What did Abraham Lincoln mean by "A house divided against itself cannot stand"?
On June 16, 1858, the Republican State Convention met in Springfield, Illinois, and chose Abraham Lincoln to run against Democrat Stephen Douglas for the U.S. Senate. Lincoln's speech that evening was specifically about the problems of slavery in the United States, and especially the effect of the recent Dred Scott decision of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Lincoln paraphrased the following passage from the Bible, Matthew 12:25, when he spoke of a house divided:
And Jesus knew their [the Pharisees'] thoughts, and said unto them, "Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand."
Lincoln hoped to use a well-known figure of speech to help rouse the people to recognition of the magnitude of the ongoing debates over the legality of slavery. His use of this paraphrased metaphor is perhaps clearer when you look at some more of his speech:
"A house divided against itself cannot stand." I believe the 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.
As you can see, in this metaphor, the "house" refers to the Union — to the United States of America — and that house was divided between the opponents and advocates of slavery. Lincoln felt that the ideals of freedom for all and the institution of slavery could not coexist — morally, socially, or legally — under one nation. Slavery must ultimately be universally accepted or universally denied.
This speech, given two-and-a-half years before South Carolina would become the first state to secede from the Union, foreshadowed the coming storm of the Civil War. Although Lincoln lost the election to Stephen Douglas, his eloquent political arguments put him in the national limelight and paved the way for his election to the presidency in 1860.
The end of slavery in the United States inspired conflicting visions of the future for all Americans in the nineteenth century, black and white, slave and free. The black child became a figure upon which people projected their hopes and fears about slavery's abolition. As a member of the first generation of African Americans raised in freedom, the black child ”freedom's child ”offered up the possibility that blacks might soon enjoy the same privileges as whites: landownership, equality, autonomy. Yet for most white southerners, this vision was unwelcome, even frightening. Many northerners, too, expressed doubts about the consequences of abolition for the nation and its identity as a white republic.
From the 1850s and the Civil War to emancipation and the official end of Reconstruction in 1877, Raising Freedom's Child examines slave emancipation and opposition to it as a far-reaching, national event with profound social, political, and cultural consequences. Mary Niall Mitchell analyzes multiple views of the black child ”in letters, photographs, newspapers, novels, and court cases” to demonstrate how Americans contested and defended slavery and its abolition.
With each chapter, Mitchell narrates an episode in the lives of freedom's children, from debates over their education and labor to the future of racial classification and American citizenship. Raising Freedom's Child illustrates how intensely the image of the black child captured the imaginations of many Americans during the upheavals of the Civil War era. Through public struggles over the black child, Mitchell argues, Americans by turns challenged and reinforced the racial inequality fostered under slavery in the United States. Only with the triumph of segregation in public schools in 1877 did the black child lose her central role in the national debate over civil rights, a role she would not play again until the 1950s.
The federal government [Obama Administration] has a duty, right and a responsibility to enforce existing laws; but when they fail to meet their responsibility in effect by condoning drug cartels, human smuggling including terrorist and encouraging cross border violence has essentially draw a 'line in the desert sands' with Arizona and the Immigration Laws. Either you're on the American and liberty side of this line or you're denying the principles upon which this country character was established. Raising Freedom's Child could just as well be the "anchor baby" in the immigration debate and narrative gripping our country. Not acknowledging our existing immigration laws but denying them with empty arguments and political pushing of the envelope will create an significant social unrest at first within complex social fabric of liberty and opportunity.
"There's nowhere in the Constitution that says a state is limited to what it absolutely won't do and can be stopped for what it might do and to exercise a judgment against a state that has passed a law that is consistent with existing federal law is beyond absurd."
"This balance between the National and State governments ought to be dwelt on with peculiar attention, as it is of the utmost importance. It forms a double security to the people. If one encroaches on their rights they will find a powerful protection in the other. Indeed, they will both be prevented from overpassing their constitutional limits by a certain rivalship, which will ever subsist between them."—Alexander Hamilton, speech to the New York Ratifying Convention, 1788
U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton also struck down the section of law that makes it a crime not to carry immigration registration papers and the provision that makes it a crime for an illegal immigrant to seek or perform work.
THIS ACTION BY JUDGE BOLTON IS MERELY THE LINE IN THE SANDS OF THE DESERT OF THE RULE OF LAW
