Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force that Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War by Jon Grinspan

Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force that Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War by Jon Grinspan published by Bloomsbury Publishing (2024)

I have been very interested in the Wide Awakes since I started seriously researching the Civil War Era fifteen years ago. Not necessarily for the same reasons that others look into them, for the mobilization of the “Youth Vote,” or for the resort to military forms in what was supposed to be a democracy. No, I was interested because the anti-immigrant Know Nothings had their own paramilitary that was also called the “Wide Awakes.” Was this evidence that the Democratic charge that the Republicans were under the control of the secretive Know Nothings was true? One of the reasons for my recommendation that you read this book is that author Jon Grinspan does confront this charge, but I will tell you about that later.

The Wide Awakes were formed during the Election of 1860 to rally the support of young Republicans to whomever the candidate they would run in November, to protect Republican speakers from the attacks by “Democratic Irishman,” and to intimidate those who might look askance at the new party. In their appearance, for all the world, they looked like they were an armed militia. The Wide Awakes heightened the political theater of Republican support, but they also aroused those who did not want the United States to be administered under a Republican military dictatorship. They might have helped the Democratic Party were the Dems not so divided.

The Wide Awakes were formed originally in Hartford, where all innovative ideas come from. The party they were formed to rally around had only participated in one presidential election, when Fremont ran against Buchanan in 1856. The Republican Party was still in the process of formation early in 1860, and it was not at all clear who would be the party’s nominee at that point. Into Hartford that cold February day, the Wide Awakes first appeared. This was a time when political street violence was common across America. And while the public liked to blame these street brawls on immigrants, Many of the largest rows were groups of native-born Americans assaulting one another. Throughout the 1850s, politicians of all stripes used violent language in denouncing their opponents. Listeners often took up cudgels to assault their enemies. Even in Congress, elected representatives fought.

In the 1850s, the Know Nothings, a secret organization which had accumulated popular support, had gone after the new waves of Irish and German immigrants coming into the country. They had started their own paramilitary organization, “The Wide Awakes.” The new organization recruited native-born workingmen into its ranks and used this structure to prevent immigrant citizens from voting or influencing public opinion. One Know Nothing Wide Awake riot in Washington in 1857 left eight people dead.

Just a couple of years before the start of the Civil War, the Know Nothing Party went into decline. The Republican Party’s claim that the Slave Power, rather than the Vatican, was behind many of the United States’ ills attracted much support. Many Republicans started using the phraseology of the Know Nothings. Rather than calling themselves “Woke” these 19th Century reformers said they were “Wide Awake” to the dangers posed by the Slave Power to the United States.

The 1860 campaign kicked off in Hartford that February with a parade of Republicans taking to the streets. Five young clerks who themselves were in what appeared to be uniforms of black capes and carrying torches turned out unannounced, but the people leading the parade asked them to march at the front. By the end of the march, these new Republican Wide Awakes were the talk of the town. They also foretold the violence that would be unleashed in the United States just fourteen months following. American politics had seen increasing violence over the preceding decade, but now a uniformed paramilitary had sprung into being. Instead of Hartford Republicans wondering why the Wide Awakes appeared, they wondered why it had taken so long.

Jon Grinspan’s book does a grand job of telling us how the Wide Awakes first made their debut in Hartford, and the rapid growth of the organization. In less than six month’s every literate person in America knew about them. Grinspan tells us about the grass roots marketing genius of the young men who evangelized their formerly voiceless under-30 minions to defend Republican Free Speech and knock in a few Democratic skulls.

The author also gives a good account of the reliance on the Know Nothing Wide Awakes’ practices for the new iteration of the Republican Wide Awakes. While Republican big-whigs like Lincoln and Seward were diametrically opposed to the Know Nothings, The leadership of the new organization reached out to the immigrant-haters and recruited them, while opening their ranks to German immigrant Radicals and Irish Abolitionists.

Many of the Wide Awake posts were open to anyone-except Blacks (and women)!  Grinspin makes it clear that this was a Republican electoral group, not an Abolitionist underground. Membership was open to those opposing the expansion of slavery, but there was not a requirement that new members called for the ending of slavery in those states where it was legal.

