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By Root 1815 0

the purge. “Schoolboys have become so excited by the sport in hanging Abolitionists that the schools are completely deserted,” one Texas paper reported. “They … will go 15 or 100 miles on horseback to participate in a single execution of the sentence of Judge Lynch’s court.” By the time the vigilantes finished their work, somewhere between thirty and one hundred blacks and whites had been killed and hundreds more tortured and terrorized—without a single person ever caught in any act of sabotage or insurrection. The memories would linger for a long time to come. After one white Methodist preacher was hanged (his crime was to have expressed mild doubts about slavery), his executioners stripped the flesh off his skeleton and brought it back to town to be preserved as a public trophy. More than seven decades later, an old man who had been a child in that town would still remember playing with “the abolitionist’s bones.”45

As news of the “Texas troubles” spread across the rest of the country, very few white Southerners doubted the vigilantes’ version of events. After all, weren’t the Northern abolitionists already drilling for an invasion of the slave states? The Wide Awakes, a Georgia paper charged, “may yet, should the signal be given, commence a drunken bacchanal, to end in wild orgies of blood, of carnage, lust and rapine.… These semi-military organizations, the sport of the hour, shall erect the guillotine, tear down the temples of justice, sack the city and the plain, and overturn society.” And a Mississippi editor told his readers: “They parade at midnight, carry rails to break open our doors, torches to fire our dwellings, and beneath their long black capes the knife to cut our throats.” In response, Southerners began forming—and arming—companies of “Minute Men” to resist the Northern onslaught.46

Perhaps there was indeed reason to fear the Wide Awakes. Some actually had begun carrying knives, and even revolvers, beneath their capes—and occasionally had needed to use them. Republican marchers were coming under attack, especially in the border states. Opponents threw stones and bricks at their processions, and sometimes mobs formed, screaming, “Kill the damn Wide Awakes.” In Indiana, a local Democratic leader shot one marcher in the shoulder. Every so often it was the Wide Awakes themselves who started the brawls. In New York, one company attacked a firehouse at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Thirteenth Street, smashing the glass and woodwork with their “Lincoln” axes until the firemen emerged to charge at the young Republicans, clenching clubs and wrenches.47

Newspaper reports of such battles—the whiff of smoke and blood on the wind—only attracted more recruits. Young Republicans, it seemed, were not just ready but eager for a summons to combat. By October, many estimates put the organization’s national membership at half a million men.48 When a small earthquake shook New England that month, many Bostonians assumed it was just Wide Awakes drilling, as usual, on the Common.49

The earth was shaking in Boston in more ways than one. From The Liberator’s print shop to the mansions on Beacon Hill, the city seemed to be feeling the tremors of an impending convulsion—perhaps something like the day of judgment that the Puritan fathers had so often prophesied. At last even the august Atlantic Monthly deigned to take notice, with an essay in the October issue by the editor-in-chief himself, James Russell Lowell. Beginning with an apt classical allusion to “the new Timoleon in Sicily”—that is to say, Garibaldi—Lowell helpfully informed his readers that while they had all been paying attention to the thrilling news from the Italian states, an important election had been going on closer to home. Perhaps, indeed, it might turn out to be a revolution in its own right. “Whatever its result,” he wrote, “it is to settle, for many years to come, the question whether the American idea is to govern this continent.” For many years, he reminded his readers, the slave states had shackled the nation to a barbaric past—the recent lynchings