It's widely agreed that the "House Divided" speech that Lincoln gave in June 1858, accepting the Republican nomination for the Senate and warning that the spread of slavery must be stopped or the whole nation would be taken over by slavery, is one of the greatest speeches by an American politician. I was reading Don Fehrenbacher's important book on Lincoln in the 1850s the other night when he repeatedly referred to the speech as being dominated by a conspiracy theory.
Well, this is a true fact, as we say in journalism. In the speech, Lincoln looks back over events of 1854-1857, from the Kansas-Nebraska Act to the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court, to statements of the former President Franklin Pierce and sitting President James Buchanan, and sees a hidden pattern in them, of a plan to promote slavery throughout the country, not just the south.
Lincoln urges his Republican party listeners to "run the mind over the string of historical facts… Several things will now appear less dark and mysterious than they did when they were transpiring." He analyzes a series of actions by the two presidents, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, and Senator Stephen Douglas, and imagines a conspiracy by the four men:
of preconcert. But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions
of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and
by different workmen — Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, for instance
— and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly
make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortices exactly
fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly
adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few
— not omitting even scaffolding — or, if a single piece be lacking, we
see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared yet to bring such
a piece in — in such a case, we find it impossible not to believe that
Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from
the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before
the first blow was struck.
Many critics of the Israel lobby have been dismissed as conspiracy theorists. And I guess conspiracy theory has gotten a bad name for being wild speculation, in light of several sensational events in recent history. It's worth remembering that conspiracy theory is often just another name for insight into how power works, because powerful people don't like to leave their fingerprints on dealmaking, especially when the deals involve standing up for apartheid in a foreign country. People with imagination have to read between the lines, and establish the pattern.
Lincoln was a radical. This is something that all the news reports on the man widely considered our greatest president overlook. He had a middling political career until great moral events fired him up as an outsider. He could have played along with the slave power, as the Democratic Party did, but Lincoln chose an oppositional stance around a new party. In doing so, he used his great political imagination to see the disastrous moral pattern in government actions. I have no doubt what he would focus on today.
