The Rail Candidate
(Currier & Ives, 1860. Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
The anti-slavery plank was a controversial feature of the 1860 platform. Here, Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln is shown uncomfortably straddling a rail, carried by a black man and the abolitionist editor Horace Greeley. The rail is a dual allusion to the platform and Lincoln's frontier origins. Lincoln states, "It is true I have split rails, but I begin to feel as if this rail would split me, it's the hardest stick I ever straddled."
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