Free Speech, Slavery, and the Wide Awakes

The Hartford Wide-Awakes

Smithsonian curator Jon Grinspan has a piece in the NY Times. reminding us of the key role the political club known as the Wide Awakes played in the election of 1860.

In the British model that was brought over to America, electoral politics was always a rough sport. For a contested election to spawn riots was, if not exactly routine, certainly no surprise. One of the arguments regularly advanced for why women should not vote was that the whole business could be dangerous; fueled by liquor their favorite candidates provided, men regularly got into shouting matches and fist fights, and, again, sometimes outright riots.

Another common form of political agitation was shutting down opposition speakers. This could be done by drowning them out with shouting, loud music, or fireworks, or, if that failed, rioting and driving them off the podium. This was a fairly natural development of the way medieval communities had enforced their social norms, using various forms of low-level violence that went under the general heading of "rough music" against oddballs, outcasts, and rule-breakers who annoyed their neighbors.

Which brings me to America in the 1850s and the growing agitation over slavery. Abolitionists began as fringe types who were regularly shouted down, or ridden out of town on a rail, whenever they tried to argue for their views. As abolitionist sentiment spread, they began to have mobs of their own willing to mix it up with pro-slavery men. These ruffians saw themselves as defending, not just abolitionism, but the right to free speech and indeed all democratic rights, which they saw as under attack from pro-slavery forces. As Frederick Douglass warned, “Slavery cannot tolerate free speech.”

Wide Awake March in New York City, October 1860

In Hartford, Connecticut, in 1860, some of those anti-slavery men came together and formed a club they called the Wide Awakes, because they were awake to the danger that pro-slavery forces presented to American democracy. They carried torches or lanterns and wore a uniform consisting of a black kepi and a cape made of enameled canvas that protected them from lamp oil. These mostly young men became the foot soldiers of Lincoln's presidential campaign, defending him and other Republican speakers against pro-slavery agitators; later most of them became foot soldiers in the Civil War.

George Kimball was ready for war as soon as the first brick hit his head.

The 20-year-old printer was listening to an abolitionist lecture in Boston’s Bowdoin Square during the 1860 presidential campaign, when a pro-slavery throng tried to shut it down. Kimball was prepared, present as part of a torch-bearing, black-clad bodyguard called the Wide Awakes, who beat the brick-throwers back using their torches as clubs.

As Kimball walked home, blood in his eyes, he wanted “war declared at once.” Years later, having fought his way through from Bull Run to Gettysburg to Petersburg, he still considered that Boston brickbat, “as much a casus belli as was the firing upon Fort Sumter.” For him, it was the embattled right to publicly protest slavery that sparked the conflict — a fight over free speech brought on the war.

Some historians think the Wide Awakes played a key role in the 1860 election, mobilizing support for Lincoln in many districts where Republicans had never been strong. They were especially influential among the young; we don't have any polling data, but newspapermen at the time certainly thought that Lincoln was more popular among the young than the old. They gained support by playing up the danger presented to America by pro-slavery forces. The battle cry of hard core Republican supporters in 1860 was not abolitionism, but opposing the threat that the "slave power" posed to America. Pro-slavery mobs rioting against abolitionist speakers were the most obvious symbol of that threat, and the Wide Awakes represented the North mobilizing against it.