Old State Capitol

The Old State Capitol is where Lincoln said the sentence. On June 16, 1858, in the Hall of Representatives of Illinois's fifth capitol — the Greek Revival building on the Springfield square — Lincoln accepted the Republican nomination for Senate and delivered the speech that named the country's condition: 'A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.' His advisers had begged him to soften it; he refused — 'the proposition is indisputably true... and I will deliver it as written.'

The building was already his arena — Lincoln had sat in the legislature there in 1840-41, pleaded more than 200 cases in its Supreme Court room, and shared the building with Stephen Douglas, who had sat as a justice of that court in 1841-43. The 1858 speech was aimed at Douglas and launched the Senate campaign that produced the Lincoln-Douglas debates; Lincoln lost the seat and won the argument, and seven years later his body lay in state in the same Hall of Representatives — the room where he'd declared the house divided, filled with the mourners of the war that decided it.

The building itself has a resurrection story — sold to Sangamon County as a courthouse in 1869, jacked up on screw jacks in 1899 to insert a new first floor, then bought back by the state in 1962, dismantled stone by numbered stone, and rebuilt to its 1850s dimensions over two underground floors. The Lincoln sites of Springfield are many; this is the one where he spoke the sentence that made him a national figure.

The Old State Capitol is the archive's divided-house file — the Springfield building where Lincoln argued 200 cases, delivered the House Divided speech in 1858, and lay in state in 1865, dismantled and rebuilt stone by stone a century later.