FAR FROM THE BANKS of the Sangamon, far from the wigwams and fence rails and tobacco-spitting backcountry bosses, men and women lingered over white-linened breakfast tables, unfolded the morning’s crisp copies of the Boston Daily Advertiser, and wondered what it all meant. The capital of New England—still in those days almost a separate principality within the union of states—was also the capital of the abolitionist movement. It was the holy see of something even more exalted, too: the American compulsion to make the world perfect.
The great-grandchildren of the Puritans may have given up the hellfire-and-brimstone sermons of earlier times, but they had never abandoned their forefathers’ dream of building a city on a hill. A cynic might have quipped that they already possessed one, and a rather comfortable one at that: the elegant streets and squares of Beacon Hill, where Boston’s patrician families had lived in redbrick gentility since the early part of the century. Walking alongside a row of discreet bow-fronted facades, their first-story windows lifted above the eyes of curious passersby, one might not have guessed at the purifying ardor that burned within. But behind the silk curtains lived the gentlemen and ladies whose patronage (and purses) advanced such worthy causes as the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, the Boston Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, the Boston Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Indians, the Boston Infidel Relief Society, the Boston Temperance Association, the Boston Female Moral Reform Society, the Boston Total Abstinence Society, and the Boston Trustees of Donations for Education in Liberia—to name just a few.26
“There is a city in our world,” the philosopher Bronson Alcott wrote, “upon which the light of the sun of righteousness has risen,—a sun which beams in its full meridian splendor there.… It is the source whence every pure stream of thought and purpose emanates. It is the city that is set on high; it cannot be hid. It is Boston.” And if many of New England’s great fortunes happened to derive from the sun-ripened cotton of Southern plantations, and the stream-powered mills that wove the cotton into cloth—well, all the more reason to put that money into more righteous hands. (Mr. Alcott himself wore only wool and linen.)27
Abolitionism, however, was more than simply a Sunday-afternoon hobby of meddlesome Brahmins, although Southerners sometimes portrayed it as such. Down the hill and across Boston Common, where the militiamen of ’75 had once drilled, was a maze of narrow streets and shabby alleys little changed since colonial times. This was where the movement’s real work got done. Here was the ink-soaked printshop of The Liberator, the nation’s most influential abolitionist newspaper. (Lincoln’s law partner in faraway Springfield was a subscriber.) Its famous editor, William Lloyd Garrison, may have looked like a primly bespectacled Yankee schoolmaster, but his sympathy with the downtrodden came from all-too-personal experience: he had grown up in a shack in Newburyport and been put to work at the age of six. Here, too, in a narrow little house next to a shoemaker’s shop, lived Garrison’s unlikely brother in arms: the handsome, sonorous-voiced Wendell Phillips.28 Phillips, New England’s greatest antislavery orator, was a Harvard-educated lawyer, born in one of the finest mansions on Beacon Street, but he and his wife now dwelt in an ascetic simplicity befitting the righteousness of their cause.
The ardor for abolition reached into farther-flung quarters, too. In 1854, when an escaped slave named Anthony Burns had been arrested under the Fugitive Slave Act, an urban mob—variously composed of free Negro laborers, radical Unitarian ministers, and others—gathered to free him. They stormed the federal courthouse, which was surrounded by police and wrapped in protective chains (an apt symbol, many people thought, for the current state of American justice). Amid the melee, one protester shot and killed a police deputy. Two weeks later, Burns was marched in shackles down State Street, guarded by hundreds of soldiers with loaded guns and an entire battery of artillery, toward the wharf, where a naval cutter waited to carry him back into bondage. Lampposts and storefronts along the route were draped in black mourning; crowds hissed at the soldiers as they passed, then surged forward into the street until cavalrymen beat them back with the flats of their sabers. It was Boston’s most thrilling demonstration against tyranny since the Tea Party almost a century before. The city was—before the eyes of all the world, and to the satisfaction of many Bostonians—a battleground for freedom once more.29
Garrison and Phillips condemned the mob violence. Yet they, too, grew increasingly radical, and increasingly certain that the day of jubilee for American slaves would never arrive by legal means. Phillips gave up the practice of law entirely, saying he could never work within a system in thrall to slaveholders. Garrison went even further. A month after Anthony Burns was sent south, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society held its annual Fourth of July picnic. One by one, orators addressed the assembly from a dais on which an American flag hung upside down and draped in mourning. Finally it was Garrison’s turn. The abolitionists’ chieftain, his spectacles flashing in the summer glare, spoke passionately of the document that had been signed on that very day in 1776, asserting the equality of all mankind—the document that had been a touchstone of the antislavery movement almost since its original publication. But then, as Garrison’s speech reached its climax, he lit a candle on the table beside him and held up a copy of the United States Constitution: the document that had betrayed the promises of the Declaration, hardened the chains that held black men and women in servitude, and created a corrupt system by which slaveholders, almost since its ratification, had imposed their political will on the entire nation. Declaring it “the source and parent of all other atrocities—a covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” Garrison touched the document to the flame.
