A Nice Metaphor for the Country
Aurora Borealis, by Frederic Edwin Church, 1865. [Smithsonian American Art Museum]
It started with a few kids in Connecticut. Tired of being shouted down and beaten up, a crew of antislavery Republicans formed a militaristic company in Hartford. They called themselves “the Wide Awakes,” no longer willing to slumber as enslavers stole the country and poisoned democracy. With their black capes and martial caps, their torchlight rallies and their bare-knuckled tactics, these Wide Awakes proposed to revolutionize the 1860 presidential campaign. Thousands started to join across Connecticut, then Massachusetts. But to make change nationally, the new movement would have to awaken a larger bloc, a Northern antislavery majority who rarely saw themselves as one.
In mid-May, Republicans began their great pilgrimage to Chicago. It took considerable effort to drag 25,000 people to a city of just over 100,000. Some floated in by steamboat, others bounced up on strutless carriages. Those who chugged from the east by railroad arrived in partisan convoys — trains packed with political chieftains, mobbed at every small-town junction by excited Republicans offering whiskey and barbecue, bad coffee and worse brass bands.
After days of alternately blasting along at forty miles an hour, then stopping to admire some small town’s Republican banner, the delegation arrived in Chicago. It was around nine in the evening, and the trains were coming in along the lakefront. At an agreed-upon distance, the engineer let out six screams from his steam whistle. All along the lake, houses illuminated on command, lighting thousands of twinkling candles in windows. “Numerous enthusiastic individuals who call themselves Wide-awakes” stepped forward in an orderly double line, according to a New York Herald correspondent Simon Hanscom, casting a wall of torchlight that shimmered along the glassy surfaces of the lake, bounced off their black capes, flooded the bleary train windows.
“The cannons began to boom,” Hanscom wrote, “the rockets to soar, the small boys to hurrah, the police to get in everybody’s way, and the dense crowd which filled the great railway station and all the streets adjacent, to push and elbow and general annoy each other.” Most aboard had already sat through plenty of political demonstrations on their way to Chicago, “and have been bored to death with them.” But these Wide Awakes were something different. Republican politicians stepped down from dusty trains, faced with a silent Republican army standing to attention in the illuminated city.
It seemed like half of the North was in Chicago: Eastern worthies, Western boosters, emissaries from the South, recent immigrants, foreign correspondents, and thousands upon thousands of curious locals. Omnibuses filled with state delegations rolled through packed and muddy streets. Chicago in those days was both descending into the swampy lakeside and beginning a massive municipal project to raise the whole town. Some streets were slimy with muck, while others were suddenly four feet higher. It was a nice metaphor for the country in 1860, simultaneously rising and sinking.
The hotels packed in as many Republicans as they could. Even in a culture used to sleeping a few strangers to a bed, the “rush and crush and jam” felt extreme. Hanscom chuckled at “the vigorous, earnest, bustling way in which everybody rushed about to do nothing in particular.” Everyone was talking politics, all pretending they knew some secret about the nomination. Looking for adventure, Hanscom sought out Chicago’s ladies, enjoying the crowds in large numbers. But he found that “the ladies here are all violent politicians,” and he could not “commence the smallest hint of a flirtation without defining his position upon the question of the power of Congress over slavery in the Territories.”
Party conventions always have the air of an unsatisfying night out, everyone convinced that someone more powerful knows better, sits closer. For his Democratic readers, Hanscom satirized the typical small-town politician, stalking about “as if the fate of the nation rested on his shoulders.” Or even worse, the local newspapermen — “the more obscure his paper, the more ornate his behavior, the more expansive and superb his dignity.” The hubbub orbited around “the Wigwam,” an immense, temporary building. It was the biggest venue in America at the time, capable of holding 10,000 people, with 600 on the stage alone. Constructed in rough Western style, it was no beauty. Its “hasty and irregular construction” reminded Hanscom of the entire Republican Party.
The real action was outside the Wigwam, as Chicago’s streets filled with thousands of uniformed Wide Awakes making their national debut. Chicago’s young Republicans had worked hard to get them ready. Even though no one from Chicago seems to have met a real-live Wide Awake, locals had scoured Eastern papers for models. The booming young city — noted for its “peculiar spirit of velocity” — quickly adopted the movement, breaking in dozens of neighborhood companies. Meanwhile, the pushy Chicago Tribune nudged readers across the region: “There should be company of them in every considerable town in the Western States.” From Janesville, Wisconsin, out to Muscatine, Iowa, down to Clinton, Illinois, young men were forming clubs in a 150-mile arc around Chicago.
Delegates who had never heard of the movement were suddenly faced with the strange organization in Chicago’s streets, thousands of boys in black capes standing to attention. Chicago-based Wide Awakes who originally hailed from the East met their home states’ delegations at the train station and escorted them through uneven streets to their hotels. Visiting Republicans joined up, instructed to visit J.A. Smith & Co.’s Lake Street store and buy the proper Wide Awake gear to “ ‘fall in’ for drill this evening.” Why not give the new club a try while in town? The movement had started among textile clerks in Connecticut; now Illinois merchants with cloth to sell helped kit out new companies, happy for the motivated buyers.
