CHAPTER ONE

Wide Awake

Enough, the Centenarian’s story ends,

The two, the past and present, have interchanged …

—WALT WHITMAN,

“The Centenarian’s Story” (1861)

[left] Ralph Farnham, age 102, 1858; [right] Lincoln Wide Awake, 1860 (photo credit 1.1)

Boston, October 1860

ON A FINE AFTERNOON in the last autumn of the old republic, an ancient man stepped haltingly onto the platform of the Boston & Maine Railroad depot and peered about him with watery eyes. Ralph Farnham was 104 years old, but besides this extraordinary achievement, he had—at least since young manhood—led an unremarkable life. He had boarded the train that morning near the small farm in southern Maine from whose steep and stony fields he had eked out his subsistence for the past eighty years. Like thousands of other hardscrabble New England farmers, Old Uncle Farnham (as all his neighbors called him) woke every day before dawn, went to bed at dusk, and in the hours between lived a life that varied only according to the demands of the changing seasons. He had not been to Boston in many, many years.

Now, squinting into the shadowy dimness of the station, he could see figures moving all around him; feel them clasping his hands; hear them calling his name. “Give us your hat, sir,” someone close by cried out, and as he uncertainly proffered it toward whoever had spoken, he felt it grow suddenly heavier in his grasp as coins were dropped in from all sides, weighting it with silver and even gold. As news of his arrival rippled through the crowd, the cheers grew louder, echoing up and down the length of the cavernous train shed and even from the sunlit square beyond: “Hurrah! Hurrah for the last hero of Bunker Hill!”

Old Uncle Farnham did not tell them—had he tried to, would any have listened?—that he had not actually fought at Bunker Hill, had not even fired a shot, having simply watched from a mile’s distance, as a green eighteen-year-old recruit, while the smoke of the minutemen’s volleys drifted across Charlestown Neck. Ever since a Boston paper had “discovered” his existence that summer—as if he were one of Mr. Barnum’s rare beasts!—the writers had embellished his military career more and more, until, as they would tell it, he had practically fended off General Howe’s grenadiers single-handed. And what of it? People wanted Revolutionary heroes, and Old Uncle Farnham would oblige them. He would even, at their insistence, get on the train and come to Boston. It seemed suddenly so important to everybody.¹

Indeed, all across the country that autumn, Americans were almost desperate for heroes, old or new, and for a renewed connection to their glorious past. The quickly dwindling ranks of General Washington’s comrades-in-arms seemed to herald a larger loss: it was as though the last faint rays of the nation’s sunny youth were disappearing into the horizon. Over the past few decades, more and more Americans had come to share a sense that the nation’s leaders, and even its common citizens, had declined shamefully since the founding era, a race of giants giving way to dwarfish petty politicians and shopkeepers. As early as 1822, nineteen-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing to his brother on the eve of Independence Day, quipped cynically that his countrymen had marched forward since the Revolution “to strength, to honor, and at last to ennui.”² In the ensuing years, more and more would come to share such feelings. In 1855, one magazine writer lamented that “the chair of Washington and Jefferson has come to be occupied by a Tyler and a Pierce.” He continued:

The dream that this young land, fresh from the hands of its Creator, unpolluted by the stains of time, should be the home of freedom and the race of men so manly that they would lift the earth by the whole breadth of its orbit nearer heaven … has passed away from the most of us, as nothing but a dream. We yield ourselves, instead, to calculation, money-making, and moral indifference.³

In fact, the nation’s antebellum political leaders were trimmers and compromisers by necessity. Men like Tyler and Pierce—and even those with more glowing names such as Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and Stephen Douglas—struggled to keep the fragile union of states together at almost any price. “We can win no laurels in a war for independence,” Webster once admitted. “Earlier and worthier hands have gathered them all.… But to us remains a great duty of defence and preservation.” Charles Francis Adams put it more succinctly: “It is for us to preserve, and not to create.”⁴

Some Americans—especially Southerners, it seemed—actually cheered the decline of the heroic spirit in America. “Happy the people whose annals are dull,” a writer (styling himself “Procrustes, Junior”) declared in the leading Southern literary magazine at the start of an 1860 essay titled “Great Men, a Misfortune.”⁵ Unfortunately for the South, many of the author’s countrymen—especially Northerners, it seemed—did not share his feelings.

And despite the best efforts of the skillful preservationists, the country was changing fast. The land of Ralph Farnham’s youth—and even that of his middle age, at the beginning of the current century—had been a very different America. In those days the tiny cabin that he had built with his own hands, of logs felled from the surrounding forest, stood in the middle of an almost virgin wilderness, country so rough that only the poorest and most desperate pioneers settled there. Books and newspapers never reached him; clocks and watches were virtually unknown; a man guessed the time of day by looking at the sun. Neighbors—that is, anyone within ten miles—were rarely seen. A journey of even a short distance meant hiking through the woods along tenuous pathways and old Indian trails. When General Washington first ran for president, Farnham had walked all day to reach the nearest town and cast a ballot for his old commander. Life had been hard in those days, but independence was something tangible and real.⁶

Now the little wooden farmhouse looked out not over endless waves of treetops but on a deforested valley of cornfields, orchards, and prosperous villages. The fast-flowing streams that fed the Great East Lake were lined with sawmills, gristmills, even a few large factories. In the nearby towns were ingenious devices that he would never have dreamed of even twenty years before. Not long before the Boston trip, a man had shown up at the farmhouse and asked to take his likeness with one of the new photographic machines. The old soldier assented, put on his best suit of clothes, and sat up very straight and dignified, holding his walking stick tight to steady himself as the big lens fixed his image forever on a sheet of glass.⁷ Visits from strangers were no longer much of a surprise, anyway. His once remote hillside was now connected to the rest of the world; any day might bring news or callers. When Farnham had first settled his land, not a single newspaper was published in all of Maine; now there were almost seventy, copying the latest dispatches from across the nation and even from overseas. The railroad passed within a few miles of his front door; he could leave home in the morning and arrive in Boston just after lunch, or in Washington the following day. But such a journey still would have seemed to him nearly as fanciful as flying to the moon. He hadn’t even been to Boston since he’d marched there with Captain Hubbard’s militia back in the spring of ’75.

America in 1860 was much like Old Uncle Farnham: making its way as best it could from the Revolutionary past into the revolutionary future, and facing the present sometimes with fuddled confusion, sometimes with unexpected grace. The contrasting realities of the old and new could be jolting. Although people now dashed cross-country at unheard-of speeds by rail, the rest of the time they could travel only as fast as horses could pull them or the winds push them. Innovative military engineers were designing high-powered cannons that could hit a target five miles away, while ordinary soldiers still trained for hand-to-hand combat with swords. Although St. Louis could contact New York almost instantaneously with a few taps at a telegraph key, getting a message to San Francisco still meant doing as the ancient Romans had done, enlisting relays of horsemen—in this case, the celebrated new Pony Express—galloping two thousand miles across mountains and deserts with mail pouches on their backs. A journey of even a few miles in 1860 could take you from bucolic isolation—and most Americans still lived on farms or in small villages—into a maelstrom of ceaseless news, advertisements, celebrities, and mass spectacle; the incessant hawking and haggling of commerce and the constant migrainous din of people pronouncing, preaching, debating, complaining, shouting one another down. In other words, America had all the ruthless drives of a developing nation. Its big cities were, in at least one sense, like third-world capitals today: you could check into a luxury high-rise hotel (by nineteenth-century standards) with elevators and the most modern plumbing—and then, around a corner, find yourself amid the clang of blacksmiths’ hammers and stench of open sewers, next to shadowy doorways opening onto dens of child labor or prostitution.

