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Who really said it

A house divided against itself cannot stand

Spoken by Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865 · 16th president of the United States
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Lincoln used exactly these words in the opening paragraph of his speech accepting the Illinois Republican nomination for U.S. Senator at Springfield on 16 June 1858 — it is the fifth sentence of that paragraph, not its first line — and he set them in quotation marks himself, because he was quoting the Gospels. The wording is confirmed in the 1860 campaign volume of the 1858 speeches, and the standard text descends from the printing Lincoln supplied and proofread for the Illinois State Journal of 18 June 1858.

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“A house divided against itself cannot stand” A house divided against itself cannot stand. — Abraham Lincoln, "A House Divided" speech, Springfield, Illinois, 16 June 1858 (quoting Mark 3:25, King James Version). Via Quotle.info

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Provenance

The source

Speech
“A House Divided” — on accepting the Republican nomination for U.S. Senator
Delivered
16 June 1858, Illinois State Capitol, Springfield, Illinois
First printed
Illinois State Journal, 18 June 1858 — from copy Lincoln supplied and proofread
Quoting
Mark 3:25 and Matthew 12:25, King James Version

… In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. 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. … from the opening paragraph

Text as printed in the 1860 campaign volume Political Debates Between Hon. Abraham Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, read here in facsimile. The ellipses mark cuts: the paragraph opens with the salutation and four earlier sentences, and runs on past “all one thing, or all the other” to “North as well as South.” The quotation marks around “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” are Lincoln’s own.

Scanned 1860 campaign volume
Read the 1860 printing on Internet Archive
Full text of the June 16, 1858 speech (House Divided Project, Dickinson College)

How we checked

  • Lincoln delivered the speech at Springfield, Illinois on 16 June 1858, on accepting the Illinois Republican nomination for U.S. Senator. The House Divided Project at Dickinson College ↗ quotes the line and cites The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (Rutgers University Press, 1953), 2:461–469.
  • The standard text descends from a printing Lincoln himself handled: Voices of Democracy’s textual authentication ↗ records that the speech appeared in the Illinois State Journal of 18 June 1858, supplied and proofread by Lincoln, collated against a variant in the Chicago Daily Tribune of 19 June 1858.
  • We read the words in a pre-1931 printing. The 1860 campaign volume Political Debates Between Hon. Abraham Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas ↗ (Columbus: Follett, Foster and Company) carries “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” in the Springfield speech — and later in the same volume Douglas presses Lincoln to explain what he means by “this Scriptural quotation.” Note that this volume heads the speech “At Springfield, June 17, 1858”, a known misdating; Basler’s Collected Works and the 1907 Miller edition both give 16 June.
  • The phrasing is scripture, not invention: the King James text of Mark 3:25 ↗ reads “And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”
Public domain

The speech was first published in the Illinois State Journal of 18 June 1858 and reprinted in book form in 1860 — both far earlier than the 1931 U.S. copyright line, so the text is in the public domain, as is the King James wording Lincoln was quoting. Basler’s Collected Works (1953) is a separate copyrighted compilation; the 1858 words inside it are not.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

What people get wrong

Nobody serious doubts that Lincoln said this. The thing to correct is subtler and far more common: the assumption that he wrote it. Lincoln was quoting, he marked the quotation, and the line had been circulating in American politics for decades before June 1858.

Abraham Lincoln Quoting, not coining

Lincoln put the sentence in quotation marks and never claimed it. The closest King James wording is Mark 3:25 ↗: “And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.” Matthew 12:25 ↗ has “every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.” The tighter form Lincoln used was not his own compression either — it was already the common English rendering, and the 1843 Whig circular below quotes it in exactly that shape, fifteen years earlier.

Luke 11:17 Often miscited

Lists of the three synoptic parallels frequently render Luke 11:17 as “a house divided against itself will fall,” which reads like a match. But that is not the King James verse Lincoln’s audience knew — KJV Luke 11:17 ↗ says “and a house divided against a house falleth.” Mark and Matthew are the King James parallels for the famous wording; Luke is not.

