...
Can you help me a little in this matter at your end of the vineyard?"
This point of the allegiance of his own State was soon made right. The
Republican State Convention met in the "Wigwam" at Decatur, May 9 and
10, 1860. Governor Oglesby, who presided, suggested that a distinguished
citizen, whom Illinois delighted to honor, was present, and that he
should be invited to a place on the stand; and at once, amid a tumult of
applause, Lincoln was lifted over the heads of the crowd to the
platform. John Hanks then theatrically entered, bearing a couple of
fence rails, and a flag with the legend that they were from a "lot made
by Abraham Lincoln and John Hanks in the Sangamon Bottom, in the year
1830." The sympathetic roar rose again. Then Lincoln made a "speech,"
appropriate to the occasion. At last, attention was given to business,
and the convention resolved that Abraham Lincoln was the first choice of
the Republican party of Illinois for the presidency, and instructed
their delegates to the nominating convention "to use all honorable means
to secure his nomination, and to cast the vote of the State as a unit
for him."
With the opening of the spring of 1860 the several parties began the
campaign in earnest. The Democratic Convention met first, at Charleston,
April 23; and immediately the line of disruption opened. Upon the one
side stood Douglas, with the moderate men and nearly all the Northern
delegates, while against him were the advocates of extreme Southern
doctrines, supported by the administration and by most of the delegates
from the "Cotton States.
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