Wide Awake

Has the country ever been so divided? Well, yes, several times, including the 1860 Presidential election. From this review of a recent book, Wide Awake, by Jon Grinspan:

How did Lincoln, then relatively unknown in national politics, win this critical race? Presidential candidates at the time did not ordinarily campaign for themselves. ....

A youth movement known as the Wide Awakes played a huge role in promoting Lincoln’s candidacy. The Wide Awakes are often mentioned in works on Lincoln, but Mr. Grinspan, a curator of political history at the Smithsonian Institution and the author of two previous books on the history of American democracy, is the first to probe them in depth.

He traces the movement to five textile clerks in Hartford, Conn., who formed a grassroots political organization in February 1860 to support the antislavery Republican Party. From this initial group, known as the Hartford Originals, the movement expanded quickly. Wide Awake clubs appeared throughout the North—as Mr. Grinspan writes, they emerged “in Bangor and Brooklyn, Cambridge and Columbus, St. Paul and San Francisco, and hundreds of cities and towns in between.” Dressed in shiny oilskin capes and carrying torches, the Wide Awakes staged “monster” parades with fireworks and music, marching and thundering forth their distinctive chant: “Hurrah! Huzzah! Hurrah! Huzzah! Hurrah! Huzzah!” ....

In its early phase, Mr. Grinspan demonstrates, the Wide Awake movement opposed slavery but was not progressive on race. But the movement diversified. African-Americans became Wide Awakes, with the Ohio lawyer John Mercer Langston (later a congressman representing Virginia) and the Bostonian Lewis Hayden, a former slave, leading the way. Opponents came to view the Wide Awakes as dangerous radicals involved in a conspiracy to bring about a horrid racial reversal in America. One journalist fumed: “The chief object seems to be to give the negro the supremacy over the white man.” ....

It’s unknown how large the Wide Awake movement was: Mr. Grinspan gives us a rough range of between 100,000 and half a million participants. Regardless of the numbers, the Wide Awakes generated outsize excitement wherever they appeared. Violence sometimes followed, as groups of proslavery Democrats assaulted the Republican Wide Awakes with stones and brickbats, while the Wide Awakes were summoned to the fray with the cry: “Do your duty!”

When the Civil War came, many of these young men traded torches for rifles. Mr. Grinspan tells us that most of the former Wide Awakes participated in the war, including the African-American Wide Awakes of Boston. ....

David S. Reynolds, "‘Wide Awake’ Review: On the March for Lincoln," Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2024.