After Farnham and his fellow passengers threaded their way among all the well-wishers, emerging at last from the Boston & Maine depot into Haymarket Square, they would have been instantly beset by another insatiable throng: newspaper urchins scurrying toward them from every direction, from behind every pillar and post, like so many hungry mice vying for a just-fallen crumb of cheese. “Get yer Daily Advertiser right here, gents!” squeaked one. Another: “Boston Evening Transcript, first edition, fresh off the press!” “Boston Post, the true-blue Democratic paper, only three cents!” “Get yer Boston Herald!” “Yer Boston Traveller!” “Yer Daily Bee!” “Daily Journal!” “Morning Journal!” “Gazette!” Shins were furtively kicked; smaller boys elbowed unceremoniously to the rear. The news business was cutthroat even in Boston, better known for the genteel literary lights who graced the monthly pages of The Atlantic.

Americans everywhere were ravenous for news. Just a few decades earlier, the major dailies had filled their drab columns mostly with ship departures, commodities prices, reprinted speeches, and a few reports on current events in the form of letters, haphazardly submitted by any self-motivated reader. Now all the cities and even smaller towns had competing broadsheets with teams of reporters fanning out widely in search not only of commercially useful information but of stories, opinions, personalities, and color. It wasn’t just that people enjoyed gossip, controversy, and scandal, although they did. Ordinary Americans also felt connected in new ways to the world beyond their own rural villages or city neighborhoods. The phenomenon fed on itself: soon nearly everyone wanted to be the first to know the latest.

It still seemed like yesterday that Professor Morse had tapped his biblical four words into a wire he’d just strung between Washington and Baltimore. Now, less than fifteen years later, telegraph lines already crisscrossed the country. (That network spread much more quickly than the Internet would in more recent times.) For better or for worse, the loosely united states were now a union indeed, knit together, if not by bonds of affection, then at least by some fifty thousand miles of rubber-coated copper. When Massachusetts had something to say, South Carolina heard it, and vice versa, for better or for worse—usually the latter. A couple of years earlier, some entrepreneurs had even run a fragile cable across three thousand miles of Atlantic seabed between far eastern Newfoundland and far western Ireland. The thing had quickly failed after a few stately, half-garbled transmissions between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan, but everyone knew it was only a matter of time before New York was chatting easily with London. Already, fast “news boats” from the major New York papers raced one another to meet arriving steamers that carried foreign news across the Atlantic in less than two weeks. (Back in Ralph Farnham’s youth, it had taken considerably more than a month for word of the first shot at Lexington to reach London, and then another six weeks—well into the summer of 1775—before Americans in the coastal ports, let alone elsewhere, started hearing their English cousins’ first responses.) Action and reaction were now subject to a law of accelerated motion.

What other people did or thought in Paris or Calcutta—or Charleston or New Orleans, for that matter—suddenly mattered more than it ever had before. The world was beginning to seem, for the first time, like a single interconnected web, where a vibration at some distant point might set even solid Boston trembling.

The newspapers that the urchins were waving at Old Uncle Farnham on that long-ago afternoon of his arrival survive today mostly as microfilmed ghosts. Even so, their pages glow with life. The story getting the most attention that day was not, in fact, the impending presidential election in the United States. Rather, it was the triumphant march through southern Italy of General Giuseppe Garibaldi (“the Italian Washington,” the Daily Advertiser called him) and his red-shirted comrades, an army of liberation and national unification. The reactionary regimes of popes and princes seemed to crumble before the youthful crusaders with hardly a shot fired. On the front page of the Boston Evening Transcript, a brand-new poem by William Cullen Bryant, America’s most revered literary figure, hailed the newly unchained inhabitants of those medieval fiefdoms: “Slaves but yestereve were they, / Freemen with the dawning day.”

Other noteworthy news came from even farther afield. The Advertiser’s front page carried a dispatch just received from the sloop-of-war USS Constellation, on patrol along the coast of Angola. It reported the recent capture of several slave ships by vessels of the U.S. Navy’s West African squadron. Commander LeRoy of the USS Mystic had just seized two slavers: the Triton out of New Orleans and the brig Russell of New York. Off the mouth of the Congo River, Commander Dornin of the USS San Jacinto had intercepted the brig Storm King of New York and, on boarding her, found 619 slaves, likely bound for the sugar plantations of Cuba. Another New York ship taken the same day had no fewer than a thousand unfortunate souls packed in her hold. The newly freed men, women, and children were sent on to Liberia. It might have seemed odd to some Boston readers that their national government was liberating slaves across the Atlantic while zealously protecting the property rights of slaveholders closer to home. Not long after Congress abolished slave importation in 1807, however, U.S. and British naval vessels had begun to roam the African coasts and the waters of the Caribbean, assiduously (or sometimes not so assiduously, depending on who was in charge back in Washington) suppressing the trade, occasionally even bringing the captains and crews back to stand trial under federal law. It was one of many such contradictions born of compromise that Americans took for granted, while foreign travelers viewed them, like so much else in this land, with astonishment.

All the Boston papers that day covered two related stories that had transfixed the nation: the travels of the first official Japanese delegation to visit America (now on its way home) and, even more exciting, the tour of these states by the Prince of Wales. The Japanese envoys had been cordially received at the White House and fêted at a grand ball in New York, but their enjoyment of the trip had been dampened somewhat by the fact that their “translator” spoke only broken English and not a single American citizen, as yet, spoke Japanese. Still, they had been impressed by how frequently Americans combed their hair and by the ingeniousness of Western bathroom facilities—though the envoys had caused a near scandal at their Washington hotel when several were found naked together in the same bathtub, a Japanese, though apparently not American, custom. (Some of the envoys, for their part, were shocked when they visited a Washington brothel and found multiple couples having sex in the same room—an American, though clearly not Japanese, custom.) Several of the diplomats kept diaries of their journey; one noted that in America, “anyone of good character except a negro may be elected president.”⁸

