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By Root 1810 0

to distant San Francisco. It seemed to catch fire especially among the new cities of the upper Midwest, towns where New Englanders had, like their English ancestors, borne their missionary fervor westward to a new frontier: Milwaukee, Madison, La Crosse, Kalamazoo. Many members were clerks, mechanics, or common laborers, but in Boston, even some Beacon Hill aristocrats were swept into the ranks, shouldering torches along with the rest.41 Most of the “Rail-Splitter” clubs from back in the spring disbanded to join the more exciting organization. There were special clubs of German Wide Awakes and Irish Wide Awakes. In some places, women formed Wide Awake units and, wearing the same familiar hats and cloaks, rode on horseback alongside the marching men.42 The one thing nearly all members had in common is that they were young—many were teenagers not even old enough to vote. (“Half of our Wide Awakes,” one New York journalist scoffed, “are not too big for their mothers to spank.”)43 Finally, the movement grew so large that even the Republican Party’s senior statesmen began taking notice. Senator Seward himself, gamely stumping for his onetime rival, addressed a huge gathering of Wide Awakes in Detroit, hailing them as a new generation of Americans, ready to throw off the “prejudices” that still encumbered their elders. “Today,” Seward proclaimed to the wildly cheering throng, “the young men of the United States are for the first time on the side of freedom and against slavery.”44

It was not only the North that had noticed the Wide Awakes. Some Southerners were watching as well, with growing disquiet. Was this, they wondered, the first stage of a Yankee invasion? Or had that invasion already begun? Flames began to spread across the South, perhaps kindled by the Wide Awakes’ own torches.

The summer of 1860 was the South’s hottest and driest in memory. Nowhere was it worse than in Texas. Crops shriveled; farmers sold off their herds lest the cattle die of thirst. And then the fires started. On the afternoon of July 8, a day of scorching heat, a general store in Dallas (then a village of fewer than seven hundred people) suddenly burst into flames, and before panicked residents could bring the blaze under control, nearly all of the little business district was reduced to ashes. The same day, a similar fire broke out in Denton, forty miles west. Before long, a dozen towns across the state were swept into what seemed to be a wave of spontaneous combustion.

At first locals blamed a lethal combination of the heat, drought, rickety wooden buildings, and a widespread new invention, phosphorous matches, which were chemically unstable and sometimes blazed up suddenly in high temperatures. Many, if not most, of the businesses where the fires began had held large stocks of these matches. But then one young newspaper editor began suggesting another explanation: an abolitionist plot. The fires, he wrote, were the first stage of “a general revolt of the slaves, aided by the white men of the North in our midst.” The next step in the insurrection, he revealed, was for blacks to start poisoning all the wells with strychnine. Soon these rumors—and a thirst for revenge—were spreading across Texas even faster than the fires themselves.

Vigilantes banded together to hunt down the perpetrators. First, hundreds of slaves were rounded up and beaten until they provided the information that the interrogators were looking for. After a few began to “confess” under the lash and to implicate others—or, worse, were found in possession of strychnine, a common rat poison—the killings began. Across the state, black men were left dangling from fence posts and makeshift gallows, or tied to trees and used for target practice. A local Baptist newspaper urged that they be “shot like wolves or hung like dogs.” The plot’s supposed instigators were not spared, either. White men whose only crime was to be Northerners recently arrived in the state—an innkeeper, a laborer, a schoolteacher—were lynched alongside the blacks. Texans of all classes and ages zealously joined