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Updated: June 26, 2025
This incident was the means of enlarging the soubriquet "Honest Abe" to "Honest Old Abe, the Rail-splitter." The enthusiasm over the rails spread far and wide. That he had split rails, and that he even had done it well, was no test of his statesmanship.
"Honest old Abe the rail-splitter!" might sound well in the ear of the masses; but the Republican party was laden with the burden of an immense responsibility, and the men who did its thinking could not reasonably feel certain that rail-splitting was an altogether satisfactory training for the leader in such an era as was now at hand.
I used to cut and split a hundred a day from our short, knotty oak timber, swinging the axe and heavy mallet, often with sore hands, from early morning to night. Father was not successful as a rail-splitter. After trying the work with me a day or two, he in despair left it all to me.
He looked like a common rail-splitter. The money was soon made up, and the stakes placed in proper hands. The gaffs were fitted, the roosters were placed in the pit and held until both were sufficiently mad to fight, when they were turned loose, and each struck at the same time. I looked and poor Fed was dead. The other rooster had popped both gaffs through his head.
The election followed, and Lincoln, the Republican, received one hundred and eighty electoral votes; Breckinridge, the Southern Democrat, seventy-two; Bell, of the Union ticket the last fragment of the old Whig party thirty-nine; and Douglas, of the Northern Democracy, but twelve. The rail-splitter became President of the United States, and Senator Hannibal Hamlin, of Maine, Vice President.
He accompanied his restless, migratory father from one squatter home to another until he settled in Illinois, where the timber-land and prairie meet, near the Sangamon, and there built another cabin, made rails to fence ten acres of land which gave him the sobriquet the "rail-splitter" "broke" the ground, and raised a crop of corn on it the first year.
Lincoln was called the "Rail-splitter Candidate," and this telling name, added to the equally telling "Honest Old Abe," by which he had long been known in Illinois, furnished country and city campaign orators with a powerful appeal to the sympathy and trust of the working-people of the United States.
The young rail-splitter had also a knack of slaughtering hogs, for which he received thirty cents a day. Physically he had extraordinary strength, and no one could beat him in wrestling and other athletic exercises. Mentally, he was bright, inquiring, and not wholly illiterate. He had learned, during his various peregrinations, to read, write, and cipher.
Immediately upon its conclusion the speaker was sworn into office by Chief Justice Taney whose name is connected with the famous Dred Scott decision. James Buchanan was now a private citizen and the pioneer rail-splitter was at the head of the United States. In all the thousands of people there assembled, there was no one who listened more intently than Stephen A. Douglas.
Interesting things were happening in the world then; things that were to mould the future of one of the boys at her knee in a way she little dreamed. A war was being waged in Mexico to train soldiers for a greater war coming. Out in Illinois, a plain rail-splitter, farmer and lawyer was beginning to be heard in the cause of freedom and justice for all men, black or white.
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