1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [27]
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
What did that open eye mean? How exactly did these men consider themselves “wide awake”? Were they standing vigil against a rising danger? Were they spies, stalking the streets by night? Or had they somehow fully awakened to a new and clearer vision of the world, while the rest of their countrymen still drowsed?
In any case, the movement grew. From Hartford it spread across New England, down into Pennsylvania and New York, even