[Listen to the audio edition of this excerpt: part one, part two]

In early May 1860, a week before the Republican party held its national convention in Chicago, the delegates from Illinois met in Decatur, a small town in the center of the state. They met in what they called a “wigwam,” a kind of urban barn, built over a vacant lot with a canvas roof held up by wood beams. When the Decatur convention opened, on May 9, three thousand men packed inside. After an initial round of huzzahs, at the start of the afternoon session, a thirty-five-year old politician named Richard Oglesby took the stage. “I am informed,” he said, “that a distinguished citizen of Illinois, and one who Illinois will ever delight to honor, is present and I wish to move that this body invite him to a seat on the stand.” The crowd waited to hear the man’s name, but Oglesby paused — as though, observed a man in the crowd, “to tease expectation to the verge of desperation.”

A parade for the August Republican rally of 1860 passed the Lincoln home on its way to the fairgrounds.

At that moment, Abraham Lincoln was crouched on his heels at the back of the hall, just inside the entrance. A fifty-one-year-old lawyer and a veteran of the state legislature, Lincoln had left his last political office, as U.S. representative, eleven years before. After one middling term in Congress, he mostly stayed away from politics for five years. Then, in 1854, an old debate over slavery took a new turn with the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which, Lincoln wrote, “aroused me again.” Pressing his argument against the extension of slavery, and for its eventual extinction, he helped build the new Republican party in Illinois. In 1858, he challenged Stephen Douglas for his Senate seat, losing the race but gaining a national reputation from the campaign debates. In February 1860, he dazzled a crowd at New York City’s Cooper Union with an antislavery speech the New York Tribune called among “the most convincing political arguments ever made in this city.”

Lincoln came to the Decatur convention in May as a rising star. When Oglesby called his name from the stage of the wigwam, the delegates and onlookers broke into thunderous applause. A half-dozen men seized Lincoln and tried to push him to the front of the room. When that didn’t work — the room was too full — they lifted him up on their shoulders and passed him, not unlike in a mosh pit today, over the mass of people to the stage. The crowd roared its approval.

Still, those in the wigwam knew that Lincoln stood a slim chance to take the national nomination the following week at Chicago. Most Republicans expected that the honor would fall to Senator William Seward, the party’s leading man. Lincoln, by contrast, failed to rate a mention on preconvention scorecards of seven, twelve, even twenty-one candidates. Lincoln couldn’t even count on the backing of his own state convention at Decatur, which he badly wanted. “I am not in a position where it would hurt much for me to not be nominated on the national ticket,” he wrote, “but I am where it would hurt some for me to not get the Illinois delegates.”

Richard Oglesby, the young politician who was managing the convention, knew Lincoln’s position and wanted to improve it. An ambitious and energetic man — he would become a major general in the Union army and, soon afterward, governor of Illinois — Oglesby wanted to deliver the state’s delegates for him. Not some, but all; not in a tepid fashion, but with a rousing cheer.

Oglesby had decided that Lincoln needed something to distinguish himself — a catch phrase like “Log Cabin and Hard Cider,” which had helped elect William Henry Harrison in 1840. So before the convention, Oglesby had gone to see a white-whiskered old farmer named John Hanks. Hanks was Lincoln’s mother’s cousin and had lived with the Lincoln family when they first came to Illinois in 1830. Oglesby asked what kind of work Lincoln had done in those days. “Not much of any kind but dreaming,” Hanks replied. Then he told the story of how he and Lincoln had once cleared fifteen or twenty acres of black walnut and honey locust trees, built a cabin, and mauled rails for fences.