1861 (9 page)

For some Americans who would read the speech in the days to come, another of Sumner’s exhortations may have been even more alarming: “If bad men conspire for slavery, good men must combine for freedom. Nor can the holy war be ended until the barbarism now dominant in the republic is overthrown, and the Pagan power is driven from our Jerusalem.”
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As for the Republican candidate himself, he sat silent as ever in Springfield. The party’s moderate leaders fanned out across
New York and Pennsylvania, talking busily about tariffs, about railroads—about anything except slavery.
In Boston, Garrison and Phillips poured forth their crystalline stream of prophecy, as ever untainted by the muck of politics. But across the North, almost
imperceptibly at first, a grassroots army was banding together: one that would enter the presidential contest as though enlisting in Senator Sumner’s holy war.

N
O ONE WOULD EVER
know exactly how, where, or when the movement started. Some proslavery men claimed it was born that summer as part of a vast and sinister conspiracy in the West; even that the malign hand of
John Brown had reached out of the grave and coaxed it to life.
Northern Democrats believed devious political bosses were pulling strings from behind
the scenes; Republicans denied this, saying they could trace its origins back to a similar organization in the campaign of ’56.

Eventually, though, the explanation that gained the most currency was a tale about five young dry-goods clerks in Hartford, Connecticut. In February 1860, the story went, a noted Republican orator—an antislavery Kentuckian named
Cassius M. Clay—visited the city. The young men, Republicans all, took on the duty of escorting the dignitary from the railway station to his hotel, and in order to make the little procession of
shop assistants somewhat more impressive, they fashioned makeshift uniform capes out of some shiny oilcloth, and borrowed whale-oil torches from a local fire company. They marched through the streets in military formation with Clay tagging along behind, perhaps somewhat nonplussed.

Some onlookers scoffed at the odd spectacle, but other young Hartford men along the parade route—fellow shop assistants, counting-house clerks, insurance-company actuaries—found themselves oddly stirred. Within a week or two, some fifty of them met to organize themselves as a Republican marching club. By the end of the month, its ranks had swelled to more than two thousand. Somewhere along the way, they came up with a name for their group: the Wide Awakes.
By the summer, similar groups were forming across the country, until eventually even Bennett’s skeptical
New York Herald
was asking: “Who are these Wide Awakes?”
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Well might the
Herald
wonder. A first glimpse of a Wide Awake battalion on parade was a strange, even frightening, experience. Late at night, city dwellers would be startled from their sleep by the rhythmic crashing of a drum drawing closer and closer. Rushing to the window, they would see the darkened street below them suddenly blaze up with fire as a broad row of men with torches rounded the corner in marching formation, and more followed, rank upon rank,
their boots striking the cobblestones in perfect cadence. The marchers wore military-style caps and were shrouded in full black capes of a shiny fabric that reflected the flames. Some carried rail-splitter axes strapped to their backs. Perhaps most chilling of all, they marched in complete
silence, their eyes fixed straight ahead, the only sound the beating of drums and the tramp of boot heels. They were unlike anything ever seen in American politics, unlike the
boisterous parades, rowdy songs, and brass bands of elections past. “Quiet men,” the
Herald
warned its readers, “are dangerous.”
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Details of the organization’s inner workings began to trickle out. New members signed enlistment papers as if in an army. The groups were organized into companies and battalions, with their own sergeants, lieutenants, and captains, each wearing appropriately fancier versions of the Wide Awake uniform. These officers, many of them veterans of the Mexican War, taught enlistees formal military drill using official army handbooks. (
In St. Louis, a shop assistant and former army lieutenant named Ulysses Grant often coached the local Wide Awakes.) The sinister symbol of the new organization, painted on its banners and printed on its membership certificates, was a single all-seeing, unblinking eye.
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What did that open eye mean? How exactly did these men consider themselves “wide awake”? Were they standing vigil against a rising danger? Were they spies, stalking the streets by night? Or had they somehow fully awakened to a new and clearer vision of the world, while the rest of their countrymen still drowsed?

