1861 by Adam Goodheart

Abe had split fence rails together when they were clearing some land about twelve miles west of Decatur. Sensing an opportunity, Oglesby drove out there in his buggy with Hanks in tow, and they managed to find what Hanks proclaimed the very fence: testing it with the blade of his penknife, he found that it was constructed of black walnut and honey locust, just as he recollected. The two men grabbed a couple of rails—whether they had asked the fence owner’s
     permission is unclear—and loaded them into the buggy, later stashing them in Oglesby’s barn.
    On May 9, delegates gathered in the convention hall: an enormous tent, or “wigwam,” erected for the occasion. Just before the first formal ballot, Oglesby arose and announced that a certain person wanted“to make a contribution to the Convention.” This was Hanks’s cue. He and another man came marching up the center aisle carrying the two old rails, which were freshly festooned with red, white, and blue streamers and
     large banners reading:
    ABRAHAM LINCOLN
The Rail Candidate
FOR PRESIDENT IN 1860
Two rails from a lot of 3,000 made in 1830 by John Hanks and
Abe Lincoln, whose father was the first pioneer of Macon County.
    The effect of this, a local newspaper reported, “was electrical.” The wigwam’s canvas rippled with the delegates’ cheers as exuberant Republicans threw hats, canes, and books into the air. Soon the tenting started to tear free of its wooden framework—“the roof was literally cheered off the building,” one observer wrote. 15 Lincoln was brought up to the speakers’ platform and made to tell the story of how, in his early twenties, he had split rails, built a cabin, and cultivated a small farm down on the Sangamon River. He was unanimously nominated the next day. And when Republicans from across the country gathered four days later for the national convention, held in an even bigger wigwam in Chicago, even more rails found their way into the hall. (Oglesby and Hanks
     had gone back down to Decatur for a few more wagonloads and were raking in a tidy profit selling them for the exorbitant sum of a dollar apiece.) Lincoln won his party’s nomination, knocking down the longtime favorite, Senator William Henry Seward of New York, considered the tribal leader of the national Republicans. Within weeks, “Rail-Splitter” and “Rail-Mauler” clubs were springing up throughout the Northern states—even in the bosom of
     Manhattan, leagues away from the nearest split-rail fence. Chicago had a short-lived pro-Lincoln newspaper called
The Rail-Splitter.
16
    It is hard to imagine today how some lengths of old lumber could electrify a large tentful of jaded politicos—let alone much of the nation. But the split-rail fence, sometimes known as a “worm fence,” was a powerful symbol in the nineteenth century, and a brilliant choice as an emblem for the Lincoln campaign, perhaps the most ingenious ever devised in more than two hundred years of presidential politics. For one thing, it was a distinctively
     American construction. (Visiting Europeans often mentioned such fences in their letters home, as an instance of local color.) For another, it was almost ubiquitous in Lincoln’s time. Just after the Civil War, a government survey foundthat 86 percent ofOhio’s fences were made of split rails; 75 percent ofMaine’s; 92 percent of Oregon’s. 17 Split-rail fences required hard work to build. They represented individual independence and private ownership, and yet also a sense of community, since they were often constructed by groups of neighbors coming together to pitch in. They epitomized America’s working class and its rural way of life. They were homely, yet strong—perhaps like Lincoln himself. 18 Perhaps most important, though, the split-rail fence was a symbol of theWest (mainly what today we would call theMidwest), since it was often the first permanent structure that a pioneer would build after clearing the land. In 1860, regions