The Promising Face!
“Senator Douglas is of world-wide renown. All the anxious politicians of his party have been looking upon him as certainly, at no distant day, to be the President of the United States. They have seen in his round, jolly, fruitful face post-offices, land offices, marshalships and cabinet appointments, chargé-ships and foreign missions, bursting and sprouting out in wonderful exuberance, ready to be laid hold of by their greedy hands.... On the contrary, nobody has ever expected me to be President. In my poor, lean, lank face nobody has ever seen that any cabbages were sprouting out.”—(Speech by A. Lincoln, Springfield, Illinois, July 17, 1858.)
“A HOUSE DIVIDED CANNOT STAND.”
This often-quoted passage was uttered in June, 1857, at Springfield, Illinois, during Lincoln’s congressional campaign:
“A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe that this government cannot endure permanently, half-slave and half-free. I do not expect this house to fall: I do not expect the Union to be dissolved. But I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become one thing or the other.”