Circumstances

Abraham Lincoln delivered the speech “A House Divided” on 16th of June, 1858. It was delivered during the Republican Party Convention when he was nominated to run for US Senate for the Illinois seat, which was then held by Democratic Senator, Stephen A. Douglas. Officially nominating a candidate to run for Senate was not common practice then, so the event was probably a way for the Republican Party to throw all its weight behind Lincoln’s candidacy.

Furthermore, at that time, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party in the US were very different from their modern-day versions. The Republican Party had only been formed four years before the speech, in 1854, as a response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act that the speaker frequently mentions in his address: “That if any one man choose to enslave another, no third man shall be allowed to object. That argument was incorporated into the Nebraska Bill itself…” (ll. 54-57).

The bill establishes th...