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On this day in 1855, five full years before being elected president, Abraham Lincoln wrote a letter to a former congressman named George Robertson. The letter is both a foreshadowing of Lincoln’s later “House Divided” speech and the bloody Civil War. Lincoln proved especially prescient in writing to Robertson when he said “there is no peaceful extinction of slavery in prospect for us.” Lincoln closed the letter saying “Our political problem now is ‘Can we, as a nation, continue together permanently—forever—half slave, and half free?’ The problem is too mighty for me. May God, in his mercy, superintend the solution.”

It was a question he would wrestle with, and ultimately answer, in the years ahead.