June 16 · This Day in America
More than a thousand delegates have just named him their candidate for the U.S. Senate. At eight in the evening, in the Hall of Representatives in Springfield, Abraham Lincoln rises to accept. His friends had begged him to soften the opening. He does not. "A house divided against itself cannot stand," he says, borrowing from Scripture his audience knows by heart. "I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free." Not that it should not — that it cannot. The nation, he says, will become all one thing or all the other. It is too plain, too early, and many think it loses him the race; it does. But the country has now been told, in a sentence no one can un-hear, exactly where it is heading. Two years later the man who said it is elected president, and the house breaks.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1903
At half past nine in the morning, a former farm boy and a handful of investors put their names to incorporation papers for a new car company. The automobile is still a rich man's toy. Henry Ford has a different idea: a car for the great multitude, built so plainly and cheaply that the families who make it can afford to own it. Within fifteen years half the cars on earth are his. America learns to move.
Source: www.history.com
“A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free.”Abraham Lincoln, 1858