"A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free." Explain in the context of the American Civil War.

Answer:

Lincoln's words of 1858 expressed the conviction that the United States could not indefinitely contain two incompatible social systems. The Civil War of 1861-65 proved him right, resolving by force what compromise had merely postponed.

The two societies

• The North was industrialising, with free labour, cities and diversified manufacture.
• The South rested on plantation agriculture, cotton exports and slave labour.
• Their interests diverged on tariffs, internal improvements and western land.
• Slavery was not merely a labour system but the foundation of southern society.

The failure of compromise

• The Missouri Compromise of 1820 divided the territories along a line.
• The Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act satisfied neither side.
• The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 reopened the question and produced 'Bleeding Kansas'.
• The Dred Scott decision of 1857 denied Congress power to exclude slavery from territories.
• John Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry in 1859 hardened southern fears.

Secession and war

• Lincoln's election in 1860 on a platform of no extension precipitated secession.
• Eleven states formed the Confederacy, and war began at Fort Sumter in 1861.
• Lincoln's initial aim was the preservation of the Union rather than abolition.
• The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 redefined the war as a struggle against slavery.
• Union victory in 1865 and the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery permanently.

The verdict on Lincoln's thesis

• The house did indeed prove unable to stand divided, as he had predicted.
• Some six hundred thousand died resolving the contradiction.
• Reconstruction was cut short and racial equality left unachieved.
• The Union was preserved and the federal government decisively strengthened.

Consequences

• The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments transformed the Constitution.
• Industrial capitalism in the North was greatly accelerated by the war.
• The southern economy was devastated and the plantation system destroyed.
• Segregation replaced slavery after Reconstruction was abandoned in 1877.

Lincoln's prophecy was therefore vindicated by events. As historians of the period conclude, two incompatible social orders could not permanently share one federal republic, and the war settled by force the question that four decades of compromise had proved unable to resolve.