By Mel Freilicher
Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force that Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War by Jon Grinspan on Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024
1.
I was very excited to learn about this forthcoming book, eager to write about what surely is a virtually unknown historical situation. And the volume, by the curator of the Smithsonian’s Natural Museum of American History, is, indeed quite fascinating. Jon Grinspan, who says he’s been collecting data, “chasing” the Wide Awakes for 17 years, compiles an admirable account of these youth groups (all Republicans, though not all abolitionists), which first formed “to act as a political police”—fighting back against antislavery speakers and mobs.
It’s hard to get a realistic sense of how extensive, or impactful, this movement actually was. Partly because many local groups sprung up, decentralized but in some communication with one another, both by word-of-mouth, and via America’s 4,000 newspaper presses of the time, 95% of which “had explicit party affiliations.”
But to start, the difficulty lies in trying to understand the subtitle, and to separate the publisher’s inevitable persiflage, evidenced in the book jacket, from the facts.
The jacket proclaims: “These Wide Awakes—mostly working-class Americans in their twenties—became one of the largest, most spectacular, and most influential political movements in our history. To some it demonstrated the power of a rising majority to push back against slavery. To others, it looked like a paramilitary force to invade the South. Within a year, the nation would be at war with itself, and many on both sides would point to the Wide Awakes as the mechanism that got them there.”
Such promotional materials seem to cause the author to make some singularly odd statements: “It would be facile to claim that Lincoln won because of the Wide Awakes…to make a causal case would be lazy history.” “Facile” is a rather deceptive way to phrase this.
“Absurd” would be more like it, given what we know, and what Grinspan himself tells us, about the complexities of this era: the many ways Northern industrialism and mercantilism were tied to cheap cotton from the South; the country’s profound racism, and intense savagery of the Fugitive Slave Law (The Bloodhound Bill, as Frederick Douglass called it), and guerilla warfare in the Kansas-Nebraska territories.
When Lincoln took office, “among the white majority only a sliver could be considered true abolitionists. The number who wanted to stop slavery from expanding further was bigger. But the largest slice majority merely wanted the Slave power to stop imposing on their lives.”
Another rather obvious narrative assertion: “Probably no one [state] seceded because of the Wide Awakes alone. The movement was not the core of the issue, but it was a succinct embodiment of everything secessionists wanted to leave.” “Probably?”
Nonetheless, Grinspan makes a convincing case for the popularity, and impact of this movement, citing in his preface an 1860 New York Tribune article, calling the Wide Awakes, “The most imposing, influential and potent political organization which ever existed in this country.” Although it’s impossible to calculate the numbers, by the post-Republican convention in 1860, we learn the originators of the Wide Awakes received information about the existence of a total of 900 clubs nationwide.
“Club size swung wildly—from 19 members to 250 in one Chicago company—but averaged around 100. Those nine hundred clubs could easily have represented l00,000 men by August with many other companies uncounted. Soon Americans would decide, based on no reliable information, that there were half a million Wide Awakes in the nation. That number stuck.” This idea seems derived from some letters to the editor of local newspapers in varied states.
From its start in Hartford, Connecticut, club members established a standardized uniform, appearing everywhere in all units: a “spiffed up, even shinier oil cloth version of a black cape…adding a glazed martial cap and anther new innovation”: a device which contained an entire torch apparatus and oil can within a swiveling metal flame. “You could hold its staff at an angle, and the flame would still burn straight and bright and vertical.”
“A young generation of Americans looked across the Atlantic and saw militarism as romantic, dynamic, and proud.” Grinspan cites Italy’s Red Shirts: “Garibaldi, a kind of superhero of international revolution,” was famous for his billowing poncho; Mazzini, “the movement’s intellectual architect,” wore only black. “Zouave units borrowed from the robes of North African tribesmen.”
In addition, Wide Awakes adopted a rigorous military discipline, partly to distinguish themselves from other flourishing paramilitary organizations. Such discipline was often needed to “face down the disorder of [pro-slavery] mobs and lynchings, stolen elections and vigilante chaos.” Actual encounters had mixed results, but the publicity favored the Wide Awakes.
The movement’s reputation for orderly marches, Grinspan points out, probably made their events more welcoming to women. “And plenty showed up.” A correspondent at a New York rally joked that the Ladies Gallery “was perfectly filled with ladies—probably one more could not have gotten in and lived; such a jammfull place I never saw.” At Wide Awake events in the summer of 1860, “young ladies seemed to outnumber any other demographic.”
Many young women stepped up as more than observers: preparing collations of food, banquets, or tables piled high with pies and cakes. Some sewed banners, decorated bandstands, threw bouquets; female horn players or drumbeaters marched in bands. In the Midwest, females on horseback, with flowing robes and sashes, rode with Wide Awakes in their long black capes. Almost always costumed as some allegorical figure--“a Victorian dodge to avoid acknowledging them as full citizens with individual views,” Grinspan explains.