Prince Albert Edward’s tour, on the other hand, seemed so far to have been an unqualified success, and mostly unhampered by language barriers. (The public was unaware, however, that Queen Victoria’s eldest son, later to become King Edward VII, was sometimes inwardly appalled at the jostling rudeness of American crowds. While paying his respects to a statue of Washington, for instance, he was greeted with jeers of “He socked it to you in the Revolution!” and “He gave you English squirts the colic!”) Edward was the first British royal to visit America since the end of the Revolutionary War, and Americans—at least most of them—were eager to show their country in the best possible light.^* The chubby-cheeked teenage prince and his retinue coasted through Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York on a wave of democratic obsequiousness, each city trying to outdo the others with the splendor of its galas and receptions. (With Boston now awaiting its turn, the newspapers were full of ads for fine silks suitable to the occasion.) The distinguished guest had also, somewhat to the discomfort of many Northerners, made a brief foray into the South, a two-day visit to Virginia. Passing through the Fredericksburg depot, he glimpsed a large crowd of slaves gathered by the tracks, bowing low and crying out, “God bless massa!” His Royal Highness bowed gravely to them in return.⁹

In all the papers, however, were abundant intimations of the crisis that was about to break over the country—and that would, within just a few years, make that scene in Fredericksburg seem like a relic of another age. Gubernatorial elections in several states were scheduled for the following day, and all eyes were on Pennsylvania. If that important bellwether—“the most conservative and distrustful of the middle states,” according to the Advertiser—went to the Republicans, their victory in next month’s national election seemed probable, if not almost certain. As to what this could mean for the nation, the firmly Democratic Boston Post had few doubts. In Ohio, it reported, a “Black Republican” judge named Brinckerhoff had just handed down a decision conferring voting rights on fourteen thousand free Negroes in the state. If the Republicans took the White House, it hinted grimly, the same thing might eventually be in store for the whole country.

If Ralph Farnham was nostalgic for the revolution he had participated in so many years before, he may have been encouraged by signs that his more youthful countrymen might be itching to start a new one of their own. In New York, the Advertiser reported, a Republican parade a few days earlier had included some twenty thousand young men dressed in military-style uniforms, singing and marching by torchlight down Fifth Avenue. One group of French émigrés—some of them refugees from the autocracy in their homeland—had composed for the occasion a special pro-Republican, antislavery version of “La Marseillaise”: “Aux urnes, citoyens! Portons nos bulletins!” Even the Advertiser’s editors, loyal Republicans all, asked how long it might be before the streets of Manhattan—or, heaven forbid, Boston itself—rang with cries of “À bas les aristocrats!”

And just across the river in Charlestown—where General Putnam’s men had stood fast against the redcoats’ volleys—a “Great Republican Wide-Awake Demonstration” was scheduled for that very evening. Young men from Cambridge and East Boston, Medford and Lynn would be marching or riding horseback straight across Bunker Hill Green.¹⁰

It is unclear whether anybody even mentioned to Old Uncle Farnham what would be happening that night, on the very field where he was supposed to have so nobly fought. But it seems likely he would have approved. When someone asked the grizzled veteran if he planned to vote in the upcoming election, the old man replied stoutly that he would indeed be casting a ballot—“for the Rail-Splitter.”¹¹

THE MOST FEARED and most famous person in America was also, throughout that entire summer and fall, one of its least visible. Following the precedent set by nearly every presidential nominee since Washington, he did not go out on the stump himself, which would have been unseemly. The man who would become known as the nation’s greatest communicator did not even offer a single public statement to the press. Instead, Abraham Lincoln sat in his office in Springfield, Illinois, as the political operatives, newspapermen, photographers, and portrait painters came and went. He attended to his law practice as best he could, going to court once to litigate for a client who claimed patent infringement on a plow he had invented. He didn’t even show up to meet the Prince of Wales when His Royal Highness passed through Springfield in late September, lest this seem presumptuous. Curious members of the public arrived by the hundreds to shake hands with the Republican nominee, and he obliged them all. But whenever these visitors asked him for his position on one or another of the urgent issues facing the nation, he just smiled politely and suggested they refer to his published speeches, especially the series of debates he had held with Senator Douglas two years earlier. Then he might launch into an anecdote about his youthful days as a flatboatman on the Ohio River, or ask whether they’d ever heard that joke about the Kentucky hog farmer.¹²

Not all the presidential contenders that year were quite so coy. Lincoln’s longtime rival—Senator Stephen Douglas, the Illinois Democrats’ own Little Giant—was barnstorming the country. His tour had started almost surreptitiously, or so he had fancied: in July, after decorously avowing that he “would make no political speeches,” he suddenly decided to visit his elderly mother in upstate New York. En route, it just so happened that crowds showed up at every railway station, begging him to make a speech, and he could not but oblige them. Somehow, the trip from New York City to Ontario County ended up taking two months and requiring a long detour through most of New England, then a swing down to Pennsylvania and Maryland. Before long, the candidate’s journey “in search of his mother” became a national joke among Republicans. “That poor maternal relative of his must be hard to find,” one newspaper quipped. “It is said that he will next visit Japan, Algiers, Liberia, South America, and Mexico in search of her.” Then, once the long-awaited family reunion occurred, Douglas suddenly discovered that he had to take care of some urgent business in North Carolina regarding the estate of his late mother-in-law, which required an equally circuitous and loquacious pilgrimage through the South. Even worse than the public mockery was the inconsistency in what he said to audiences from region to region, as if he were oblivious to the fact that besides the thousands of locals who came out to hear him, millions of others would read his speeches in the national press, making him seem disingenuous or worse. When, several days before the election, a dock in Alabama collapsed under the weight of his supporters, tossing everyone—including Senator and Mrs. Douglas—into the water, it seemed to symbolize the collapse of the Little Giant’s presidential ambitions. Millions admired his principles; few thought him electable.¹³

Lincoln, on the other hand, literally couldn’t be dragged out to make a political speech. In August, thousands of supporters gathered in Springfield for a “monster meeting.” An eight-mile-long parade marched past the candidate’s house at Eighth and Jackson, and Lincoln, in a white summer suit, came out to greet them and be photographed. Finally they prevailed upon him at least to drive over in his carriage to the state fairgrounds, where thirty thousand of his followers awaited. When he arrived, the mob hauled him out of the carriage and carried him on their shoulders across the fairgrounds, landing him with a thump on the speakers’ platform. The candidate spoke only a few awkward words of appreciation to the vast assembly before he managed to wriggle off the dais, squeeze his way through the crowd, jump onto the back of a horse, and gallop off homeward as fast as the beast could carry him.¹⁴

As that dragooning in Springfield suggests, Lincoln’s candidacy was becoming a public sensation. Just a few months earlier, he had been but a former one-term congressman and failed Senate candidate from Illinois. It was more than a decade since he had even set foot in Washington. Now his bid for the presidency was riding a surge of emotion rarely seen in the annals of electoral politics. Whatever he was saying or not saying about his actual policies, millions saw him as the embodiment of their hopes and ideals.

