ABRAHAM LINCOLN,
THE RAIL CANDIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY
IN 1860. 
TWO RAILS FROM A LOT OF 3000
MADE IN 1830
BY JOHN HANKS AND ABE LINCOLN.

The rails were received with cheer after cheer, and Lincoln was chosen candidate.  About a week after that a much greater meeting was held in Chicago, and he was chosen there in the same way.  The next November Abraham Lincoln, “the Illinois rail-splitter,” was elected President of the United States.  He had reached the top.  There he was to die.

[Footnote 15:  Candidate (can’di-date):  a person who seeks some office, such as that of governor or president, or a person who is recommended by a party for such an office.  The people in favor of the candidate vote for him; and if he gets a sufficient number of votes, he is elected.]

259.  The great war between the North and the South; why a large part of the people of the South wished to leave the Union.—­In less than six weeks after Lincoln actually became President, in the spring of 1861, a terrible war broke out between the North and the South.  The people of South Carolina fired the first gun in that war.  They, together with a great part of the people of ten other southern states, resolved to leave the Union.[16] They set up an independent government called the Confederate States of America, and made Jefferson Davis its president.

The main reason why so many of the people of the South wished to withdraw from the United States was that little by little the North and the South had become like two different countries.

At the time of the Revolution, when we broke away from the rule of England, every one of the states held negro slaves; but in the course of eighty years a great change had taken place.  The negroes at the North had become free, but those of the South still remained slaves.  Now this difference in the way of doing work made it impossible for the North and the South to agree about many things.

They had come to be like two boys in a boat who want to go in opposite directions.  One pulls one way with his oars, the other pulls another way, and so the boat does not get ahead.

At the South most of the people thought that slavery was right, and that it helped the whole country; at the North the greater part of the people were convinced that it was wrong, and that it did harm to the whole country.

But this was not all.  The people who held slaves at the South wanted to add to the number.  They hoped to get more of the new country west of the Mississippi River for slave states, so that there might always be at least as many slave states in the Union as there were free states.  But Abraham Lincoln like most of the people at the North believed that slavery did no good to any one.  He and his party were fully determined that no slaves whatever should be taken into the territories west of the Mississippi River, and that every new state which should be added should be entirely free.