As the paper blazed up and then flaked into ashes, he intoned: “So perish all compromises with tyranny! And let all the people say, Amen!”
“Amen!” roared the crowd in reply.30
Perhaps it is no surprise that men like these should have reacted skeptically, at best, to the Republicans’ presidential nominee in 1860. To Garrison and Phillips, the unknown Midwesterner (born in Kentucky to Virginian parents, they must have noted with alarm) was simply one more mediocre politician to warm the presidential chair for another four years, while the nation drifted closer and closer toward despotism. Lincoln would “do nothing to offend the South,” Garrison predicted after hearing of the nomination. But Phillips’s outrage truly boiled over. Addressing an antislavery meeting just after the Republicans announced their nominee, he sneered: “Who is this huckster in politics? Who is this county court advocate?… What is his recommendation? It is that nobody knows anything good or bad of him. His recommendation is that out of the unknown things in his past life, journals may make for him what character they please. His recommendation is that his past is a blank.” In an article he wrote for The Liberator a month later, Phillips went further still: he sent Garrison a manuscript headlined ABRAHAM LINCOLN, THE SLAVE-HOUND OF ILLINOIS.31
In Phillips’s denunciations there was more than a trace of the Harvard man’s disdain for an uneducated rail-splitter from backcountry. Even more, though, he and Garrison had long since lost all trust in politics itself: its tidy backroom deals, its stump speakers and ward heelers, its party platforms all bombast and no substance, and, worst of all, its endless progression of sordid compromises. They, like most other Americans, assumed that this year’s presidential race would bring simply more of the same. They had seen enough to expect nothing else.
Yet there were already signs that the 1860 election might prove them wrong. If some abolitionists believed the four nominees’ platforms simply ran the gamut from bad to worse—all of them, to one degree or another, trying to appease “the slave power”—still, a careful reader would have noticed a signal difference. The Constitutional Unionists’ platform and both the Democratic factions invoked the Constitution. The Republicans, however, quoted the famous passage of the Declaration proclaiming all men equal, endowed equally by God with certain inalienable rights. They spurned the back
room compromises of 1787 in favor of the original, radical American dream of 1776.
The Republicans had, to be sure, used the same language in their platform in 1856. This time, though, the more moderate wing had almost succeeded in taking it out until an impassioned speech at the national convention by Joshua Giddings, a party leader from Ohio, convinced the delegates to let Jefferson’s words remain. Despite all the shadowy deals struck in Chicago, the Republicans still stood for a very new—and at the same time very old—idea in mainstream American politics. The critical difference from 1856 was that now, thanks to simple electoral math, they stood a very good chance of winning the presidency.
By midsummer, the full implications of this prospect were dawning on Americans in both the North and South. In fact, Democratic newspaper editors and stump speakers, far more than any Northern Republicans, began turning the election into a national referendum on slavery, race, and equality in the very broadest sense—often in the ugliest possible terms. A St. Louis newspaper charged flatly that the principle of “negro equality” lay behind the entire Republican ideology. A Texas paper referred to Lincoln as “the candidate of the niggers.”32 And almost every anti-Lincoln paper in the country consistently referred to the “Black Republicans,” just in case any inattentive voter might somehow miss the point.
