The "Wide Awakes" young exuberant supporters pushed Abraham Lincoln into power

[flamingdem]

http://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/projects/lincoln/contents/grinspan.html



*** If they were around today they would have kicked some (current) Republican ass !!

The march that shook New York was one of thousands that poured through America’s cities, towns, and villages in 1860, started by a revolutionary new political organization. Stumping for the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, the strange movement electrified the presidential election. Young men from Bangor to San Francisco and from huge Philadelphia clubs to tiny Iowa troupes donned uniforms, lit torches, and “fell in” to pseudomilitary marching companies. They flooded every northern state and trickled into upper South cities like Baltimore, Wheeling, and St. Louis. Launched in March by “five young dry goods clerks” in Hartford, Connecticut, by November the Wide Awakes had developed into a nationwide grassroots movement with hundreds of thousands of members. Many of the movement’s supporters—and even some of its vociferous opponents—believed “there never was, in this country, a more effective campaign organization than the Wide Awakes.”[2]

Youth and militarism distinguished the Wide Awakes from the hundreds of other clubs milling around nineteenth-century American elections. The organization appealed to white men in their teens, twenties, and thirties, attracting ambitious upstarts sporting youthful goatees who were “beginning to feel their true power.” Using popular social events, an ethos of competitive fraternity, and even promotional comic books, the Wide Awakes introduced many to political participation and proclaimed themselves the newfound voice of younger voters. Though often remembered as part of the Civil War generation stirred by the conflict, these young men became politically active a year before fighting began. The structured, militant Wide Awakes appealed to a generation profoundly shaken by the partisan instability of the 1850s and offered young northerners a much-needed political identity.[3]

They were also the first major campaign organization to adopt a military motif. Upon enlistment members became soldiers in the Wide Awake army—complete with ranks, uniforms, and duties. The Wide Awakes did not intend to incite actual violence. They chose their symbolism to appeal to the widespread “militia fever” of the era, to glorify aggressive political combat, and to signify the organizational strength and uniformity of the new Republican party. The Wide Awakes’ employment of a martial theme helps shine a light on the use of militaristic symbolism for political ends. More than anything else, this study attempts to examine the concrete impact of this seemingly superficial campaign metaphor.[4]

The militarism of the Wide Awakes helps explain how the election of Lincoln sparked the Civil War. Historians have long pondered the missing link between the complex politics of the 1850s and the war. It is difficult to believe that the Civil War could have erupted as a popular conflict—with hundreds of thousands of excited volunteers—unless political debates were transformed into larger cultural motivators. The Wide Awakes enabled that transformation. The movement’s dangerous use of militarism for political purposes unintentionally bled into powerful cultural agitation that terrified southerners. Young northerners equipped with uniforms and torches sent an ominous message to those already apprehensive about the Republican party’s antisouthern attitudes. While certainly not a cause of the war, the Wide Awakes’ presence ratcheted up sectional pressure and invested Lincoln’s election with weighty significance. Understanding how the organization worked helps connect the political and military campaigns. MORE AT LINK

[Odin2005]

1. Fascinating article, thanks!

[flamingdem]

2. Glad you liked it!

I can't stop thinking about what this period of time was like. I've just discovered that I have a relative who was involved politically and with the brigade mentioned at the end of the article. I'd like to know more about what the Wide Awakers thought about economic inequality, racism and slavery. It's interesting to know more about Lincoln's time and to consider what aspects about Lincoln and his times impacted Obama's thinking.

[Odin2005]

3. By what I've read the early Republicans were a very diverse group.

A mix of industrialists, abolitionists, radical left-libertarians (think "moderate anarchist" types), and Northern farmers wanting cheap land out west. the only thing that united them was opposition to the spread of slavery and wanting to break the political power of the planter aristocrats.

The industrialists opposed the Southern Democrats' anti-tariff, anti-immigrant, and anti-public works views, which were hurting industrialization.

The abolitionists, obviously, wanted slavery abolished and many wanted to make the slaves full citizens.

The farmers were angry at the Southern politicians blocking what became the Homestead Act and also wanted the West for themselves and not the planters.

The radicals were the "intellectual voice" of the abolitionists and the farmers.

[JHB]

4. Here's an indication of the diversity of the early Republicans. Anything look familiar?

Last edited Tue Sep 4, 2012, 07:21 PM - Edit history (1)

Check out this 1860 political cartoon against them and play a drinking game with the teabagger tropes that are still with us:

Person enamored with charisma or celebrity: take a shot (was said about JFK and Obama)
Person who conservatives consider a sexual deviant: take a shot (then: "free love element"; now: gays)
Person who conservatives consider a religious deviant: take a shot and make it double: it's the Mormons! (now: Muslims and secularists)
Minority caricature wanting special rights: take a shot
Women's rights person hates men: take a shot
Collection of layabouts, foreigners, and thugs: chug, chug, chug!

And a candidate who will give the lot of them everything they want: just stick your head under the tap and have the whole barrel (beer, wine, whiskey, doesn't matter at this point)

The Republican Party going to the right House


Title: The Republican Party going to the right House
Creator(s): Currier & Ives.,
Related Names:
Maurer, Louis, 1832-1932 , artist
Date Created/Published: : Published by Currier & Ives, 152 Nassau St. N.Y., c1860.
Medium: 1 print on wove paper : lithograph ; image 24 x 40 cm.
Summary: Abraham Lincoln's supporters are portrayed as radicals and eccentrics of various stripes. The satire is loosely based on an anti-Fremont cartoon from the previous presidential race, "The Great Republican Reform Party" (no. 1856-22), also issued by Nathaniel Currier. Here Lincoln, sitting astride a wooden rail borne by Horace Greeley, leads his followers toward a lunatic asylum. Greeley instructs him, "Hold on to me Abe, and we'll go in here by the unanimous consent of the people." Lincoln exhorts his followers, "Now my friends I'm almost in, and the millennium is going to begin, so ask what you will and it shall be granted." At the head of the group is a bearded man, arm-in-arm with a woman and a Mormon. He claims to "represent the free love element, and expect to have free license to carry out its principles." The woman looks at Lincoln, saying "Oh! what a beautiful man he is, I feel a passionate attraction' every time I see his lovely face." The Mormon adds, "I want religion abolished and the book of Mormon made the standard of morality." They are followed by a dandified free black, who announces, "De white man hab no rights dat cullud pussons am bound to spect' I want dat understood." Behind him an aging suffragette says, "I want womans rights enforced, and man reduced in subjection to her authority." Next a ragged socialist or Fourierist, holding a liquor bottle, asserts, "I want everybody to have a share of everybody elses property." At the end of the group are three hooligans, one demanding "a hotel established by government, where people that aint inclined to work, can board free of expense, and be found in rum and tobacco." The second, a thief, wants "the right to examine every other citizen's pockets without interruption by Policemen." The last, an Irish street tough, says, "I want all the stations houses burned up, and the M.P.s killed, so that the bohoys can run with the machine and have a muss when they please."
Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-1990 (b&w film copy neg.)
Call Number: PGA - Currier & Ives--Republican Party going... (B size)
Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3a05729/

[Odin2005]

5. It's funny how back then the Repubs were the good guys...

and the Dems were the bad guys. It as if from 1870 to 1970 the 2 parties completely flipped identities.