In campaign enthusiasm the Republican party easily took the lead.  About a week before his nomination, Mr. Lincoln had been present at the Illinois State convention at Decatur in Coles County, not far from the old Lincoln home, when, at a given signal, there marched into the convention old John Hanks, one of his boyhood companions, and another pioneer, who bore on their shoulders two long fence rails decorated with a banner inscribed:  “Two rails from a lot made by Abraham Lincoln and John Hanks in the Sangamon Bottom in the year 1830.”  They were greeted with a tremendous shout of applause from the whole convention succeeded by a united call for Lincoln, who sat on the platform.  The tumult would not subside until he rose to speak, when he said: 

“GENTLEMEN:  I suppose you want to know something about those things [pointing to old John and the rails].  Well, the truth is, John Hanks and I did make rails in the Sagamon Bottom.  I don’t know whether we made those rails or not; fact is, I don’t think they are a credit to the makers [laughing as he spoke].  But I do know this:  I made rails then, and I think I could make better ones than these now.”

Still louder cheering followed this short, but effective reply.  But the convention was roused to its full warmth of enthusiasm when a resolution was immediately and unanimously adopted declaring that “Abraham Lincoln is the first choice of the Republican party of Illinois for the Presidency,” and directing the delegates to the Chicago convention “to use all honorable means to secure his nomination, and to cast the vote of the State as a unit for him.”

It was this resolution which the Illinois delegation had so successfully carried out at Chicago.  And, besides they had carried with them the two fence rails, and set them up in state at the Lincoln headquarters at their hotel, where enthusiastic lady friends gaily trimmed them with flowers and ribbons and lighted them up with tapers.  These slight preliminaries, duly embellished in the newspapers, gave the key to the Republican campaign, which designated Lincoln as the Rail-splitter Candidate, and, added to his common Illinois sobriquet of “Honest Old Abe,” furnished both country and city campaign orators a powerfully sympathetic appeal to the rural and laboring element of the United States.

When these homely but picturesque appellations were fortified by the copious pamphlet and newspaper biographies in which people read the story of his humble beginnings, and how he had risen, by dint of simple, earnest work and native genius, through privation and difficulty, first to fame and leadership in his State, and now to fame and leadership in the nation, they grew quickly into symbols of a faith and trust destined to play no small part in a political revolution of which the people at large were not as yet even dreaming.