In 1860, Lincoln was eager to win the support of the Illinois delegates who would later attend the Republican National Convention in Chicago. Abe’s backers looked for a way to reconnect their man with his genuinely humble roots. They ended up taking a cue from Harrison and staging a nice bit of political theater at the state-level convention in Decatur.

idea of sending Lincoln’s cousin, John Hanks, back to the family farm in Decatur, Illinois, to collect a couple of the wooden fence rails that he and Abe had split years before.

under which a banner is suspended that reads ‘Abe Lincoln the Rail Splitter,’

The Missouri Compromise, in 1820, admitted Missouri to the union as a slave state; in exchange, it admitted Maine as a free state and barred slavery in most parts of the Louisiana Purchase territory north of a specified latitude. The Compromise of 1850 eliminated the slave trade from Washington, D.C., but also required citizens of free states to aid in the capture of fugitive slaves. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, which replaced the Missouri Compromise in 1854, let citizens of Kansas and Nebraska decide whether to allow slavery.

Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of congressional districting