A sketch of the Wigwam in Decatur to house the Rebuplican Convention of 1860.

“John,” Oglesby asked, “did you split rails down there with old Abe?”

“Yes, every day,” Hanks answered.

“Do you suppose you could find any of them now?” Hanks said he had seen that old fence about ten years before, and he took Oglesby there the next day. While Oglesby waited in his buggy, Hanks chipped away at the fence with a knife. When he came up with shavings that were black walnut and honey locust, he declared, “They are the identical rails we made.”

The rails were just what Oglesby wanted: symbols of free labor, solid character, triumph over the crude frontier, humble origins, and the strength to rise. He and Hanks took two of them, tied them to Oglesby’s buggy, and brought them to town. Then, on the first day of the state convention, Oglesby introduced Lincoln with a flourish. This was John Hanks’s cue. As Lincoln reached the stage, Hanks burst into the wigwam carrying the rails. A banner hanging from them explained that Lincoln had split them and announced, in large letters:

ABRAHAM LINCOLN
The Rail Candidate
FOR PRESIDENT IN 1860

The crowd went wild. Delegates and onlookers threw hats, books, and canes into the air. The wigwam shook so much that its canvas exterior became detached from the wood beams. “The roof was literally cheered off the building,” declared an early account of the maelstrom. The energy of the crowd foreshadowed Lincoln’s success. The state’s delegates soon resolved to back Lincoln unanimously. Buoyed by the “rail-splitter” image, Lincoln would vault into place as William Seward’s main rival for the Republican nomination. On that stage, then, Lincoln stood at the peak of three hard decades in politics. “Lincoln’s name was in every mouth,” recalled Joseph G. Cannon, who later became Speaker of the House of Representatives, “and in those stirring times everything was on fire.”

Yet, to the wigwam audience in Decatur, Lincoln presented a strange figure. He didn’t seem euphoric, or triumphant, or even pleased. To the contrary, said a man named Johnson, observing from the convention floor, “I then thought him one of the most diffident and worst plagued men I ever saw.”

The next day, the convention closed. The crowds dispersed, leaving behind cigar stubs and handbills and the smell of sweat and whiskey. After the wigwam had emptied, a Republican journalist named William J. Bross walked the floor. He noticed his state party’s choice for president sitting alone at the end of the hall. Lincoln’s head was bowed, his gangly arms bent at the elbows, his hands pressed to his face. As Bross approached, Lincoln noticed him and said, “I’m not very well.”

Lincoln’s look at that moment — the classic image of gloom — was familiar to everyone who knew him well. These spells were common. And they were just one thread in a curious fabric of behavior and thought that Lincoln’s friends and colleagues called his “melancholy.” He often wept in public and recited maudlin poetry. He told jokes and stories at odd times — he needed the laughs, he said, for his survival. As a young man he talked of suicide, and as he grew older, he said he saw the world as hard and grim, full of misery, made that way by fates and forces of God. “No element of Mr. Lincoln’s character,” declared his colleague Henry Whitney, “was so marked, obvious and ingrained as his mysterious and profound melancholy.” His law partner William Herndon said, “His melancholy dripped from him as he walked.”