|Plate Number One--This cartoon, "Lincoln à la Blondin," which appeared in _Harper's Weekly_, on August 25, 1860, seems to have been suggested by Blondin's crossing of Niagara on a tight rope with a man on his back--an event then fresh in the public mind. It also recalls an interesting phase of Lincoln's first campaign for the Presidency, which had its origin in a characteristic incident of the candidate's earlier years. It was in March, 1830, that Lincoln, at that time a youth of twenty-one, removed with his father and family from Indiana to Illinois, locating on the bluffs of the Sangamon River about ten miles from Decatur. There he and his kinsman, John Hanks, built a hewed log house, and broke fifteen acres of prairie sod with the two yoke of oxen they had driven from Indiana. They then felled the trees, cut off the logs, and with mauls and wedges split the rails to fence in the land they had broken. The following winter, the winter of the "deep snow" as it was known in Illinois, Lincoln alone made three thousand rails for a neighbor, walking three miles each day to do it. The Republican state convention of Illinois assembled at Decatur on May 9, 1860, and the first act of its chairman was to invite Lincoln, who was modestly seated in the body of the hall, to a seat upon the platform. An eye-witness describes the scene that followed as one of tumultuous enthusiasm. No way could be made through the shouting throng, and Lincoln was borne bodily, over their heads and shoulders, to the place of honor. Quiet restored, the chairman again arose and said: "There is an old Democrat outside who has something he wishes to present to this convention." Then the door of the hall swung open, and a sturdy old man marched in, shouldering two fence-rails, surmounted by a banner inscribed, in large letters: "Two rails from a lot made by Abraham Lincoln and John Hanks in the Sangamon Bottom, in the year 1830." The bearer was John Hanks himself, and he had come to do his part in making his old friend President. "It was an historic scene and moment. In an instant Lincoln, the rail-splitter, was accepted as the representative of the working man and the type and embodiment of the American idea of human freedom and possible human elevation. The applause was deafening. But it was something more than mere applause," for there was no opposition afterwards, to a resolution that declared Lincoln to be the first choice of the Republicans of Illinois for President, and instructed the delegates to the national convention to cast the vote of the State as a unit for him. It is a part of history how the tidal wave of enthusiasm behind this resolution swept from Decatur to Chicago, and thence over the country. [Illustration: 002]