In accepting
the Republican nomination as Douglas's opponent for the
senatorship, Lincoln used these words which have taken rank among
his most famous utterances: "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. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the
further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall
rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate
extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall
become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new--North
as well as South."
No one had ever so tellingly expressed the deathgrapple of the
sections: slavery the weapon of one, free labor the weapon of the
other. Though Lincoln was at that time forty-nine years old, his
political experience, in contrast with that of Douglas, was
negligible. He afterward aptly described his early life in that
expressive line from Gray, "The short and simple annals of the
poor." He lacked regular schooling, and it was altogether from
the practice of law that he had gained such formal education as
he had.
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