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By Root 1831 0

John Breckinridge. Breckinridge was, personally, no lover of the “peculiar institution”—he hoped that blacks could eventually be freed and resettled in Africa—yet considered himself a proud and loyal Southerner and believed the federal government had no right to interfere with any aspect of slavery, including its expansion into any state or territory. The right to hold slaves was protected, he said, wherever the Stars and Stripes waved. He had won credentials as a moderate in 1854 when he pronounced an eloquent eulogy over the body of his fellow Kentuckian Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser. Southerners of all persuasions rallied behind Breckinridge as the man most likely to protect the rights of slaveholders by following in the cautious footsteps of Pierce and Buchanan. Indeed, many declared that he was the only major candidate they were willing to accept as the next president.

By far the most renowned of the four presidential contenders was Douglas, nominee of the Northern Democrats. Douglas was a controversial figure: it was he who had fathered the Kansas-Nebraska Act, resulting in a Midwestern bloodbath. Still, he was widely admired as one of the greatest intellects in the U.S. Senate, perhaps even in all of America. His massive forehead seemed to bulge out over the rest of his face from the sheer volume of the throbbing brain inside; a New York Times correspondent called it “a head most difficult to describe, but one better worth description, in a phrenological aspect, than any other in the country.” The famed orator’s rhetorical style had “nothing of the cavalry slash in its impressiveness, rather resembling a charge of heavy infantry with fixed bayonet.”21 Relentlessly logical, Douglas argued that the Constitution clearly enshrined the right of each state to be governed by its own people. Each new territory should choose its policy on slavery by a fair majority vote—thus, he promised, “burying Northern Abolitionism and Southern Disunionism in a common grave.”22

As for the Republicans, they, too, tacked toward the political center. Although founded six years earlier by antislavery hard-liners, the party had now broadened its platform to embrace popular causes such as protectionist tariffs and a transcontinental railroad. Delegates in 1860 chose Lincoln specifically—with all due respect to Judge Oglesby and his rails—as a man moderate enough to make mainstream voters comfortable. Some expected he could be an impartial broker who would soothe Northern and Southern tempers alike. Lincoln, one Republican speaker assured an audience in Ohio, was “a sound conservative man.” A Republican editor promised readers that the party’s nominee, if elected, would “follow a moderate, fair, constitutional course of policy.”23 Perhaps the Illinoisan’s greatest asset as a candidate, actually, was that very few people outside his home state had any strong opinions about him, or even any idea who he was. Many newspaper editors couldn’t even spell his name: he was “Abram” until election day.24

Yet, regardless of the party bosses’ clear intentions, and regardless of their candidate’s tightly closed lips, the Republican campaign of 1860 quickly began to spin out of control, to transform itself into something neither intended nor envisioned.

Perhaps, in retrospect, it did actually have something to do with those fence rails, which for many Americans began to assume proportions that old John Hanks and his cousin Abe never dreamt of as they cleared that farm along the Sangamon back in the spring of 1830. Most of the great sectional struggles and compromises of the 1850s had hinged on the fate of the new Western states and territories, such as Kansas and Nebraska: whether they would be slave or free, and how to decide the question. Symbols of the pioneer West spoke to the Republicans’ commitment to block the westward spread of slavery. Split rails also powerfully evoked the party’s “free labor” ideology: a belief in the dignity of the independent workingman, in contrast to the indolent Southern aristocrat whose livelihood depended on slaves.25