On this day — June 16 — in 1858, at the Illinois Republican State Convention, Abraham Lincoln gave a historic speech based on the Bible verse where Christ warned that a house divided against itself cannot stand (Mark 3:25). Lincoln was referring to the political divide over slavery, and yet the description of a house divided applies as much today to the conflict between Democrats and Republicans as it did to the conflict then between Democrats and anti-slavery Americans.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln reminded his audience. “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.“
He added, “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.”
The pro-freedom fighters who believed that all men were indeed created equal ultimately won that battle. And yet more than 160 years later, our house is still divided. The Civil War, which began with the Democrats, never really ended. Democrats are more anti-American, anti-constitutional, anti-Republican, racist, and lawless than ever. The Democrats are trying to launch a repeat of the 2020 summer of love and mostly fiery protests, the judiciary is acting like unrestricted tyrants with the power to order all elected officials to break the law, and almost no one is serious about cutting spending.
That division is partly, of course, because we persist in still compromising with Democrats on their perverse policies, including abortion, LGBTQ ideology, illegal immigration, and more. We use their terminology, such as “gay,” instead of accurate vocabulary. We are also still celebrating the Democrats of times past, from Andrew “Trail of Tears” Jackson to socialist FDR to election-rigging John F. Kennedy, and the Democrat leaders of the Confederacy.
First of all, the latter were traitors; they themselves said they wanted to split apart the United States. Either you agree with them, in which case you think America ought to have been divided permanently, and you wish our great republic had died a premature death. In which case, of course, not only our lives but the 20th century would’ve been completely different — to say nothing of the tragedy of the Constitution and the American experiment perishing less than a century after being born. Either you support that, or you believe that the Confederates were wrong, and it was good that they lost the war and the Union survived.
Furthermore, the Democrat/Confederate government and military explicitly signed into law and enacted war crimes on a wide scale. Jefferson Davis’s executive orders and the following Retaliatory Act demanded enslavement or killing of escaped slaves based on previous Democrat laws (in practice, this meant every black person the Confederate army could get a hold of, including Union soldiers and lifelong freemen), and the killing or otherwise shameful treatment of white Union officers of black soldiers.
Pennsylvania’s free black population did not recover for a long time from the Confederate depredations based on this act, and Nathan Bedford Forrest was justified by Confederates for his infamous Fort Pillow massacre because he was simply carrying out the orders to their logical extreme by massacring surrendering black and white troops. “A terrible retribution, in any event, has befallen the ignorant, deluded Africans,” bragged the Memphis/Atlanta Appeal after the massacre, admitting such atrocities as burying black soldiers alive in trenches.
Related: The L.A. Riots and Democrats’ Long History of Political Violence
After the war, many Confederates were architects of the Jim Crow system designed to prevent civil rights for the black people whom they had wanted to keep enslaved. Even Robert E. Lee, whose name Trump is restoring to a military base, publicly condemned giving black people the vote (he called it an “injury” tending to “demagogism”), which they originally had in most states when the Constitution was first passed. But perhaps that was not surprising since Lee was in charge of implementing the Retaliatory Act during the war.
And of course, we all know how the history of the Democrat party went from there, how they became habitual election fraudsters starting in the late 1800s and up to our present day, how they practiced domestic terrorism on a mass scale against black people, Catholic immigrants, and Republicans, how they championed forced sterilizations, abortion, illegal immigration, and other destructive evils. The KKK and Antifa are part of a continuum of Democrat political violence. The current lying Democrat rhetoric about mass illegal immigration necessarily fueling the economy is nearly the same as the rhetoric Democrats used to justify slavery in the 19th century.
If a house divided cannot stand, we must face this crisis before it destroys our Republic altogether.