In any case, the movement grew. From Hartford it spread across
New England, down into
Pennsylvania and
New York, even to distant San Francisco. It seemed to catch fire especially among the new cities of the upper
Midwest, towns where New Englanders had, like their English ancestors, borne their missionary fervor westward to a new
frontier: Milwaukee, Madison, La Crosse, Kalamazoo. Many members were clerks, mechanics, or common laborers, but in Boston, even some Beacon Hill aristocrats were swept into the ranks, shouldering torches along with the rest.
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Most of the “Rail-Splitter” clubs from back in the spring disbanded to join the more exciting organization. There were special clubs
of German Wide Awakes and Irish Wide Awakes. In some places, women formed Wide Awake units and, wearing the same familiar hats and cloaks, rode on horseback alongside the marching men.
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The one thing nearly all members had in common is that they were young—many were teenagers not even old enough to vote. (“Half of our Wide Awakes,” one New York
journalist scoffed, “are not too big for their mothers to spank.”)
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Finally, the movement grew so large that even the Republican Party’s senior statesmen began taking notice. Senator Seward himself, gamely stumping for his onetime rival, addressed a huge gathering of
Wide Awakes in Detroit, hailing them
as a new generation of Americans, ready to throw off the “prejudices” that still encumbered their elders. “Today,” Seward proclaimed to the wildly cheering throng, “the young men of the United States are for the first time on the side of freedom and against slavery.”
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It was not only the North that had noticed the Wide Awakes. Some Southerners were watching as well, with growing disquiet. Was this, they wondered, the first stage of a Yankee invasion? Or had that invasion already begun? Flames began to spread across the South, perhaps kindled by the Wide Awakes’ own torches.

The summer of 1860 was the South’s hottest and driest in memory. Nowhere was it worse than
in Texas. Crops shriveled; farmers sold off their herds lest the cattle die of thirst. And then the
fires started. On the afternoon of July 8, a day of scorching heat, a general store in Dallas (then a village of fewer than seven hundred people) suddenly burst into flames, and before panicked residents
could bring the blaze under control, nearly all of the little business district was reduced to ashes. The same day, a similar fire broke out in Denton, forty miles west. Before long, a dozen towns across the state were swept into what seemed to be a wave of spontaneous combustion.

At first locals blamed a lethal combination of the heat, drought, rickety wooden buildings, and a widespread new invention, phosphorous matches, which were chemically unstable and sometimes blazed up suddenly in high temperatures. Many, if not most, of the businesses where the fires began had held large stocks of these matches. But then one young newspaper editor began suggesting another explanation: an abolitionist plot. The fires, he wrote, were the first stage of
“a general revolt of the slaves, aided by the white men of the North in our midst.” The next step in the insurrection, he revealed, was for blacks to start poisoning all the wells with strychnine. Soon these rumors—and a thirst for revenge—were spreading across Texas even faster than the fires themselves.