It had all started that May, thanks largely to two weather-beaten pieces of wood. As Illinois Republicans prepared to gather for their state nominating convention, one of Lincoln’s staunchest supporters, Judge Richard Oglesby, was talking with one of Lincoln’s country cousins, a grizzled pioneer farmer named John Hanks. Hanks happened to mention that some thirty years earlier, he and Cousin Abe had split fence rails together when they were clearing some land about twelve miles west of Decatur. Sensing an opportunity, Oglesby drove out there in his buggy with Hanks in tow, and they managed to find what Hanks proclaimed the very fence: testing it with the blade of his penknife, he found that it was constructed of black walnut and honey locust, just as he recollected. The two men grabbed a couple of rails—whether they had asked the fence owner’s permission is unclear—and loaded them into the buggy, later stashing them in Oglesby’s barn.

On May 9, delegates gathered in the convention hall: an enormous tent, or “wigwam,” erected for the occasion. Just before the first formal ballot, Oglesby arose and announced that a certain person wanted “to make a contribution to the Convention.” This was Hanks’s cue. He and another man came marching up the center aisle carrying the two old rails, which were freshly festooned with red, white, and blue streamers and large banners reading:

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

The Rail Candidate

FOR PRESIDENT IN 1860

Two rails from a lot of 3,000 made in 1830 by John Hanks and

Abe Lincoln, whose father was the first pioneer of Macon County.

The effect of this, a local newspaper reported, “was electrical.” The wigwam’s canvas rippled with the delegates’ cheers as exuberant Republicans threw hats, canes, and books into the air. Soon the tenting started to tear free of its wooden framework—“the roof was literally cheered off the building,” one observer wrote.¹⁵ Lincoln was brought up to the speakers’ platform and made to tell the story of how, in his early twenties, he had split rails, built a cabin, and cultivated a small farm down on the Sangamon River. He was unanimously nominated the next day. And when Republicans from across the country gathered four days later for the national convention, held in an even bigger wigwam in Chicago, even more rails found their way into the hall. (Oglesby and Hanks had gone back down to Decatur for a few more wagonloads and were raking in a tidy profit selling them for the exorbitant sum of a dollar apiece.) Lincoln won his party’s nomination, knocking down the longtime favorite, Senator William Henry Seward of New York, considered the tribal leader of the national Republicans. Within weeks, “Rail-Splitter” and “Rail-Mauler” clubs were springing up throughout the Northern states—even in the bosom of Manhattan, leagues away from the nearest split-rail fence. Chicago had a short-lived pro-Lincoln newspaper called The Rail-Splitter.¹⁶

It is hard to imagine today how some lengths of old lumber could electrify a large tentful of jaded politicos—let alone much of the nation. But the split-rail fence, sometimes known as a “worm fence,” was a powerful symbol in the nineteenth century, and a brilliant choice as an emblem for the Lincoln campaign, perhaps the most ingenious ever devised in more than two hundred years of presidential politics. For one thing, it was a distinctively American construction. (Visiting Europeans often mentioned such fences in their letters home, as an instance of local color.) For another, it was almost ubiquitous in Lincoln’s time. Just after the Civil War, a government survey found that 86 percent of Ohio’s fences were made of split rails; 75 percent of Maine’s; 92 percent of Oregon’s.¹⁷ Split-rail fences required hard work to build. They represented individual independence and private ownership, and yet also a sense of community, since they were often constructed by groups of neighbors coming together to pitch in. They epitomized America’s working class and its rural way of life. They were homely, yet strong—perhaps like Lincoln himself.¹⁸Perhaps most important, though, the split-rail fence was a symbol of the West (mainly what today we would call the Midwest), since it was often the first permanent structure that a pioneer would build after clearing the land. In 1860, regions that not long before had been remote frontier territories peopled mostly by Indians—places like Iowa, Minnesota, and Oregon—had suddenly become settled states with significant voting blocs. These were places where people still lived much as Ralph Farnham had in Maine at the end of the previous century, lives of hard work and fierce independence, secured with an axe in one hand and a rifle in the other. But the image, and the romance of the West, resonated back East, too: dime novels and illustrated monthlies had brought the frontier to every street-corner newsstand.

Cringing under the barrage of fence rails, Lincoln’s rivals for the presidency tried to fire back in some fashion. Supporters of John Bell, who bore the standard of the Constitutional Union Party, carried little tinkling bells to their rallies and formed clubs called the Bell Ringers or the Clapperites. Douglas’s followers organized themselves as the Little Dougs. But all emblems are not created equal, and these enticements did not noticeably boost either man’s candidacy.¹⁹

Still, Lincoln’s opponents seemed to have history on their side. The country may have been increasingly fractured along sectional lines, but in the spring and summer of 1860, two concerns united many Americans in both North and South: the fear of disunion and the desire for peace. For forty years, the precarious balance had been held through conciliation and compromise, with political bargains by which Southerners could feel secure that their “peculiar institution” would be tolerated and even protected by the government of the United States, while Northerners were assured that their own soil would never know the moral taint of slavery. In most Americans’ minds as of 1860, the ideal of union and the ideal of universal freedom stood in direct antithesis, irreconcilable at present or anytime in the foreseeable future.

Events of the past decade had only proved the precariousness of the balance, and set blood boiling on both sides. Most white Southerners were furious over John Brown’s attempted invasion of Virginia the previous year. They suspected it was part of a concerted Northern plot to realize the South’s worst nightmare: a widespread and bloody slave revolt like that in Haiti seven decades before, when Negroes were alleged to have raped, tortured, and slaughtered whites by the thousands. Northern abolitionists, they believed, surreptitiously fanned the flames of “servile rebellion” by circulating abolitionist literature in the South, even slipping it into the hands of slaves whom they had perfidiously taught how to read. And they had robbed Southerners of property, constitutionally protected property, when Northern thieves helped slaves escape through the Underground Railroad. Northern propagandists who had barely set foot in the South fabricated outrageous slanders like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, defaming their Southern brethren to the entire world. Even the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dred Scott case—which had declared eloquently and unequivocally that slave ownership was a basic constitutional right and that blacks could never, at least in a legal sense, be considered fully human—had not been enough to check their outrages. Some of the Northern extremists now even idolized Brown, the insane fanatic who had put weapons into the Negroes’ hands and had himself once slaughtered five law-abiding Kansas settlers with a broadsword simply for being proslavery. Finally, many in the South feared that the North’s burgeoning population, increasing economic power, and growing strength in national politics would only multiply the audacious encroachments on Southern liberties.

Increasing numbers of Northern voters, meanwhile, were coming to suspect a Southern scheme to establish a vast slave empire stretching from the Caribbean (where renegade Southern adventurers had recently tried to take Cuba and Nicaragua by force) to the Pacific coast. How else to understand their violations of the Missouri Compromise and attempts to expand slavery into Kansas and Nebraska, far north of the bounds Congress had set? Northerners had been forced to swallow the Fugitive Slave Act, making local courts complicit in the kidnapping of Negroes living peacefully among their white neighbors. They had seen antislavery settlers massacred in Missouri and Kansas, and, throughout the South, anyone expressing even the mildest antislavery sentiments had suffered imprisonment, flogging, tarring and feathering, and sometimes death. This violence had reached even the sacred halls of the Capitol when Preston Brooks, a South Carolina congressman, brutally beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the Senate floor. Slaveholders and their allies burned books, banned newspapers, and terrorized ministers of the gospel. They had, in fact, made a mockery of the entire idea of American democracy, turning the phrase “land of the free” into a sneer on European lips. And all this was over and above the crimes and outrages that Southerners perpetrated every day against four million helpless men, women, and children whom they kept in bondage, sold like cattle, and exploited for their sexual pleasure.

