Document 3.15.5: Excerpt from notes Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1858 in advance of his “house divided” speech

Why Kansas is neither the whole, nor the tithe of the real question.

“A house divided cannot stand.”

I believe this government can not endure permanently half slave, and half free.

I expressed this belief a year ago; and subsequent developments have but confirmed me.

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 put it 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.  Do you doubt it?  Study the Dred Scott decision, and then see, how little, even now, remains to be done.

From: “The Boisterous Sea of Liberty: A Documentary History of America from Discovery Through the Civil War” written and edited by David Brian Davis & Steven Mintz