In the fall, some of the most prominent women in East Chatham, New York, came together to form their own ”Female Wide-Awake Club”: making national news as far away as Louisiana. That fall, too, the first all-Black company, the West Boston Wide-Awakes organized “to parade and arouse enthusiasm…in securing the election of our much beloved Abraham Lincoln.” Many members were former slaves; others were born in Boston. Black men had long voted in Massachusetts, but had rarely claimed public political space.
A number of factors add to the confusion, both then and now, about the size and intentions of the Wide Awakes. “Often Democratic newspapers were to blame for growing misinformation.” Many Southerners believed, erroneously, the Wide Awakes were a secret movement, paramilitary in nature and ready to become Lincoln’s bodyguards. (Lincoln rejected such offers from several groups.) Democratic newspaper editors were searching for language harsh enough to condemn the movement. Many started with insults.
When the clubs first emerged, the Detroit Free Press described caped members as having “the appearance of a disheartened Shanghae chicken in a rain storm. It is all legs and cape, legs predominating.” From there, papers often targeted the youth of the marchers, calling them “beardless boys,” “infantile politicians,” and “foolish virgins.”
By September, Southern papers were spreading the story of William Henry Seward’s plot to replace the U.S. Army with an abolitionist Wide Awake force. Virginia’s former governor, Henry A. Wise, in office when John Brown was executed at Harper’s Ferry, predicted an invading army of “thousand--perhaps tens of thousands--of trained Wide Awakes” would take away both the South’s “personal property in Negro slaves” and their “political property in the union.”
Even before the voting began, radical Southern papers were using the Wide Awakes as “a tool to shatter faith in the democratic process,” and advocate secession. The Nashville Union proclaimed the Wide Awakes were preparing to surround polling places, intimidate Democrats, and seize ballots. “Secede now,” the New Orleans Daily Delta demanded: “We shall have four months start” against the inaugural army of “the half million of Wide-Awakes who lately made a demonstration in the streets of NY, and whose parade is pictured by all the illustrated papers.”
The Richmond Enquirer proposed: “What we have to do is simply what our enemies are doing. We must organize, arm, drill, and discipline with all our might.” Hundreds of calls went out for southern political militias “as an offset to the terrible Wide Awakes of the North,” and militias did spring up in South Carolina, New Orleans, Washington and Baltimore.
In actuality, various Wide Awake groups, while all avid Lincoln supporters, espoused different beliefs. In the summer before the election, “many campaigners were comfortably vague” about slavery. While some groups were specifically abolitionists, “Wide Awake companies were all over the place on the issue.”
Banners at rallies—even in Lincoln’s Springfield—sometimes “still contained that noxious slogan: LAND FOR THE LANDLESS vs. NIGGERS FOR THE NIGGERLESS. Some were less nasty, but simply concise like the Boston Wide Awakes whose banner articulated: WE ARE REPUBLICANS BUT NOT ABOLITIONISTS.”
One chapter in Ohio wrote to Lincoln they possessed the spirit of John Brown, while a nearby group declared their company’s constitution existed to “promote the interests of White Men” alone. Grinspan views these conflicts as symptomatic of those in the Party itself: “because the movement had always cared more about the processes of democracy than its outcomes,” he states, without examples.
2.
The historical development of the Wide Awakes is intriguing. Although the term was used occasionally by various nativist groups since 1836, its formal origin was in Hartford, Connecticut with a group of 36, 20-something working class men: clerks, railroad ticket agents, assistant pharmacists, bank tellers. Many lived in the same rooming houses, or knew each other from downtown jobs.
Grinspan attributes this group’s formation to the ”boring jobs…and hazy futures” of these young clerks. Also, Connecticut at this time was the wealthiest state in the union per capita, even richer than the slave states, and in 1860, “registered the highest literacy rate in the nation, at 99.7 percent.”
Hartford was “America’s armory,” manufacturing 80% of the country’s small arms. “Meanwhile, Hartford’s insurance industry was reaping huge profits by gaming out likely outcomes for shipping, or fires, or harvests.” Over the 1850’s, the city grew 53%, almost entirely from overseas immigration. By 1860, one-third of the population was either Irish born or children of Irish immigrants. “They were met with a frosty Puritan welcome,” and barred from high-paying skilled jobs.
Grinspan describes the Original Group as “news junkies” of their times who “floated in a vast watershed of partisan ink. Behemoths like the snarky, Democratic-leaning New York Herald and the utopian, antislavery New York Tribune circulated far outside their hometown, while many fly-by-night papers wended smaller routes…often borrowing liberally from the bigger guys’ reporting….Hard news and wild disinformation floated together, reproduced and altered ad infinitum.”
The Wide Awakes first jumped out of state to Williams College in western Massachusetts, via some of its Connecticut-born students. “From there, the movement hopped to other northern locales with Connecticut connections”: including Newark, Buffalo, Ohio’s Western Reserve (once owned by the extended colony of Connecticut). Ohio editors praised the movement’s nativist undercurrents, proud to see “men from the hills and valleys, the good old yeoman stock of Connecticut (i.e., the Protestant Yankees) defeat ‘naturalized voters’ (i.e., Irish Catholic immigrants).”