As with all politics, there was also a broad middle ground on which most white American males—which is also to say most voters—probably stood. Some Southerners, especially in states of the Upper South like Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Virginia, saw slavery as an unfortunate arrangement and hoped it could gradually be done away with, perhaps by sending freed blacks to Liberia and compensating their owners, whose slaves often constituted most of their wealth. A larger share of Northerners, while wishing to limit the spread of slavery, felt it would be dangerous, as well as unfair to slaveholders, to impose a program of emancipation. They certainly did not identify themselves as abolitionists, a term reserved for members of a radical, crankish New England sect. Indeed, the vast majority of white Americans on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line accepted without question the premise that blacks were inherently inferior and that the two races could never live together as equals. Some white Northerners even agreed with the common Southern sentiment that slavery was good for the Negro.

Each of the three major parties in the 1860 presidential election sought to capture as much of this middle ground as possible, promising some form of compromise that would keep the peace. Wasn’t this, after all, the very essence of American democracy: balancing interests, reconciling contrary views, and protecting each community’s right to make its own laws and follow its own conscience? Few were those, either abolitionists or slaveholders, who didn’t maintain that even an uncomfortable truce was preferable to the horrors of civil war.

Some Northern and Southern moderates had banded together in February to form a new national party based on the simplest version of this logic. The platform of the Constitutional Union Party was little more than a slogan: “The Constitution of the Country, the Union of the States, and the Enforcement of the Laws.” It nominated Bell, a Tennessee slaveholder who believed the Constitution protected the right to own slaves but opposed recent Southern expansionism, especially the effort to foist slavery upon Kansas. Bell was a colorless, even dour man with a hangdog face that seemed drawn into a permanent frown—indeed, he made ex-presidents like Tyler and Fillmore look dashing by comparison—but perhaps stolid, uncharismatic conservatism was just what the overexcited nation needed.

The Democrats fielded not one but two candidates in 1860. In June, the party had split into regional factions, one of them dominated by Southerners and the other by Northerners.²⁰ The Southern wing nominated Buchanan’s vice president, a handsome, courtly thirty-nine-year-old Kentuckian named John Breckinridge. Breckinridge was, personally, no lover of the “peculiar institution”—he hoped that blacks could eventually be freed and resettled in Africa—yet considered himself a proud and loyal Southerner and believed the federal government had no right to interfere with any aspect of slavery, including its expansion into any state or territory. The right to hold slaves was protected, he said, wherever the Stars and Stripes waved. He had won credentials as a moderate in 1854 when he pronounced an eloquent eulogy over the body of his fellow Kentuckian Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser. Southerners of all persuasions rallied behind Breckinridge as the man most likely to protect the rights of slaveholders by following in the cautious footsteps of Pierce and Buchanan. Indeed, many declared that he was the only major candidate they were willing to accept as the next president.

By far the most renowned of the four presidential contenders was Douglas, nominee of the Northern Democrats. Douglas was a controversial figure: it was he who had fathered the Kansas-Nebraska Act, resulting in a Midwestern bloodbath. Still, he was widely admired as one of the greatest intellects in the U.S. Senate, perhaps even in all of America. His massive forehead seemed to bulge out over the rest of his face from the sheer volume of the throbbing brain inside; a New York Times correspondent called it “a head most difficult to describe, but one better worth description, in a phrenological aspect, than any other in the country.” The famed orator’s rhetorical style had “nothing of the cavalry slash in its impressiveness, rather resembling a charge of heavy infantry with fixed bayonet.”²¹ Relentlessly logical, Douglas argued that the Constitution clearly enshrined the right of each state to be governed by its own people. Each new territory should choose its policy on slavery by a fair majority vote—thus, he promised, “burying Northern Abolitionism and Southern Disunionism in a common grave.”²²

As for the Republicans, they, too, tacked toward the political center. Although founded six years earlier by antislavery hard-liners, the party had now broadened its platform to embrace popular causes such as protectionist tariffs and a transcontinental railroad. Delegates in 1860 chose Lincoln specifically—with all due respect to Judge Oglesby and his rails—as a man moderate enough to make mainstream voters comfortable. Some expected he could be an impartial broker who would soothe Northern and Southern tempers alike. Lincoln, one Republican speaker assured an audience in Ohio, was “a sound conservative man.” A Republican editor promised readers that the party’s nominee, if elected, would “follow a moderate, fair, constitutional course of policy.”²³ Perhaps the Illinoisan’s greatest asset as a candidate, actually, was that very few people outside his home state had any strong opinions about him, or even any idea who he was. Many newspaper editors couldn’t even spell his name: he was “Abram” until election day.²⁴

Yet, regardless of the party bosses’ clear intentions, and regardless of their candidate’s tightly closed lips, the Republican campaign of 1860 quickly began to spin out of control, to transform itself into something neither intended nor envisioned.

Perhaps, in retrospect, it did actually have something to do with those fence rails, which for many Americans began to assume proportions that old John Hanks and his cousin Abe never dreamt of as they cleared that farm along the Sangamon back in the spring of 1830. Most of the great sectional struggles and compromises of the 1850s had hinged on the fate of the new Western states and territories, such as Kansas and Nebraska: whether they would be slave or free, and how to decide the question. Symbols of the pioneer West spoke to the Republicans’ commitment to block the westward spread of slavery. Split rails also powerfully evoked the party’s “free labor” ideology: a belief in the dignity of the independent workingman, in contrast to the indolent Southern aristocrat whose livelihood depended on slaves.²⁵ The old pieces of walnut and locust, originally mere stylistic flourishes, became eloquent, while still discreet, antislavery symbols.

Even more potent was the image of Lincoln himself as a rail-splitter. Campaign posters bore crude woodcuts portraying the bookish attorney as—improbably enough—a mighty he-man, sleeves rolled up and muscles bulging as he wielded an enormous mallet. (Even most printers knew that you cut timber with an axe, but you didn’t split rails with one.) For the past two decades, America had been governed mostly by the genteel but weak-spined alumni of the finest colleges in the East. The White House’s current occupant, Buchanan—“Granny Buck” to his detractors—was openly derided as effeminate, not because of any physical mannerisms, but for his timid impotence in the face of the nation’s looming crises. Lincoln would be a different kind of president. Perhaps some—both supporters and opponents—even hoped the Rail-Splitter would drive a wedge that would split North and South forever, solving at a single stroke the conundrum of a nation half slave and half free.

