On this day, June 16, in 1858, a lawyer from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln accepted the Republican nomination for Senate and delivered one of the most consequential speeches in American history.

He warned a nation already fracturing under the pressure of slavery that a “house divided against itself cannot stand.” Lincoln did not expect the Union to dissolve, but he knew its division was unsustainable.

He predicted it would “cease to be divided” and would inevitably become “all one thing, or all the other.”

Lincoln’s prophecy was not about political disagreement; it was about a fundamental, moral, and constitutional conflict so deep that it made compromise impossible and governance untenable.

Today, on the anniversary of that solemn warning, we are compelled to ask: Has the enforcement of federal immigration law become the new, irreconcilable issue of our time?

Are we now a nation so fundamentally divided on the questions of sovereignty, law, and national identity that our own constitutional “house” is once again divided against itself?

The Fault Lines of Federalism

The first cracks in our divided house appear along the fault lines of federalism. In the 1850s, the conflict was over the Fugitive Slave Act, which forced free states to participate in the institution of slavery against their will. Today, the conflict is over federal immigration enforcement, and so-called “sanctuary cities” and states have taken the place of the resistant free states of the past.

This is not merely a policy dispute. It is a fundamental clash over sovereignty and the rule of law. On one side, the federal government asserts its supreme authority to set and enforce immigration policy, threatening to withhold funding from jurisdictions that refuse to comply.

On the other, states and cities argue that the 10th Amendment protects them from being forced to participate in federal actions they believe are harmful to their communities. When the federal government and a state government operate under two different conceptions of the law, the house is, by definition, divided.

The Use of Force to Enforce the Law

When legal and political disagreements can no longer be resolved, the state may turn to force. We have now witnessed this profound escalation. The deployment of the federalized National Guard and U.S. Marines to American cities to support immigration raids—over the explicit objections of state and local officials—represents a grave step.

This is the executive branch using the nation’s ultimate instrument of power, the military, to impose its will on a resistant state government. The sight of troops on American streets to enforce a domestic policy is a visual representation of the failure of our political process.

It signals that the division is so deep that one side believes it can only be settled through a show of overwhelming force, raising terrifying echoes of the breakdown that preceded the Civil War.

A People Divided

This division is not confined to courtrooms and statehouses; it is playing out on our streets and in our communities. We see it in the fierce, sustained anti-ICE and “No Kings” protests, where thousands of citizens view the actions of their own federal government as illegitimate and tyrannical. In some cases, these protests have escalated into riots, property destruction, and violent clashes with law enforcement.

At its most horrific extreme, we see this division in the targeted assassination of a lawmaker in Minnesota. An act of political violence like this is the ultimate symptom of a society where the bonds of civic trust have frayed to the breaking point. When a significant portion of the populace believes the government is an enemy, and when political violence becomes a tool to settle scores, the house is not just divided—it is beginning to crumble.

Ceasing to be Divided

Lincoln’s warning was that a nation cannot remain in a state of perpetual, fundamental crisis. The pressure will inevitably force a resolution. The combination of today’s legal schisms between federal and state governments, the use of military force for domestic law enforcement, and the rising tide of civil unrest suggests we are approaching a constitutional breaking point.

It forces us to confront a set of questions as profound as those Lincoln faced:

• At what point does the disagreement between a state and the federal government become an irreconcilable conflict over the nature of the Union itself?
• Can a republic withstand the use of military force to settle domestic political disputes?
• How does a nation pull back from the brink when its people are so divided that they can no longer agree on a shared definition of the law?

Lincoln’s generation was forced to answer these questions with a civil war. We must hope that our divided house can find a constitutional path to becoming “all one thing, or all the other” before such a painful resolution is forced upon us again.