A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand: Presidential Address to the Peace Science Society

Abstract

The ante-bellum history of the United States is modelled as the competing expansion of urban, slave and citizen fanners expanding into a frontier occupied by indigenous Native American and Mexican peoples. The resulting “irrepressible conflict” illustrates a circumstance in which all of the actors can be described as exhibiting democratic political institutions to a significant degree. In this instance, peoples rationalized their opposed interests and implemented them through representative governments. Wars are likely to be particular events to be analyzed as an aspect of a total social conjuncture and are unlikely to be explicable in a uniform fashion across various economic and political circumstances. '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. Abraham Lincoln (1858)

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