Still louder cheering followed this short, but effective reply. But the convention was roused to its full warmth of enthusiasm when a resolution was immediately and unanimously adopted declaring that "Abraham Lincoln is the first choice of the Republican party of Illinois for the Presidency," and directing the delegates to the Chicago convention "to use all honorable means to secure his nomination, and to cast the vote of the State as a unit for him." It was this resolution which the Illinois delegation had so successfully carried out at Chicago. And, besides they had carried with them the two fence rails, and set them up in state at the Lincoln headquarters at their hotel, where enthusiastic lady friends gaily trimmed them with flowers and ribbons and lighted them up with tapers. These slight preliminaries, duly embellished in the newspapers, gave the key to the Republican campaign, which designated Lincoln as the Rail-splitter Candidate, and, added to his common Illinois sobriquet of "Honest Old Abe," furnished both country and city campaign orators a powerfully sympathetic appeal to the rural and laboring element of the United States. When these homely but picturesque appellations were fortified by the copious pamphlet and newspaper biographies in which people read the story of his humble beginnings, and how he had risen, by dint of simple, earnest work and native genius, through privation and difficulty, first to fame and leadership in his State, and now to fame and leadership in the nation, they grew quickly into symbols of a faith and trust destined to play no small part in a political revolution of which the people at large were not as yet even dreaming.