Opinion: These torchlit young marchers helped to save American democracy

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Opinion | These torchlit young marchers helped to save American democracy
They called themselves the Wide Awakes. They are a lesson in building a political movement.

By Jon Grinspan
May 14, 2024 at 6:30 a.m. EDT


Grand procession of Wide Awakes in New York on Oct. 3, 1860. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

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Jon Grinspan is curator of political history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and author of “Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force that Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War.”

They called themselves the Wide Awakes: one of America’s largest, weirdest and most consequential political organizations, now nearly forgotten. 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.

Their success can tell us a lot about cobbling together a coalition in a fractured, tribal, distrustful age. ... 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. ... 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 percent of the population in 1860 actually enslaved anyone, and those Americans trapped in slavery made up another 12 percent of the nation’s men, women and children. That left 86 percent 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.

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[Arne]

1. That is some obscure history that I've never seen.

Perfectly fits with the Bizarro world of today.
Everything is opposite.

[Mister Ed]

2. So the "Wide Awakes" were the "woke" of the 19th Century.

Thank you for posting. This is a fascinating bit of U.S. history that I'd never known.

[thucythucy]

3. Thank you for posting this.

I'm glad also that the article mentioned the role of German immigrants in helping to elect Lincoln--and then supporting his administration in its fight against the Slave Power and secession.

This is a very much overlooked aspect of our history, and illustrates a larger point: that the US has often benefited from its role as safe haven for progressives around the world.

The German immigrants mentioned were refugees from the failed German revolutions of 1848-49, when it looked--for a very brief moment--that the various German states would unite to become a parliamentary democracy. That hope was crushed by the German right with the result that the leaders of the movement had to flee into exile. Many of them ended up in England or America, where they joined progressive movements there.

The resulting German-American community was a thriving part of American politics until World War One, when anti-German hysteria led to the closing of German language newspapers, and the banning of teaching German in many American schools. The progressive German-American community never recovered. Ironically, this helped bring the German-American right to the forefront in the 1930s, financed by the Nazis and opposed to US aid to Britain after 1939. Not only the suppression of progressive German-American groups and leaders, but also the resentment fostered by the hysteria--led in large part by the Wilson administration 1917 to 1920--helped fuel sympathy for the Bund and other right-wing groups.

Americans are cheated of so much when they remain ignorant of their own history, good and bad. Knowing where we've been so often helps as we try to figure out where we are now, and how we got here, and how to move on to some place better.

Thanks again for posting.

[Stuart G]

4. K AND R (no text)