FAR FROM THE BANKS of the Sangamon, far from the wigwams and fence rails and tobacco-spitting backcountry bosses, men and women lingered over white-linened breakfast tables, unfolded the morning’s crisp copies of the Boston Daily Advertiser, and wondered what it all meant. The capital of New England—still in those days almost a separate principality within the union of states—was also the capital of the abolitionist movement. It was the holy see of something even more exalted, too: the American compulsion to make the world perfect.

The great-grandchildren of the Puritans may have given up the hellfire-and-brimstone sermons of earlier times, but they had never abandoned their forefathers’ dream of building a city on a hill. A cynic might have quipped that they already possessed one, and a rather comfortable one at that: the elegant streets and squares of Beacon Hill, where Boston’s patrician families had lived in redbrick gentility since the early part of the century. Walking alongside a row of discreet bow-fronted facades, their first-story windows lifted above the eyes of curious passersby, one might not have guessed at the purifying ardor that burned within. But behind the silk curtains lived the gentlemen and ladies whose patronage (and purses) advanced such worthy causes as the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, the Boston Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, the Boston Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Indians, the Boston Infidel Relief Society, the Boston Temperance Association, the Boston Female Moral Reform Society, the Boston Total Abstinence Society, and the Boston Trustees of Donations for Education in Liberia—to name just a few.²⁶

“There is a city in our world,” the philosopher Bronson Alcott wrote, “upon which the light of the sun of righteousness has risen,—a sun which beams in its full meridian splendor there.… It is the source whence every pure stream of thought and purpose emanates. It is the city that is set on high; it cannot be hid. It is Boston.” And if many of New England’s great fortunes happened to derive from the sun-ripened cotton of Southern plantations, and the stream-powered mills that wove the cotton into cloth—well, all the more reason to put that money into more righteous hands. (Mr. Alcott himself wore only wool and linen.)²⁷

Abolitionism, however, was more than simply a Sunday-afternoon hobby of meddlesome Brahmins, although Southerners sometimes portrayed it as such. Down the hill and across Boston Common, where the militiamen of ’75 had once drilled, was a maze of narrow streets and shabby alleys little changed since colonial times. This was where the movement’s real work got done. Here was the ink-soaked printshop of The Liberator, the nation’s most influential abolitionist newspaper. (Lincoln’s law partner in faraway Springfield was a subscriber.) Its famous editor, William Lloyd Garrison, may have looked like a primly bespectacled Yankee schoolmaster, but his sympathy with the downtrodden came from all-too-personal experience: he had grown up in a shack in Newburyport and been put to work at the age of six. Here, too, in a narrow little house next to a shoemaker’s shop, lived Garrison’s unlikely brother in arms: the handsome, sonorous-voiced Wendell Phillips.²⁸ Phillips, New England’s greatest antislavery orator, was a Harvard-educated lawyer, born in one of the finest mansions on Beacon Street, but he and his wife now dwelt in an ascetic simplicity befitting the righteousness of their cause.

The ardor for abolition reached into farther-flung quarters, too. In 1854, when an escaped slave named Anthony Burns had been arrested under the Fugitive Slave Act, an urban mob—variously composed of free Negro laborers, radical Unitarian ministers, and others—gathered to free him. They stormed the federal courthouse, which was surrounded by police and wrapped in protective chains (an apt symbol, many people thought, for the current state of American justice). Amid the melee, one protester shot and killed a police deputy. Two weeks later, Burns was marched in shackles down State Street, guarded by hundreds of soldiers with loaded guns and an entire battery of artillery, toward the wharf, where a naval cutter waited to carry him back into bondage. Lampposts and storefronts along the route were draped in black mourning; crowds hissed at the soldiers as they passed, then surged forward into the street until cavalrymen beat them back with the flats of their sabers. It was Boston’s most thrilling demonstration against tyranny since the Tea Party almost a century before. The city was—before the eyes of all the world, and to the satisfaction of many Bostonians—a battleground for freedom once more.²⁹

Garrison and Phillips condemned the mob violence. Yet they, too, grew increasingly radical, and increasingly certain that the day of jubilee for American slaves would never arrive by legal means. Phillips gave up the practice of law entirely, saying he could never work within a system in thrall to slaveholders. Garrison went even further. A month after Anthony Burns was sent south, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society held its annual Fourth of July picnic. One by one, orators addressed the assembly from a dais on which an American flag hung upside down and draped in mourning. Finally it was Garrison’s turn. The abolitionists’ chieftain, his spectacles flashing in the summer glare, spoke passionately of the document that had been signed on that very day in 1776, asserting the equality of all mankind—the document that had been a touchstone of the antislavery movement almost since its original publication. But then, as Garrison’s speech reached its climax, he lit a candle on the table beside him and held up a copy of the United States Constitution: the document that had betrayed the promises of the Declaration, hardened the chains that held black men and women in servitude, and created a corrupt system by which slaveholders, almost since its ratification, had imposed their political will on the entire nation. Declaring it “the source and parent of all other atrocities—a covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” Garrison touched the document to the flame.

As the paper blazed up and then flaked into ashes, he intoned: “So perish all compromises with tyranny! And let all the people say, Amen!”

“Amen!” roared the crowd in reply.³⁰

Perhaps it is no surprise that men like these should have reacted skeptically, at best, to the Republicans’ presidential nominee in 1860. To Garrison and Phillips, the unknown Midwesterner (born in Kentucky to Virginian parents, they must have noted with alarm) was simply one more mediocre politician to warm the presidential chair for another four years, while the nation drifted closer and closer toward despotism. Lincoln would “do nothing to offend the South,” Garrison predicted after hearing of the nomination. But Phillips’s outrage truly boiled over. Addressing an antislavery meeting just after the Republicans announced their nominee, he sneered: “Who is this huckster in politics? Who is this county court advocate?… What is his recommendation? It is that nobody knows anything good or bad of him. His recommendation is that out of the unknown things in his past life, journals may make for him what character they please. His recommendation is that his past is a blank.” In an article he wrote for The Liberator a month later, Phillips went further still: he sent Garrison a manuscript headlined ABRAHAM LINCOLN, THE SLAVE-HOUND OF ILLINOIS.³¹

In Phillips’s denunciations there was more than a trace of the Harvard man’s disdain for an uneducated rail-splitter from backcountry. Even more, though, he and Garrison had long since lost all trust in politics itself: its tidy backroom deals, its stump speakers and ward heelers, its party platforms all bombast and no substance, and, worst of all, its endless progression of sordid compromises. They, like most other Americans, assumed that this year’s presidential race would bring simply more of the same. They had seen enough to expect nothing else.

Yet there were already signs that the 1860 election might prove them wrong. If some abolitionists believed the four nominees’ platforms simply ran the gamut from bad to worse—all of them, to one degree or another, trying to appease “the slave power”—still, a careful reader would have noticed a signal difference. The Constitutional Unionists’ platform and both the Democratic factions invoked the Constitution. The Republicans, however, quoted the famous passage of the Declaration proclaiming all men equal, endowed equally by God with certain inalienable rights. They spurned the backroom compromises of 1787 in favor of the original, radical American dream of 1776.