“No one from Chicago seems to have met a Wide Awake, but by assiduously reading the eastern papers, they built their own clubs with astounding speed.” A handful of well-connected East coast transplants led the way, stimulated by the Chicago Tribune which proclaimed “there should be a company of them in every considerable town in the Western states.”
The first Chicago club of 50 members differed in key ways from the Hartford Originals. Slightly older, better-established young men in their late-twenties and thirties—grocers, merchants and small businessmen. Ads in the Tribune announced “young men of all nationalities ware cordially invited to become members...Indeed, they seemed to be energetic, up-and-coming cosmopolitan capitalists, eager to promote their new town.”
Chicago was, famously, a multi-ethnic city with a huge geographic reach. The movement’s “greatest power was its ability to bridge class divides,” Grinspan assesses. At a point in early May when most of the Northeast lacked Wide Awake clubs, companies were springing from Chicago onto the Great Plains, down the Mississippi, and into the Great Lakes wood.
“In each town a local newspaper reprinted the Tribune’s heated coverage, and added their own exhortations: ‘Similar clubs should be organized in every town and ward in the state. YOUNG MEN! You must put your shoulder to the wheel.’”
While clubs were spreading into every Northern state, they were especially popular in Republican-leaning but still contested regions. States which had given Republicans pluralities or slim majorities in the 1856 presidential election—Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, New York, Ohio, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Wisconsin—“saw incredible Wide Awake growth.”
Chicago hosted the Republican national convention that summer. “Republican politicians met something striking and new as they stepped down from dusty trains, faced with a silent Republican army standing to attention in the illuminated city.” Within ten days, the papers claimed Chicago had mustered two thousand Wide Awakes for the reception. In a major rally in Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, crowds were estimated to be “anywhere from nineteen thousand to eighty thousand, in a city of just 9,000 residents.”
“Someone had to pay for all these capes, torches, and oil,” Grinspan notes. Those who joined the movement would have to spend nearly a week’s wages on this paraphernalia. “And this left out the cost of train or steamboat tickets, not to mention food and lodgings, booze and cigars.” Political leaders and local elites stepped up to help. “Wide Awakes might seem to emerge from the ground, organized by twentysomethings, but they grew out of communities with parents, bosses, and benefactors.”
“The older and richer part of the community” paid for the political labor of the boys in the ranks. The St. Louis chapter “found incredible financial support,” for example, from a local restaurateur, a brewer, and an inventor. But Grinspan is quick to point out, this money “did not pay young men to be Wide Awakes, only to help them do what they were already doing.” Further, there is “little evidence” of either participants or their backers “profiting personally from doing so.”
Grinspan’s final chapter goes into the start of the war. Many Wide Awakes joined the Union army. Over the course of the war, roughly half of military-aged northern men served at one time or another. “But among the Wide Awakes, it is rare to find a club member who saw no service.”
On the other hand, “Good Wide Awakes did not always make good soldiers.” Grinspan sees “little connection between zeal in the 1860 election and success in actual warfare,” citing some Wide Awake favorite figures who proved to be mediocre generals.
“The best Union generals came not from the ranks of Republicans eager for a fight in 1860 but from dutiful moderates like Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman who grew along with Lincoln into the men who won the war.”
“Others were eager to fight but long denied,” Grinspan notes. “From the very first days of the war, African Americans volunteered” but were rejected by several generals. When Washington’s black community offered to form a force, Jacob Dobson, a famous African American explorer who worked in the Senate, sent a letter to the Secretary of War about “three hundred of reliable, free colored citizens” who desired to enter the service. They were rejected.
Many whites insisted, much as they had during the electoral campaign, that African Americans had no place in the conflict. When Cincinnati’s black community organized a “Home Guard,” and began to drill they were threatened by mobs, and told by the police, “We want you damned niggers to keep out of this, this is a white man’s war.” Nearly the same thing happened in Manhattan.
Nonetheless, nearly two hundred thousand black men served in the war. One of Lincoln’s severest critics, George E. Stephens, who “wrote blistering editorials in the Anglo-African,” became the first black officer in command of his own unit. Many prominent Wide Awakes ended up commanding black forces as well.
“Being a Wide Awake was, for many, a conduit to military service,” Grinspan notes. “And yet becoming soldiers unmade the movement. Enlistment covered their tracks, part of the reason the Wide Awakes have largely been forgotten.”
“Historians,” Grinspan laments, ‘have long pointed to Boston’s black community in the 1850s as the template for the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment, but missed the key Wide Awake stepping stone in between. The same men organized each, but every new organization represented an evolution into public, aggressive, militaristic and integrated activism.”
After the war, this author claims, “African Americans’ military service (tested in Boston’s streets) formed the bedrock of the successful argument for black voting rights, enshrined in the Fifteenth Amendment. Politics led to warfare, and warfare back to politics.”
Mel Freilicher retired from some 4 decades of teaching in UCSD's Lit. Dept./ writing program. He was publisher and co-editor of Crawl Out Your Window magazine (1974-89), a journal of the experimental literature and visual arts of the San Diego/Tijuana region. He's been writing for quite some time. He is the author of The Unmaking of Americans: 7 Lives, Encyclopedia of Rebels, and American Cream, all on San Diego City Works Press.