America’s rough-and-tumble young democracy had always dealt its share of bruises to those who entered the arena. But technological innovations, along with political trends, were now making the game more merciless than ever. Cheap printing and the telegraph made it easier and easier for the shrillest ideologues to find audiences, even national ones. And each fresh blast of rhetoric from the enemy demanded an even harsher volley in return. If it were cleverly enough phrased, sympathetic editors around the country might pick it up. An upstart newspaper could make its reputation that way; so could an ambitious young congressman.
The intensity of racial invective in 1860 was shocking even by the standards of that time. Northern Democrats could be as offensive as their Southern counterparts. A Chicago Democratic paper warned its readers that if Lincoln’s party won in November, the entire country would soon be overrun by “naked, greasy, bandy-shanked, blubber-lipped, monkey-headed, muskrat-scented cannibals from Congo and Guinea,” who would live on terms of perfect equality with the proud descendants of “Washingtons [and] Lafayettes.”33 Probably the worst offender in the North, though, was the New York Herald. Its editor, the acid-tongued James Gordon Bennett, had captured the largest circulation of any daily in the country by serving up a patented blend of sarcasm and sensationalism. The Herald’s editorial page cracked wise almost every day about “the Eternal nigger,” the “Almighty nigger,” the “Irrepressible nigger,” and the “nigger-loving black republicans.”
Bennett’s fellow New Yorkers, in fact, seemed especially virulent in their racism. Democrats paraded through the streets of Manhattan with banners reading “No Negro Equality.” One showed a crudely caricatured black man embracing a white girl. Another banner bore a cartoon of an African-American above the words “The successor of Abraham Lincoln in 1864.”34 (Interestingly, the specter of a future black president cropped up repeatedly throughout the campaign as an anti-Republican scare tactic. “What will you do with these people?” one pro-Bell orator asked rhetorically. “Will you allow them to sit at your own table, marry your daughters, govern your states, sit in your halls of Congress and perhaps be President of the United States?”)35
Many Democratic newspapers warned of possible horrors even worse than a Negro in the White House. “There can be no reasonable doubt that the direct result of Black Republicanism … is to ferment servile insurrections in the South, and provoke such horrible atrocities as marked the negro insurrection in St. Domingo and Hayti,” one editor wrote. The implication was clear: loyalty to the Union demanded loyalty, first and foremost, to the white race.36
Only by standing faithfully at the side of their slaveholding white brethren, many Northerners believed, could they preserve the nation intact. At a rally in the Cooper Union—the same hall where Lincoln had delivered his great speech on slavery and the Constitution a few months earlier—a crowd of several thousand Democrats sang in unison:
We fight to save the Union, and God is on our side;
We fight against a faction who would let the Union slide;
To put down these rail-splitters, who would split it into two,
They love the nigger better than the red, white, and blue.
As the Democrats’ drumbeats grew louder, though, so did some Republicans’. Boston’s own Charles Sumner—the abolitionist martyr beaten almost to death on the floor of the Senate after one of his tirades against slavery—descended from the Olympian heights of Beacon Hill to stump for Lincoln just after Independence Day. “Prostrate the slave oligarchy,” the Massachusetts senator commanded a large gathering of the party faithful:
Prostrate the slave oligarchy and the North shall no longer be the vassal of the South.… Its final doom may be postponed, but it is certain. Languishing, it may live yet longer; but it will surely die. Yes, fellow-citizens, surely it will die.… It can no longer rule the republic as a plantation … can no longer fasten upon the Constitution an interpretation that makes merchandise of men, and gives a disgraceful immunity to the brokers of human flesh and the butchers of human hearts.… It must die, it may be, as a poisoned rat dies of rage in its hole.
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.”37
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.
NO 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?”38
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.”39
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.40
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