Confederate "Heritage" Month, 2010: April 19

Jon Grinspan in "'Young Men for War': The Wide Awakes and Lincoln's 1860 Presidential Campaign" The Journal of American History 96:2 (Sept 2009) writes about a Republican campaign organization in 1860 called the Wide Awakes, which organized young men to take active part in the Republican campaigns that year, including Lincoln's Presidential campaign.

Grinspan makes an argument that fits nicely into a Lost Cause version of the Civil War. It's validity as historical analysis is another matter.

The argument is that the Wide Awakes were nonviolent groups but organized on military-like disciplines. And their existence scared white Southerners into thinking the Black Republicans (as the Southerners called them) were out to forcibly conquer them. And thus the existence of the Wide Awakes was an important factor in the outbreak of the Civil War. As he frames his argument:

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. [my emphasis]

His article shows signs of trying to put some original conclusion on top of a set of arguments that don't begin to bear its weight.

Grinspan's argument that the Wide Awakes particularly alarmed the South doesn't amount to much more than finding the occasional reference to the Wide Awakes as one more sinister sign of the North's nefarious intentions. The slave states were finding more immediate dangers to fret over during 1860s than peaceful demonstrations by Republicans campaigners in Yankee cities. As William Freehling describes in The Road to Disunion, Vol. 2: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861 (2007), during 1860 they were obsessing over the possibilities of arson and poisonings by their loyal, loving slave property. Like most of these types of things, the rumors were at least 99% paranoia.

The real threat to slavery from a Lincoln victory came from two key considerations. Having immediate emancipation forced upon the slaveholders was not one of them; Lincoln and the Republicans had no intention of imposing such a solution. Nor was the danger of Republicans inciting slaves to insurrection. But the Republicans did intend to block the further extension of slavery, either from expanding slavery into existing territories or through acquiring new territories in the Caribbean or Central America.

And once the Republicans had the Presidency, they would control federal patronage in the Southern States. That meant they could use their power to appoint postmasters and other officials to build an active Republican Party in the South and thus overcome the near-total block on dissenting opinions among whites over the basic issue of slavery's existence in many parts of the South.

The two things together would have eventually meant the end of slavery. The slaveowners and their white publics were rational in seeing that threat. The fears they built around that rational core were something else again. And the decisions they made in relation to the situation after Lincoln's election were truly disastrous.

Grinspan's argument for the so-called "militarism" of the Wide Awakes doesn't come down to much more than the fact that they were generally well-organized and carried out orderly marches when they staged such demonstrations: "the Wide Awakes maintained a martial seriousness that distinguished them from the rowdy political clubs of the era," as he puts it. They also sported uniforms:

Original Wide Awake club, Hartford CN 1860

In fact, the following sounds more like peaceful democratic activism - in the best Jacksonian tradition, I might add - than anything that could reasonably be described as militaristic:

The tools that built the Wide Awake machine—partisan competition, social bonds, political newspapers, and youthful activism—were rarely forged by nefarious bosses. Though the deliberate construction of the network challenges the facile image of a “spontaneous outburst” by an undifferentiated mass of Republicans, the individuals who assembled it were rarely members of established elites. The young men who directed the movement, such as Henry Sperry, had little or no previous campaign experience or party standing. Popular interest from below, in the form of thousands of unsolicited letters, helped push them into action, and the movement’s immense social appeal to young men and women demonstrates an easy fit between the political club and contemporary culture.

He gives a dramatic account, taking off from the New York demonstration pictured at the top of this post (the picture is from Harper's Weekly 10/13/1860):

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.” [Quote from “Wide Awakes” Chillicothe Scioto Gazette 10/02/1860]

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. [my emphasis]

Their composition also sounds very Jacksonian:

Established party leaders also looked askance at the Wide Awakes because of their non-elite roots. Though the movement incorporated members from most sections of society, wage laborers and farmers predominated. Some Republican leaders even complained about the absence of “the intelligent classes” in the Wide Awake ranks, which they claimed were made up of “the mechanic, or laborer, or clerk.” Census records from Ohio and Connecticut indicate many farmers, factory workers, and carpenters in the Wide Awakes, in addition to some middle-class young men employed as store clerks or railroad ticket agents.

Grinspan's description of the Wide Awakes here indicates some far more powerful factors spurring Southerners to revolt over their "sacred institution" of slavery than well-organized political marches in far-away Northern states:

Born in the years between the elections of John Quincy Adams in 1824 and William Henry Harrison in 1840, most Wide Awakes were infants during the shift from “corrupt bargain” [Adams' 1824 election] to the hard cider populism [Jacksonian Democracy] that signaled the democratization of American politics. Unfortunately, these boys came of age during less optimistic times and were shaken by the bitter tensions and overwhelming political malaise of the 1850s. The sectional pressures of the Mexican War, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska conflict, and the caning of Charles Sumner combined to create the political world view of a generation of northerners. They inherited a nation that had just gained five hundred thousand square miles of Mexican territory but had lost its two-party system and some of its most prominent elder statesmen. Many young men were painfully aware of the capacities of their political system, both to conquer abroad and to crumble at home. [my emphasis]

Grinspan also explains that although there were acts of violence in some of the more competitive areas of the North, they tended to be attacks by Democratic pro-slavery rowdies on the Wide Awakes:

It is deceptively easy to see a link between the militarism of the movement and those violent episodes, but to do so ignores key aspects of the Wide Awakes’ clashes. Despite their imposing image, the clubs’ mode of demonstrating made its members more vulnerable to the guerrilla warfare of nineteenth-century political violence. A tightly packed group of Wide Awakes surrounded by large crowds of anonymous spectators made an easy target for a few teenage brick throwers. When violence did occur, Wide Awakes rarely maintained their formation. As it broke up, some individual members charged their opponents while others fled for cover. The Wide Awakes also never displayed weapons, and those who used knives or revolvers brought them individually and hid them beneath their capes. Even the torches, though often used as clubs, proved unreliable. With a few highly publicized exceptions, the Wide Awakes fought like Democrats or Know-Nothings, not as an organized militia.

In the end, the historical material he discusses undermines rather than supports his contention that it was the Wide Awake organizations in particular "that alerted the public to the organizational power of militarism."

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, slavery, us south