In 1858, Abraham Lincoln announced his candidacy for president with what came to be known as the House Divided speech. Lincoln asserted about slavery that “a house divided cannot stand … I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free … It will become all one thing or all the other.”

In 1858, the Kansas Nebraska Act promised to spread slavery into the western territories, and the Dredd Scott decision by a pro-slavery Supreme Court awakened free labor advocates in the North to the rise of a “slave power.”

This was time of unimaginable change for the United States. Between 1790 and 1860 the population doubled, and then doubled again, driven by immigration. Industry was booming. The cotton wealth of the slave-owning South produced the richest class of people on the planet. Slave power conspiracies were matched by southern fears about “Black Republicans” who would promote race mixing in the South. It led to a situation of irreconcilable differences and civil war.

Today our house is divided between a MAGA world that would end the promise of a nation of immigrants and those who take pride in the imperfect progress of civil rights. Civil rights won in Reconstruction in the form of the 13th, 14, and 15th amendments to the Constitution, which paved the way not just for African Americans, but also for women’s suffrage and LGBTQ rights.

Choose the house you wish to live in. Choose wisely.

David Parrella

Buckland