The Republicans had, to be sure, used the same language in their platform in 1856. This time, though, the more moderate wing had almost succeeded in taking it out until an impassioned speech at the national convention by Joshua Giddings, a party leader from Ohio, convinced the delegates to let Jefferson’s words remain. Despite all the shadowy deals struck in Chicago, the Republicans still stood for a very new—and at the same time very old—idea in mainstream American politics. The critical difference from 1856 was that now, thanks to simple electoral math, they stood a very good chance of winning the presidency.

By midsummer, the full implications of this prospect were dawning on Americans in both the North and South. In fact, Democratic newspaper editors and stump speakers, far more than any Northern Republicans, began turning the election into a national referendum on slavery, race, and equality in the very broadest sense—often in the ugliest possible terms. A St. Louis newspaper charged flatly that the principle of “negro equality” lay behind the entire Republican ideology. A Texas paper referred to Lincoln as “the candidate of the niggers.”³² And almost every anti-Lincoln paper in the country consistently referred to the “Black Republicans,” just in case any inattentive voter might somehow miss the point.

America’s rough-and-tumble young democracy had always dealt its share of bruises to those who entered the arena. But technological innovations, along with political trends, were now making the game more merciless than ever. Cheap printing and the telegraph made it easier and easier for the shrillest ideologues to find audiences, even national ones. And each fresh blast of rhetoric from the enemy demanded an even harsher volley in return. If it were cleverly enough phrased, sympathetic editors around the country might pick it up. An upstart newspaper could make its reputation that way; so could an ambitious young congressman.

The intensity of racial invective in 1860 was shocking even by the standards of that time. Northern Democrats could be as offensive as their Southern counterparts. A Chicago Democratic paper warned its readers that if Lincoln’s party won in November, the entire country would soon be overrun by “naked, greasy, bandy-shanked, blubber-lipped, monkey-headed, muskrat-scented cannibals from Congo and Guinea,” who would live on terms of perfect equality with the proud descendants of “Washingtons [and] Lafayettes.”³³ Probably the worst offender in the North, though, was the New York Herald. Its editor, the acid-tongued James Gordon Bennett, had captured the largest circulation of any daily in the country by serving up a patented blend of sarcasm and sensationalism. The Herald’s editorial page cracked wise almost every day about “the Eternal nigger,” the “Almighty nigger,” the “Irrepressible nigger,” and the “nigger-loving black republicans.”

Bennett’s fellow New Yorkers, in fact, seemed especially virulent in their racism. Democrats paraded through the streets of Manhattan with banners reading “No Negro Equality.” One showed a crudely caricatured black man embracing a white girl. Another banner bore a cartoon of an African-American above the words “The successor of Abraham Lincoln in 1864.”³⁴ (Interestingly, the specter of a future black president cropped up repeatedly throughout the campaign as an anti-Republican scare tactic. “What will you do with these people?” one pro-Bell orator asked rhetorically. “Will you allow them to sit at your own table, marry your daughters, govern your states, sit in your halls of Congress and perhaps be President of the United States?”)³⁵

Many Democratic newspapers warned of possible horrors even worse than a Negro in the White House. “There can be no reasonable doubt that the direct result of Black Republicanism … is to ferment servile insurrections in the South, and provoke such horrible atrocities as marked the negro insurrection in St. Domingo and Hayti,” one editor wrote. The implication was clear: loyalty to the Union demanded loyalty, first and foremost, to the white race.³⁶

Only by standing faithfully at the side of their slaveholding white brethren, many Northerners believed, could they preserve the nation intact. At a rally in the Cooper Union—the same hall where Lincoln had delivered his great speech on slavery and the Constitution a few months earlier—a crowd of several thousand Democrats sang in unison:

  We fight to save the Union, and God is on our side;

  We fight against a faction who would let the Union slide;

  To put down these rail-splitters, who would split it into two,

  They love the nigger better than the red, white, and blue.

As the Democrats’ drumbeats grew louder, though, so did some Republicans’. Boston’s own Charles Sumner—the abolitionist martyr beaten almost to death on the floor of the Senate after one of his tirades against slavery—descended from the Olympian heights of Beacon Hill to stump for Lincoln just after Independence Day. “Prostrate the slave oligarchy,” the Massachusetts senator commanded a large gathering of the party faithful:

Prostrate the slave oligarchy and the North shall no longer be the vassal of the South.… Its final doom may be postponed, but it is certain. Languishing, it may live yet longer; but it will surely die. Yes, fellow-citizens, surely it will die.… It can no longer rule the republic as a plantation … can no longer fasten upon the Constitution an interpretation that makes merchandise of men, and gives a disgraceful immunity to the brokers of human flesh and the butchers of human hearts.… It must die, it may be, as a poisoned rat dies of rage in its hole.

For some Americans who would read the speech in the days to come, another of Sumner’s exhortations may have been even more alarming: “If bad men conspire for slavery, good men must combine for freedom. Nor can the holy war be ended until the barbarism now dominant in the republic is overthrown, and the Pagan power is driven from our Jerusalem.”³⁷

As for the Republican candidate himself, he sat silent as ever in Springfield. The party’s moderate leaders fanned out across New York and Pennsylvania, talking busily about tariffs, about railroads—about anything except slavery. In Boston, Garrison and Phillips poured forth their crystalline stream of prophecy, as ever untainted by the muck of politics. But across the North, almost imperceptibly at first, a grassroots army was banding together: one that would enter the presidential contest as though enlisting in Senator Sumner’s holy war.

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 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 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 in Texas, in fact, had been like nothing seen on the continent since witches were burned in Salem. Moreover, “the slaveholding interest has gone step by step, forcing concession after concession, till it needs but little to secure it in the political supremacy of the country.… The next Presidential Election is to say Yes or No.”⁵⁰

Three weeks before that final day of decision, a youthful army streamed into Boston from all over New England. Railroad cars wobbled and steamboats rocked precariously as men and boys arrived in groups of hundreds from county seats and market towns in upland Vermont and coastal Maine—the call of the Wide Awakes had reached even there. Those who could not fit into the boats or cars, or could not afford them, simply walked to the city, by the thousands. They carried bundles of oilskin cloth folded under their arms and torches waiting to be lit.

