All parties entered upon the political canvass with considerable spirit; but the chances of the Republicans were so manifestly superior that their enthusiasm easily outran that of all their competitors.  The character and antecedents of Mr. Lincoln appealed directly to the sympathy and favor of the popular masses of the Northern States.  As pioneer, farm-laborer, flat-boatman, and frontier politician, they saw in him a true representative of their early if not their present condition.  As the successful lawyer, legislator, and public debater in questions of high statesmanship, he was the admired ideal of their own aspirations.

While the Illinois State Republican Convention was in session at Decatur (May 10), about a week before the Chicago Convention, the balloting for State officers was interrupted by the announcement, made with much mystery, that “an old citizen of Macon County” had something to present to the convention.  When curiosity had been sufficiently aroused, John Hanks, Lincoln’s fellow-pioneer, and a neighbor of Hanks, were suddenly marched into the convention, each bearing upright an old fence-rail, and displaying a banner with an inscription to the effect that these were two rails from the identical lot of three thousand which, when a pioneer boy, Lincoln had helped to cut and split to inclose his father’s first farm in Illinois, in 1830.  These emblems of his handiwork were received by the convention with deafening shouts, as a prelude to a unanimous resolution recommending him for President.  Later, these rails were sent to Chicago; there, during the sittings of the National Republican Convention, they stood in the hotel parlor at the Illinois headquarters, lighted up by tapers, and trimmed with flowers by enthusiastic ladies.  Their history and campaign incidents were duly paraded in the newspapers; and throughout the Union Lincoln’s ancient and local sobriquet of “Honest Old Abe” was supplemented by the national epithet of “The Illinois Bail-splitter.”  Of the many peculiarities of the campaign, one feature deserves special mention.  Political clubs, for parades and personal campaign work, were no novelty; now, however, the expedients of a cheap yet striking uniform and a half-military organization were tried with marked success.  When Lincoln made his New England trip, immediately after the Cooper Institute speech, a score or two of active Republicans in the city of Hartford appeared in close and orderly ranks, wearing each a cap and large cape of oil-cloth, and bearing over their shoulders a long staff, on the end of which blazed a brilliant torch-light.  This first “Wide Awake” [3] Club, as it called itself, marching with soldierly step, and military music, escorted Mr. Lincoln, on the evening of March 5, from the hall where he addressed the people, to his hotel.  The device was so simple and yet so strikingly effective that it immediately became the pattern for other cities.  After the campaign opened, there was scarcely a county or village in the North without its organized and drilled association of “Wide Awakes,” immensely captivating to the popular eye, and forming everywhere a vigilant corps to spread the fame of, and solicit votes for, the Republican Presidential candidate.  On several occasions twenty to thirty thousand “Wide Awakes” met in the larger cities and marched in monster torch-light processions through the principal streets.