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By Root 1858 0

were homely, yet strong—perhaps like Lincoln himself.18 Perhaps most important, though, the split-rail fence was a symbol of the West (mainly what today we would call the Midwest), since it was often the first permanent structure that a pioneer would build after clearing the land. In 1860, regions that not long before had been remote frontier territories peopled mostly by Indians—places like Iowa, Minnesota, and Oregon—had suddenly become settled states with significant voting blocs. These were places where people still lived much as Ralph Farnham had in Maine at the end of the previous century, lives of hard work and fierce independence, secured with an axe in one hand and a rifle in the other. But the image, and the romance of the West, resonated back East, too: dime novels and illustrated monthlies had brought the frontier to every street-corner newsstand.

Cringing under the barrage of fence rails, Lincoln’s rivals for the presidency tried to fire back in some fashion. Supporters of John Bell, who bore the standard of the Constitutional Union Party, carried little tinkling bells to their rallies and formed clubs called the Bell Ringers or the Clapperites. Douglas’s followers organized themselves as the Little Dougs. But all emblems are not created equal, and these enticements did not noticeably boost either man’s candidacy.19

Still, Lincoln’s opponents seemed to have history on their side. The country may have been increasingly fractured along sectional lines, but in the spring and summer of 1860, two concerns united many Americans in both North and South: the fear of disunion and the desire for peace. For forty years, the precarious balance had been held through conciliation and compromise, with political bargains by which Southerners could feel secure that their “peculiar institution” would be tolerated and even protected by the government of the United States, while Northerners were assured that their own soil would never know the moral taint of slavery. In most Americans’ minds as of 1860, the ideal of union and the ideal of universal freedom stood in direct antithesis, irreconcilable at present or anytime in the foreseeable future.

Events of the past decade had only proved the precariousness of the balance, and set blood boiling on both sides. Most white Southerners were furious over John Brown’s attempted invasion of Virginia the previous year. They suspected it was part of a concerted Northern plot to realize the South’s worst nightmare: a widespread and bloody slave revolt like that in Haiti seven decades before, when Negroes were alleged to have raped, tortured, and slaughtered whites by the thousands. Northern abolitionists, they believed, surreptitiously fanned the flames of “servile rebellion” by circulating abolitionist literature in the South, even slipping it into the hands of slaves whom they had perfidiously taught how to read. And they had robbed Southerners of property, constitutionally protected property, when Northern thieves helped slaves escape through the Underground Railroad. Northern propagandists who had barely set foot in the South fabricated outrageous slanders like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, defaming their Southern brethren to the entire world. Even the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dred Scott case—which had declared eloquently and unequivocally that slave ownership was a basic constitutional right and that blacks could never, at least in a legal sense, be considered fully human—had not been enough to check their outrages. Some of the Northern extremists now even idolized Brown, the insane fanatic who had put weapons into the Negroes’ hands and had himself once slaughtered five law-abiding Kansas settlers with a broadsword simply for being proslavery. Finally, many in the South feared that the North’s burgeoning population, increasing economic power, and growing strength in national politics would only multiply the audacious encroachments on Southern liberties.

Increasing numbers of Northern voters, meanwhile, were coming to suspect a Southern scheme to establish a vast slave empire stretching