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111 Notes Introduction 1. This account of the 1860 Illinois Republican convention is based on the following works: Michael S. Green, Lincoln and the Election of 1860 (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011), 47–50; Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 1: 597–600; William C. Harris, Lincoln’s Rise to the Presidency (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 197; David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 244–46; and Wayne C. Temple, “Lincoln’s Fence Rails,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 47 (Spring 1954): 20–34. 2. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, 1: 599; Temple, “Lincoln’s Fence Rails,” 21–23. 3. Illinois State Journal, May 11, 1860, quoted in Temple, “Lincoln’s Fence Rails,” 26. 4. “Remarks to Republican State Convention, Decatur, Illinois,” May 9, 1860, in Abraham Lincoln, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols., ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press), 4: 48. (Hereafter cited as CW). The day before the convention opened, the Illinois State Journal had informed readers that rails split and mauled by Lincoln would be on view. One finds it hard to believe Lincoln’s claim that he knew nothing about the rails being introduced at the convention, since he was an avid reader of newspapers and would have followed any news about the upcoming convention, especially if it pertained to him. 5. The journalist Noah Brooks claimed that Lincoln “was not greatly pleased with the rail incident.” Quoted in Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, 1: 598. 6. Ibid., 1: 599–600. 7. Green, Lincoln and the Election of 1860, 51–62. See also Gary Ecelbarger, The Great Comeback: How Abraham Lincoln Beat the Odds to Win the 1860 Republican Nomination (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008). 8. On the symbolic image of the split-rail fence, see Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 35. On free-labor ideology in antebellum America, see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). See also Gabor S. Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1978); and Thomas E. Rodgers, “Saving 112 | Notes to Pages 4–9 the Republic: Turnout, Ideology, and Republicanism in the Election of 1860,” in The Election of 1860 Reconsidered, ed. A. James Fuller (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2013), 165–92. 9. On the charges of corruption against the Buchanan administration and congressional investigations concerning these charges, see Jean H. Baker, James Buchanan (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), 113–16; and Thomas A. Horrocks, President James Buchanan and the Crisis of National Leadership (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2012), 78–81. See also John W. Quist and Michael J. Birkner, eds., James Buchanan and the Coming of the Civil War (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013). 10. Green, Lincoln and the Election of 1860. See also Douglas Egerton, Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election That Brought on the Civil War (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010); and Fuller, The Election of 1860 Reconsidered. 1. Texts, Contexts, and Contests: Politics and Print in the Age of Lincoln 1. Chicago Press and Tribune, May 15, 1860, cited in Abraham Lincoln: A Press Portrait, ed. Herbert Mitgang (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 164–65. One suspects that the reference to Lincoln’s “unexceptional” record meant that it was not as controversial as that of the presumed favorite, Senator William H. Seward of New York. 2. Letter to Lyman Trumbull, April 29, 1860, in CW, 4: 45. 3. Joel H. Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 10–26. Thomas Jefferson to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789, quoted in ibid., 15. 4. For useful introductions to the history of the Democratic Party to 1860, see Richard E. Ellis, “Democratic Party, 1800–28,” in The Concise Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History, ed. Michael Kazin (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011), 155–59; John Ashworth, “The Democratic Party, 1828–60,” in ibid., 159–62; and Joel H. Silbey, “Democratic Party,” in The Political Lincoln: An Encyclopedia, ed. Paul Finkleman and Martin J. Hershock (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2009), 206–9. See also Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005). The political culture of Northern Democrats in mid-nineteenth...

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