Lesson 9 Document 8
TITLE: The rail candidate
CALL NUMBER: PGA - Currier & Ives--Rail candidate
(A size) [P&P]
REPRODUCTION NUMBER: LC-USZ62-10393 (b&w film
copy neg.)
SUMMARY: The antislavery plank was a controversial
feature of the 1860 Republican platform. Here Republican nominee Abraham Lincoln
is shown uncomfortably straddling a rail--a dual allusion to the platform and to
Lincoln's backwoods origins--carried by a black man and abolitionist editor of
the New York "Tribune" Horace Greeley (right). Lincoln says, "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." The black man
complains, "Dis Nigger strong and willin' but its awful hard work to carry
Old Massa Abe on nothing but dis ere rail!!" One of Lincoln's foremost
supporters in the Northeast, Greeley here assures him, "We can prove that
you have split rails & that will ensure your election to the
Presidency."
MEDIUM: 1 print on wove paper : lithograph : (image)
27 x 36 cm.
CREATED/PUBLISHED: New York : Currier & Ives,
c1860.
CREATOR: Currier
& Ives.
RELATED NAMES: Maurer,
Louis, 1832-1932, artist.
