47.

Zarefsky, D. (1990). Lincoln, Douglas, and slavery: In the crucible of public debate. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

. (1994). “Public sentiment is everything”: Lincoln’s view of political persuasion. Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association. 15, no. 2: 23–40. (Reprinted in this volume, Chapter 6.)