Boston would see many young men march through over the next five years: parades both ebullient and somber, strutting off toward glory or trudging homeward, shattered, from the fields of death. The Wide Awake rally of October 16, 1860—the last great parade of the peace—was an unwitting dress rehearsal for all that would follow. As dusk approached, the Common was alive with men, stooping to pull on their boots, adjusting one another’s capes, shouldering unlit torches like muskets. Then, at exactly 7:45, with the firing of a signal shot, ten thousand torches sputtered and flared to life, and the entire Common was, as one spectator would write, “a sea of glass mingled with fire.”⁵¹

Like a rivulet of lava spilling from a volcanic crater, the ranks of men erupted in a single thin stream out of the ragged old field. The rhythm of their tramping boots increased to double time as the procession swung onto Beacon Street. This was no silent midnight march but a vaudeville of devils. Fifes piped patriotic tunes; cornet bands blew brassy fanfares. The marchers carried not just torches but flags, split rails, flapping linen banners, and gaudy illuminated transparencies; they did not plod straight ahead this time but almost danced, zigzagging in formation from one side of the street to the other, imitating the crooked path of a split-rail fence. Rockets and Roman candles flared into the night sky. Most of the narrow streets were festooned with Chinese lanterns, and many of the houses were decorated, too, as the procession wended its way toward the point where the companies would disband, in Haymarket Square by the Boston & Maine Depot. On Hancock Street, up the slope of Beacon Hill, the austere brick mansion of Charles Sumner was ablaze with candles in every window, and rank upon rank of men cheered lustily as they passed.⁵²

From a corner on Dover Street, William Lloyd Garrison was watching. Twenty-five years earlier, almost to the day, a mob had tied a rope around him and dragged him through the streets of Boston, howling for the blood of the Negro-loving abolitionist. Now he stood, bundled up against the autumn chill, while company after company swung into view. As the banners passed, he read them one by one: Vigilance the Price of Liberty; No More Slave Territory; The Pilgrims Did Not Found an Empire for Slavery. But the sight that made his heart leap was the company of West Boston Wide Awakes: two hundred black men marching proudly in uniform, keeping stride in perfect tempo with their white comrades, under a banner that read God Never Made a Tyrant or a Slave.

Garrison’s twenty-two-year-old son was at his side that night. As he watched the torchlight gleam on row after passing row of youthful, joyous faces, he looked over at his father and saw reflected flames shining, too, on the pinched features of the old abolitionist. “Verily,” the younger man murmured, “the world does move.”⁵³

ON TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 6, an uncanny calm fell over most of the country, although calm, in those days, was a relative thing. Americans went about the business of democracy—or, as some might have said, the business of revolution—in a fashion as orderly as any election day of the nineteenth century. By contrast with most such occasions, there were only scattered reports of street violence and voter beatings in the larger cities and towns, including, of course, in most of the rougher wards of Lower Manhattan. The most serious incident occurred in Washington, where, after the final results came in, a proslavery mob stormed a Wide Awake company’s clubhouse a block or two from the Capitol. The attackers practically demolished the building with bricks and stones, and were only narrowly prevented from burning the ruin—along with several Wide Awakes trapped on the third floor—by the timely arrival of the District police.⁵⁴

In his office in Springfield, the Republican candidate himself was thronged all morning by journalists and well-wishers, all of whom knew that Electoral College calculus made his victory almost a foregone conclusion. It was a brisk, glorious autumn day in Central Illinois, and most citizens were thrilled at the prospect of their neighbor becoming president, even if they hadn’t voted for him. When someone asked Lincoln whether he was concerned about all the fear and anger that his campaign had seemed to evoke, the candidate replied optimistically, and with typical rough humor, that “elections in this country are like ‘big boils’—they cause a great deal of pain before they come to a head, but after the trouble is over the body is in better health than before.” In the afternoon, he put on his tall hat and walked over to the courthouse to cast his vote. Facing his fellow citizens, he held up the printed Republican ticket and snipped his own name and the names of his electors from the top: a gesture of modesty to show that he would not vote for himself.⁵⁵

On a rainy Boston morning, meanwhile, “vote distributors,” the men who handed out the ballots with each party’s slate of candidates printed on them, patrolled outside the polling places in each ward. So did the Wide Awakes, dressed in their civilian clothes and without torches. (They had held their last big rallies throughout New England a few nights earlier; the young Henry Adams, freshly arrived from an encounter with Garibaldi in Europe, got home just in time to see the Quincy march.) Vote casting was more or less public business in those days—the rival parties’ vote distributors, who usually happened to be on the burly side, hovered close to see whose ballot you dropped into the box—so it certainly made sense to have a few Republican reinforcements, just in case. Pickpockets were out in force, too, upholding another tradition of American election days as gold watches and rolls of banknotes vanished from the pockets of well-padded vests. In neighborhoods with many black voters, white politicians stood outside the polls shaking hands and addressing everyone as “Sir”—the only time until next election day, the Post hinted, that colored men would enjoy this extraordinary honor. (Massachusetts was one of five states, all of them in New England, that allowed free blacks to vote.⁵⁶) A few African-Americans, however, chose to vote with brickbats instead of ballots, letting fly a hail of projectiles at a procession of John Bell’s supporters passing them on Centre Street.

That night, anxious Bostonians of every party crowded telegraph stations and newspaper offices as results came in from across the country. Only a few years earlier, they would have had to wait days or weeks to know who would be the new president. Now there was round-the-clock coverage, with the Transcript publishing extra editions every half hour long past midnight, and as for the newsboys, the next morning’s paper reported, “the little imps had no sleep last night.” First Indiana went for Lincoln, followed by Wisconsin, Iowa, and Connecticut. Massachusetts itself, to no one’s surprise, fell into the Republicans’ column. When word came that even the conservative states of New York and Pennsylvania had chosen Lincoln, cheers rocked Faneuil Hall, the old Revolutionary shrine, where the city’s Wide Awakes had gathered to celebrate their impending victory.⁵⁷

The next morning, the only thing left for Boston to do—at least for the moment—was to sweep up the cigar stubs and crumpled ballots and wonder, once again, what it all meant. The Transcript’s editors hailed “a revolution so imposing and grand.” “There is something better than being in a majority,” they informed readers. “It is better to be in the right. And with that satisfaction Massachusetts has waited through dark nights in the national government, confident that to the darkest night there would be a dawn.”

Only one man in the city, perhaps, felt even more confident that he understood the true purport of the Republicans’ great victory. That night, a chastened Wendell Phillips strode onstage to address a large audience of abolitionists in the Tremont Temple, just off the Common. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he intoned as the hall fell momentarily quiet, “if the telegraph speaks truth, for the first time in our history, the slave has chosen a President of the United States.”

SEVEN WEEKS LATER, outside the Boston & Maine depot, the urchins again tugged at travelers’ coattails with exciting news. The same story filled the front pages of the Transcript and the Courier, the Herald and the Bee: the day before, in Charleston Harbor, Major Anderson had moved his garrison from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter. The first blow of resistance to secession had been struck.

That day the newspapers carried another item, too, this one buried inside, and much shorter: Ralph Farnham, the last soldier of Bunker Hill, had died at his farm in Maine. The country would have to look to the future for its heroes.

United States Capitol, Washington, D.C., 1860 (photo credit 1.2)

*Edward’s great-uncle Prince William Henry—later King William IV—had served in New York as a teenage Royal Navy midshipman during the Revolution, and eluded a plot by George Washington to kidnap him.