Sam Houston, Abigail Adams and the editors of January 1858 Earlier in circulation

The line was already political currency. The account of the speech ↗ documents Sam Houston telling the Senate during the Compromise of 1850 debate that “A nation divided against itself cannot stand”; Abigail Adams writing to Mercy Otis Warren during the War of 1812 of “A house divided upon itself”; and the expression running editorially in the Brooklyn Evening Star (8 January 1858), the New York Daily Herald (12 January 1858) and the Alton Weekly Telegraph (28 January 1858) — all months before Lincoln spoke.

Abraham Lincoln 1843, not 1858

Springfield was not the first time. A Whig campaign circular of 4 March 1843, prepared by Lincoln and others appointed at a meeting of Illinois Whigs at Springfield, already argued that “he whose wisdom surpasses that of all philosophers, has declared that ‘a house divided against itself cannot stand’” — crediting it to Christ by unmistakable periphrasis (the circular names Aesop outright a few lines earlier, but never Jesus), not to Lincoln. See the 1843 circular ↗

Verdict: Lincoln really did say “A house divided against itself cannot stand” at Springfield on 16 June 1858, word for word — but as a deliberate quotation of the Gospels. Even his opponent knew it: in the same 1858 campaign Douglas demanded Lincoln explain what he meant by “this Scriptural quotation” ↗.

Context

Why it mattered

Lincoln was not reaching for poetry; he was reaching for agreement. Accepting the Republican nomination for the Senate seat held by Stephen A. Douglas, he told the convention that five years of policy meant to quiet the slavery question had only made the agitation worse — and then borrowed the one sentence everyone in the hall already knew by heart, so that the premise would cost him nothing to establish. What he added was the application: “I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.”

That was the gamble. Using scripture made the argument feel settled; using this scripture committed him to a prediction — that the country would become all one thing or all the other. Douglas spent the rest of the 1858 campaign hammering the line and demanding that Lincoln explain himself, which is the clearest sign that both men understood exactly whose words were in play.

Lincoln did not coin the most famous line he ever spoke — and he never pretended he had.

The printing that carried it

The printed record did more work than the hall. Lincoln supplied and proofread the text for the Illinois State Journal of 18 June 1858, and the 1858 campaign speeches were gathered in 1860 as Political Debates Between Hon. Abraham Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas (Columbus: Follett, Foster and Company). That volume put the sentence in front of a national readership — and it is the copy we read, page by page, to confirm the wording used here.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Leadership Power Change

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

House Divided Speech (June 16, 1858)housedivided.dickinson.edu

Dickinson College’s Lincoln’s Writings transcript of the full speech, opening paragraph intact.
Political Debates … in the Celebrated Campaign of 1858 (1860)archive.org

Scanned pre-1931 campaign volume containing the Springfield speech — the printing we read to confirm the wording.
Textual authentication of “A House Divided”voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu

Documents the 18 June 1858 Illinois State Journal printing that Lincoln supplied and proofread.
King James Bible: Marken.wikisource.org

Mark 3:25 in the King James Version — the verse closest to Lincoln’s compressed wording.
Lincoln’s House Divided Speechen.wikipedia.org

Survey of the phrase’s use before June 1858, including Sam Houston, Abigail Adams and the January 1858 editorials.
Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 4 (1907)en.wikisource.org

Marion Mills Miller’s 1907 edition, printing the speech under a headnote dating it 16 June 1858.

About the speaker

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln

1809–1865 · 16th president of the United States

Lincoln was an Illinois lawyer and former congressman when he stood up at Springfield in June 1858 to open his Senate campaign against Stephen A. Douglas — the campaign whose speeches were collected and printed in 1860. He became president in 1861, led the United States through the Civil War, and was shot on the evening of 14 April 1865, dying the next morning. He was also a relentless reuser of scripture: the sentence that made this speech famous was one he had already reached for fifteen years earlier, in an 1843 Whig circular, where he credited it to scripture, not himself.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Abraham Lincoln, “A House Divided”: Speech at Springfield, Illinois, June 16, 1858. First printed in the Illinois State Journal, 18 June 1858; reprinted in Political Debates Between Hon. Abraham Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, in the Celebrated Campaign of 1858, in Illinois (Columbus: Follett, Foster and Company, 1860). Standard text: The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 2:461–69. Lincoln is quoting Mark 3:25, King James Version.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand’?” Last verified 29 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/a-house-divided-against-itself-cannot-stand/

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