As the campaign intensified, there were Black Wide Awakes who joined in. This was held up by those defending slavery as a natural outcome of Republican embrace of the “servile race.” As Blacks saw themselves progressing towards equality, they would, warned slaveholders, form militias and plot the massacre of the white race.

The Wide Awakes may have also made more loud those voices within the Republican Party who would denounce slavery. In the past, an abolitionist speaker might have been assaulted after speaking out at a street meeting, but in 1860, Wide Awakes would not allow pro-slavery Democrats or Irish gang members to quiet the Republican spokespeople.

By the time the Republican National Convention took place in Chicago that Summer, Wide Awake chapters stretched from “Saco, Maine, to Healdsburg, California,” with an estimated half-a-million men putting on their waterproof capes. These were young men ranging from teenagers to late twenties in age, many of who were underage to vote. While young men had formed political associations in the past, this was a revolutionary change in how the country saw the impact of young people during a crisis. Young people were speaking their minds on the great issues of the day, and they no longer had to fear Southern violence or other repercussions.

Carl Schurz, the German 48er, formed a special bond with the young men of the Wide Awakes. He toured the North speaking at every town that would have him, escorted by Wide Awakes. His speeches were so radical that a year earlier he would have been mobbed and left for dead. Under the watchful eyes of a company of Wide Awakes, Schurz gave a speech in St. Louis in which he addressed Democratic slaveowners:

“Imagine a future generation standing around the tombstone of the bravest of you, and reading the inscription, ‘here lies a gallant man, who fought and died for the cause—of human slavery.’ What will the verdict be? His very progeny will disown him.”

This type of freedom of speech was unknown in that state before the Wide Awakes appeared.

While Lincoln was encouraged by the mass Wide Awake demonstrations in every state in the North, he worried that the engaging pageantry of the movement might distract Republican activists from the important work of convincing their neighbors to vote for a party that had only existed for five years. Marching in uniform certainly stirred up Lincoln’s loyalists, but it did nothing to convince those on the fence to cast a vote for the Illinoisan.

As the country moved into the Fall, Wide Awakes tended to follow their Know Nothing predecessors. They surrounded polls and kept men from voting whom they considered suspicious. Of course, these were men with Southern accents or with a brogue, which Republicans considered proof of their lack of bona fides. Democrats in Brooklyn accused Wide Awakes of challenging every third voter in Democratic districts to slow down the vote, increase the lines, and drive voters home when they ran out of time to exercise their franchise. The Wide Awakes struck for freedom of speech, but it was only employed on behalf of those they agreed with.

The book does a very good job of tracing the origins of the Wide Awakes, and Grinspan, in spite of his attraction to the movement, lays clear its relation to the Know Nothings. He also shows the impact of the paramilitary on the 1860 election both for protection and voter suppression. His relaying of the celebrations at the chapters of Wide Awakes brings home the visceral reaction of these neophyte activists when Lincoln wins. They had risked their lives for the victory. He also looks at the conversion of the peacetime Wide Awakes to a war footing as seven states in rapid secession began to declare they were leaving the United States.

I must, however, say that he overestimates the role of the Wide Awakes in “saving” Missouri for the Union. While Grinspan talks about the Wide Awake Germans and native-born uniting to disarm the pro-Confederate militia outside of St. Louis, in fact a majority of the Union men in that force were Turnvereine, a German immigrant movement of radicals that would have existed whether or not the Wide Awakes were a presence. However, on most of his other conclusions about the impact of the Wide Awakes on the early stages of the Civil War, I would heartily agree with him.

And yet, for all the attention focused on the Wide Awakes in 1860, by 1864 they were beginning to fade into memory. It was not until the early years of the 20th Century that groups would try to replicate their tactics in the North, typically against immigrants, labor unionists, and radicals. While the 1860 version had some revolutionary goals, the 20th Century versions were clearly reactionary.

This new book gives both the general reader and the Civil War specialist rare insight into an important, though fleeting, political phenomenon. The writing is quite good and readers will stay up late to read each chapter. Grinspan has devoted more than a decade to research and write this important contribution to understanding the Civil War, the Election of 1860, and the recognition of the political power of young people to accomplish changes that we still live with today.

 

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