And in a town with a significant Democratic population, corps of Wide Awakes stood guard outside the Wigwam, “always on duty to ‘see that things go right.’ ” “Duty” had become Wide Awake code for something rougher.
But the surging crowds were not there to try on capes. They had a candidate to nominate. The twists and turns of convention nomination battles are usually most interesting to historians writing books about them, and none has been more picked over than the Republicans’ 1860 nomination. Taking a healthy step back, two contradictory forces motivated the debates over whom to nominate. Many Republicans felt the same incredible momentum that fired the Wide Awakes, a sense of a great Northern rising against the powers of slavery, even as the other parties were crumbling. Antislavery movements had long failed on election day, but in 1860 the wind was finally in the Republicans’ sails. They needed new energy and new men to make the most of it. But they were also swinging towards the center, trying to shake off old associations of their party as too radical, and hoping to pick up voters from the faltering Democratic and Know Nothing movements, especially in the lower North. It was a familiar political challenge, to at once fire their base and attract the doubtful.
Casting aside their party’s leader — William Henry Seward, long in the saddle and attacked as too radical by many sides — local Illinoisians began to murmur the name Abraham Lincoln. The one-time congressman was known, vaguely, and liked, vaguely, by all. People admired Lincoln’s battle for the Senate seat against Stephen Douglas; his balance of legal, logical, and moral opposition to slavery expansion; his rootsy Western ways. Even those who could be witheringly critical of Republican politicians, like Frederick Douglass, respected Lincoln as “a man of unblemished private character,” “one of the most frank, honest men in political life.” Abraham Lincoln was not present in Chicago, but his friends in the state were building a strong movement to nominate him as everyone’s second-favorite choice.
Seward’s lead fell away. Crucial Lower North delegates threw in for Lincoln, and after three rounds of voting, the Republicans had their nominee. Party leaders tried to certify the vote and offer some final remarks, but were drowned out by thousands of hoarse, cheering voices, filling the Wigwam “with the energy of insanity.”
Lincoln had one other strange advantage. He had been the very first politician escorted by the Wide Awakes in Hartford right after they had formed. This was a random accident, but in 1860 the new nominee and the new movement synced together, helping each other in Chicago and beyond.
Lincoln’s nomination complemented the Wide Awakes marching in Chicago’s streets. Republicans chose to promote Lincoln’s humble origins as a rural rail-splitter. (Never mind that he was now a sophisticated lawyer and ex-congressman.) Selective as the rail-splitter image may have been, it synced nicely with the class and age politics of the Wide Awakes. Lincoln’s backstory was perfect for a movement led by young laboring men, hostile to sleepy elites and old fogies.
Lincoln and the Wide Awakes fit together in another way. The Lincoln campaign hardly existed outside of a few close friends in Illinois. While Seward had been ready with banners and badges and celebrity endorsements, everyone’s second-favorite candidate had little infrastructure. This was the downside of a dark horse nomination. But while the nation’s small newspapers and local printers geared up to churn out campaign stuff, the Wide Awakes were ready. Back in Hartford, the original Wide Awakes were printing up pamphlets, songbooks, and club constitutions, sending out cape samples, building up a branded, franchised movement, ready to fill in as the Lincoln campaign found its footing.
Chicago was a vector, drawing in all those small-town politicians and editors, exposing them to Wide Awakes, then dispersing them to their communities to spread the contagion. Ratification rallies started to break out across the North, with bonfires and fireworks and august speeches certifying the nomination. Celebrating crowds also formed Wide Awake companies, based on the thrilled reports of returning delegates. Soon after the convention, Wide Awake companies emerged in Bangor and Brooklyn, Cambridge and Columbus, St. Paul and San Francisco, and hundreds of cities and towns in between. Burlington, Vermont, got a club going. So did Burlington, Iowa. And Burlington, Wisconsin. And Burlington, New Jersey. Out in tiny Littleton, Iowa, 19 locals formed a Wide Awake company so small that half its members were officers. The Littleton Wide Awakes denounced Democrats as pawns of the Slave Power, made up of “timid children — not men.” “While professed politicians talk,” the Littleton Wide Awakes bragged, “let the People work.”
The people were working, in ways they never had before. No antislavery movement had ever boasted such broad appeal, and no campaign had ever been so coordinated, so striking, so iconic, or so menacing. Some muttered about uniformed abolitionists stomping through their streets, event as others joined up and turned out. All agreed it was an unprecedented model for popular politics. The Republican convention in Chicago in commenced one of the fastest growing, largest political organizations in American history. By the end of that Wide Awake Summer, hundreds of thousands had joined up, roughly the equivalent of a multi-million person movement today.
Inspired by their Chicago debut, Gustav Koerner — a German refugee who had campaigned for human rights from Bavaria to Illinois — got up his own company of 300 Wide Awakes, writing “And now commenced a campaign such as I never witnessed before or after.”
Excerpt adapted from Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War by Jon Grinspan. Copyright © 2024 by Jon Grinspan. Used with the permission of Bloomsbury Publishing. All rights reserved.
