Already known popularly as Honest Abe, Lincoln had a reputation for integrity that compared favorably with the dubious image of Thurlow Weed’s New York machine. Of humble origins, Lincoln personified the free-labor ideology of equal opportunity and upward mobility. He had been born in a log cabin. In a stroke of political genius, one of Lincoln’s managers exhibited at the Illinois state convention a pair of weatherbeaten fence rails that Lincoln had supposedly split thirty years earlier. From