Vigilantes banded together to hunt down the perpetrators. First, hundreds of slaves were rounded up and beaten until they provided the information that the interrogators were looking for. After a few began to “confess” under the lash and to implicate others—or, worse, were found in possession of strychnine, a common rat poison—the killings began. Across the state, black men were left dangling from fence posts and makeshift gallows, or tied to
trees and used for target practice. A local Baptist newspaper urged that they be “shot like wolves or hung like dogs.” The plot’s supposed instigators were not spared, either. White men whose only crime was to be Northerners recently arrived
in the state—an innkeeper, a laborer, a schoolteacher—were lynched alongside the blacks. Texans of all classes and ages zealously joined the purge. “Schoolboys have become so excited by
the sport in hanging Abolitionists that the schools are completely deserted,” one Texas paper reported. “They … will go 15 or 100 miles on horseback to participate in a single execution of the sentence of Judge Lynch’s court.” By the time the vigilantes finished their work, somewhere between thirty and one hundred blacks and whites had been killed and hundreds more tortured and terrorized—without a single person ever caught in
any act of sabotage or insurrection. The memories would linger for a long time to come. After one white Methodist preacher was hanged (his crime was to have expressed mild doubts about slavery), his executioners stripped the flesh off his skeleton and brought it back to town to be preserved as a public trophy. More than seven decades later, an old man who had been a child in that town would still remember playing with “the abolitionist’s bones.”
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As news of the “Texas troubles” spread across the rest of the country, very few white Southerners doubted the vigilantes’ version of events. After all, weren’t the Northern abolitionists already drilling for an invasion of the slave states? The Wide Awakes, a
Georgia paper charged, “may yet, should the signal be given, commence a drunken bacchanal, to end in wild orgies of blood, of carnage, lust and
rapine.… These semi-military organizations, the sport of the hour, shall erect the guillotine, tear down the temples of justice, sack the city and the plain, and overturn society.” And a Mississippi editor told his readers: “They parade at midnight, carry rails to break open our doors, torches to fire our dwellings, and beneath their long black capes the knife to cut our throats.” In response, Southerners began forming—and arming—companies of
“Minute Men” to resist the Northern onslaught.
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Perhaps there was indeed reason to fear the Wide Awakes. Some actually
had
begun carrying knives, and even revolvers, beneath their capes—and occasionally had needed to use them. Republican marchers were coming under attack, especially in the border states. Opponents threw stones and bricks at their processions, and sometimes mobs formed, screaming, “Kill the damn Wide Awakes.” In Indiana, a local Democratic leader shot one marcher in the
shoulder. Every so often it was the Wide Awakes themselves who started the brawls. In New York, one company attacked a firehouse at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Thirteenth Street, smashing the glass and woodwork with their “Lincoln” axes until the firemen emerged to charge at the young Republicans, clenching clubs and wrenches.
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Newspaper reports of such battles—the whiff of smoke and blood on the wind—only attracted more recruits. Young Republicans, it seemed, were not just ready but eager for a summons to combat. By October, many estimates put the organization’s national membership at half a million men.
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When a small earthquake shook
New England that month, many Bostonians assumed it was just Wide Awakes drilling, as usual, on the Common.
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The earth was shaking
in Boston in more ways than one. From
The Liberator
’s print shop to the mansions on Beacon Hill, the city seemed to be feeling the tremors of an impending convulsion—perhaps something like the day of judgment that the Puritan fathers had so often prophesied. At last even the august
Atlantic Monthly
deigned to take notice, with an essay in the October issue by the editor-in-chief
himself,
James Russell Lowell. Beginning with an apt classical allusion to “the new Timoleon in Sicily”—that is to say, Garibaldi—Lowell helpfully informed his readers that while they had all been paying attention to the thrilling news from the Italian states, an important election had been going on closer to home. Perhaps, indeed, it might turn out to be a revolution in its own right. “Whatever its
result,” he wrote, “it is to settle, for many years to come, the question whether the American idea is to govern this continent.” For many years, he reminded his readers, the slave states had shackled the nation to a barbaric past—the recent lynchings
in Texas, in fact, had been like nothing seen on the continent since witches were burned in Salem. Moreover, “the slaveholding interest has gone step by step, forcing
concession after concession, till it needs but little to secure it in the political supremacy of the country.… The next Presidential Election is to say Yes or No.”
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Three weeks before that final day of decision, a youthful army streamed into Boston from all over New England. Railroad cars wobbled and steamboats rocked precariously as men and boys arrived in groups of hundreds from county seats and market towns in upland Vermont and coastal Maine—the call of the Wide Awakes had reached even there. Those who could not fit into the boats or cars, or could not afford them, simply walked to the city, by the thousands. They
carried bundles of oilskin cloth folded under their arms and torches waiting to be lit.

Boston would see many young men march through over the next five years: parades both ebullient and somber, strutting off toward glory or trudging homeward, shattered, from the fields of death. The Wide Awake rally of October 16, 1860—the last great parade of the peace—was an unwitting dress rehearsal for all that would follow. As dusk approached, the Common was alive with men, stooping to pull on
their boots, adjusting one
another’s capes, shouldering unlit torches like muskets. Then, at exactly 7:45, with the firing of a signal shot, ten thousand torches sputtered and flared to life, and the entire Common was, as one spectator would write, “a sea of glass mingled with fire.”
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