In February 1860 the Illinois State Republican Central Committee met in Springfield, Illinois, and selected Decatur as the site for the upcoming State Republican Convention. The convention site on South State Street occupied the street itself and vacant lots on either side, with its entrance facing South Park Street. Despite efforts by some northern Illinois delegates to support William Seward, the convention largely followed the Republican delegates' plan, and on May 10th it adopted a resolution declaring Abraham Lincoln Illinois's first choice for the presidency and instructing the state's delegates to use all honorable means to secure his nomination at the Chicago convention and to vote as a unit for him. Less than a week later, when the National Republican Convention opened in Chicago, the Illinois delegates followed those instructions and nominated Lincoln for the presidency, helping him gain the nomination that ultimately led to his election in November 1860. For the convention's opening on May 9, 1860, the Republican Wigwam, borrowing its name from the Native American term for a temporary structure, was prepared to hold 2,500 people in an enclosure 100 feet wide and seventy feet deep. Richard Oglesby, a Decatur resident who later became a three-term governor and one-term U.S. senator from Illinois, obtained a large tent for the gathering, supposedly from a circus company, and the only wooden parts were the speaker's stand and the poles supporting the tent. Soon after the convention began, while Lincoln tried to remain unassuming, Oglesby moved that the delegates invite him to a seat on the stand. The crowd shouted loudly, but Lincoln could not make his way through the packed audience, so delegates lifted him into the air, a practice they called troosted, and passed him over their heads and shoulders to the stand as the cheering continued.