a
separate group, the Republican convention at Chicago was fated to be
sectional in character, although five slave states did send delegates.
As the Democrats were split, the party that had led a forlorn hope four
years before was on the high road to success at last. New and powerful
recruits were found. The advocates of a high protective tariff and the
friends of free homesteads for farmers and workingmen mingled with
enthusiastic foes of slavery. While still firm in their opposition to
slavery in the territories, the Republicans went on record in favor of a
homestead law granting free lands to settlers and approved customs
duties designed "to encourage the development of the industrial
interests of the whole country." The platform was greeted with cheers
which, according to the stenographic report of the convention, became
loud and prolonged as the protective tariff and homestead planks were
read.

Having skillfully drawn a platform to unite the North in opposition to
slavery and the planting system, the Republicans were also adroit in
their selection of a candidate. The tariff plank might carry
Pennsylvania, a Democratic state; but Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were
equally essential to success at the polls. The southern counties of
these states were filled with settlers from Virginia, North Carolina,
and Kentucky who, even if they had no love for slavery, were no friends
of abolition. Moreover, remembering the old fight on the United States
Bank in Andrew Jackson's day, they were suspicious of men from the East.
Accordingly, they did not favor the candidacy of Seward, the leading
Republican statesman and "favorite son" of New York.

After much trading and discussing, the convention came to the conclusion
that Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was the most "available" candidate. He
was of Southern origin, born in Kentucky in 1809, a fact that told
heavily in the campaign in the Ohio Valley. He was a man of the soil,
the son of poor frontier parents, a pioneer who in his youth had labored
in the fields and forests, celebrated far and wide as "honest Abe, the
rail-splitter." It was well-known that he disliked slavery, but was no
abolitionist. He had come dangerously near to Seward's radicalism in his
"house-divided-against-itself" speech but he had never committed himself
to the reckless doctrine that there was a "higher law" than the
Constitution. Slavery in the South he tolerated as a bitter fact;
slavery in the territori