The Wide Awakes Terrify The South
Runaway bestseller Uncle Tom’s Cabin had already turned much of America’s literate pop-culture consumers against the slave power oligarchy. But during the summer of the Wide Awakes, Southerners who did not read fiction watch helplessly as popular music turns to the cause of abolition. Southern newspapers track the growth of the Wide Awakes with fear and loathing. Sensationalistic fear-mongering paints the Wide Awakes as an invading Army who promise to infiltrate the South in the dead of night and kill southerners with Republican Party-issued knives. In Texas, a panic about the Wide Awakes poisoning a drinking well during a drought triggers a paranoid, psychotic, preemptive mass lynching. In response to the success that the Wide Awakes have at winning Gubernatorial elections before the November general election, Southerners arm groups of “Minute Men,” one of the Wide Awakes’ rival marching clubs, in order to resist the imagined Wide Awake invasion. When South Carolina’s leaders debate secession, delegates directly reference the threat of the Wide Awake movement. After they vote to secede, SC’s Minute Men attack Fort Sumter.