House Divided Speech

Content Warning: The source material and this guide reference the enslavement of Black Americans and the associated racism and prejudice.

Lincoln asserts that Douglas’s appeal to democracy is nothing more than a gesture to justify or distract the public from the true intention of the Kansas-Nebraska Act: stoking public apathy about whether slavery is voted up or down. Lincoln remarks:

This necessity [of shaping public opinion] had not been overlooked; but had been provided for, as well as might be, in the notable argument of ‘squatter sovereignty,’ otherwise called ‘sacred right of self government,’ which latter phrase, though expressive of the only rightful basis of any government, was so perverted in this attempted use of it as to amount to just this: That if any one man choose enslave another, no third man shall be allowed to object (427).

The term “squatter sovereignty” alludes to the fact that the inhabitants of new territories were originally squatters, having no legal claim to federally owned lands other than their presence on it. Moreover, according to Lincoln, Douglas’s perversion of the principle of self-government would regard any objection to slavery coming from outside a particular jurisdiction as undemocratic: “That if any one man choose enslave another, no third man shall be allowed to object” (427).