The ‘wide awake’ protesters who fought slavery and helped save democracy
They called themselves the Wide Awakes: one of America’s largest, weirdest and most consequential political organizations, now nearly forgotten. Their success can tell us a lot about cobbling together a coalition in a fractured, tribal, distrustful age.
In Boston, many had escaped slavery. In St. Louis, many were radical German immigrants. In D.C., their rallies mixed Yankee federal clerks with sons of Southern families. In Connecticut, where they got started, they were working-class kids with shady political backstories.
And in 1860, this diverse coalition of young Americans drew the line against slavery and help to elect Abraham Lincoln. Clad in militaristic black capes, marching by torchlight through America’s cities, the Wide Awakes alarmed the Southern aristocracy of enslavers — which was exactly what they hoped to do.
The movement drew its mammoth size and unnerving force from the resentment many Americans felt toward “Slave Power”: the wealthy planters who pushed to expand slavery and brutally suppressed opposition.
A shocking movement
Started by a few kids barely old enough to vote in February 1860, the Wide Awakes were believed to be half a million strong by August of that year, with companies from Maine to California, Virginia to Kansas.
To understand how shocking this coalition was, we need to rethink the politics of antebellum America. Instead of a nation split between the absolutes of Slavery and Freedom, most Americans fell somewhere on a spectrum between the two. Just 2% of the population in 1860 actually enslaved anyone, and those Americans trapped in slavery made up another 12% of the nation’s men, women and children.
That left 86% of Americans who were neither enslavers nor enslaved. Some enthusiastically supported slavery, while others prayed for the practice to end. But most — especially among the large northern majority — found slavery distasteful while also objecting to what they saw as the radicalism of Abolition.
Caught in the middle, this majority bounced from party to party, explaining much of the tumult of
mid-19th-century politics. Enslavers skillfully exploited the unsettled situation and spent the 1850s demanding more slave states, the right to keep enslaved people even in free states, the prohibition of
speech and writing against slavery, and a requirement that free states assist in hunting fugitives.
This outsize influence was
backed by real and threatened violence, from the plains of Kansas to the halls of Congress. “I have no objection to the liberty of speech,” sneered Alexander Stephens, the future vice president of the Confederacy, so long as “the liberty of the cudgel is free to combat it.”
The moderate majority began to feel as though slavery was at war with democracy, trampling upon their own rights along with the rights of the enslaved. Young people decided they’d had enough.
A gawky 19-year-old textile clerk, Edgar Yergason, started it all. “Fastidious” about his clothes, Eddie prepared for a torch-lit rally of the antislavery Republican Party on Feb. 25, 1860, by fashioning a shiny black cape to protect his new coat from dripping torch-oil.
Yergason’s fellow clerks made capes, too. This oddly uniformed corps led a march through Hartford that night, while their friends beat back a mob of proslavery Democrats.
Slavery’s threat to democracy
Proud of their costumes and their fighting skills, Eddie’s friends met in a dingy third-floor apartment to formalize their association. After selecting a brawny 27-year-old leader for their “captain,” they cast about for a name.
One fellow shouted: “Why not name it ‘Republican Wide Awakes?’” It was time that they wake up to the threat slavery posed to democracy.
Their “army” of young civilians — clerks and farm boys and apprentice blacksmiths — spread from coast to coast. Uniting in “companies” drilled by “captains,” young people joined together, energized by this militaristic sense of awakening.
In an age of rowdy, boozy politics, the Wide Awakes stood out for their stoic, silent midnight marches, not exactly fun but stirring and spectacular. In an age of chaos, their discipline sent a political message.
Wide Awake companies fought as bodyguards for Republican anti-slavery speakers, escorting Lincoln and many others. Bloodied young men, still in their signature cape sand caps, sat on stage at rallies as proof of the anti democratic forces aligned against them.
This anger joined strange bedfellows. Before 1860, teetotaling Yankee abolitionists disliked beer-drinking German radicals, who hated Know Nothing gang members, who shunned African American fugitives, who distrusted antislavery Southerners.
But a shared enmity toward the Slave Power united them all. They shared what historian Henry Adams later called “the systemic organization of hatreds” at the root of politics.
Lewis Hayden, who had escaped slavery in Kentucky, led a company of Black Wide Awakes in Boston in the same movement as the nastily racist Frank Blair Jr. in St. Louis. Some Wide Awakes were truly admirable, others quite distasteful, but all were united under Yergason’s cape design.
The Wide Awakes claimed to have “no warlike intentions,” but Democrats were skeptical. In the North, Democratic newspapers legitimately worried that “politico-military” clubs would mean “our elections will become pitched battles.”
Across the South, panicked newspapers spread wild, violent rumors. One ex-governor told Virginians that they would soon be “cut to pieces by the Wide Awakes.”
On Election Day, club members woke up communities with 5 a.m. fireworks, then marched to the polls. Turnout was high: 81%. By the end of the day, Lincoln had won an unusual victory, taking nearly 60% of the electoral vote but less than 40% of the popular
vote in a four-way race.
This awkward mandate meant that for all the Republicans talk of “majority rule,” no one could really bring unity, or even basic agreement, in such a fractured land. But the Wide Awakes lit Lincoln’s plurality with torchlight, until the movement’s shadow loomed larger than the actual Republican Party.
Potent politics
Many agreed with the New York Tribune’s assessment that the Wide Awakes were “the most imposing, influential and potent political organization, which ever existed in this country.”
As the nation spiraled toward the Civil War, Wide Awake clubs armed as paramilitary forces, who did some of the first fighting in the conflict. And their members enlisted in huge numbers in the Union Army that finally killed slavery.
Today, progressive activists online sometimes name-check the Wide Awakes, styling them as woke heroes from the past. But they were really something more complex — and more thrilling: a genuine coalition of people who couldn’t agree on much but who marched side-by-side against the greatest threat to democracy.