SETUP
The year is 1856. Heber Beadle (17) defies his conservative pastor father Elias to join a nighttime abolitionist parade supporting the new Republican Party. While holding a fire brigade torch with other glee club members, Heber sings an anti-slavery hymn in spite of the abuse flung from the sidewalk. Laughing goons with flat shovels fling horse droppings and jeer the reverent liberals. Shadowing the procession, a cruel Democrat throws a rock that hits one of the parade horses in its head. The horses charge forward through the parade. In the chaos of screaming and running for their lives, Heber is trampled in the street. Slammed unconscious, blood pools beneath his head between the cobblestones.
The story really starts four years later, five weeks before the 1860 spring gubernatorial election in Connecticut. A lawyer named George P. Bissell (32) relays the Heber story to a classroom – a dozen members of an after-school church group. We learn that an election for Connecticut Governor is in 37 days and that the race will be closely watched as an augur for November…but from Bissell we sense that the shambolic CT Republican Party is an underdog. The boys eagerly volunteer to march in a torchlight parade escorting a carriage of Republican VIPs through the streets of heavily Democratic Hartford. Subtly, it becomes clear that they do so because local celebrity Heber Beadle (21), visiting from Yale University, sits among them. The younger boys declare that they know the danger, they admire Heber…who beams with pride at this next generation of The Pearl Street Church’s “Young Christian Men’s Institute.”
During the nighttime march, exactly as Heber had done, the young church boys carry big old fireman torches because they copy the intimidating election-eve midnight marches by The Bowery Boys, one of the famous gangs of New York. The Bowery Boys are volunteer firemen and the hired goonsquad for America’s anti-immigrant political party, The Know-Nothings). Hartford’s used oil lamps are rusted hand-me-downs and leak coal oil down the wooden staffs and stain the church boys’ coats. As the Republican parade walks the guest speakers across town to the train station, again pro-slavery Democrats heckle the young liberals. Will history repeat itself?
Five of the boys slip away from the parade and rush ahead to a fabric store where another Church friend is working late. They make themselves some jet black oil-proof capes to protect their coats. Then, after stoically taking a barrage of verbal abuse and thrown rocks, the smallest church boy is finally shoved to the ground. Then, in a flash, the oldest of the boys, a pugilistic ringer named James Chalker (29), runs to the lad’s defense and knocks the laughing heckler out cold with one swing from his metal torch.
CATALYST
In that moment: The parade stops…In silence, the carriage door opens. From inside, one of the rally speakers – the actual founder of the Republican Party – tips his cap to the boys. Then the driver flicks the reins as the crowd cheers.
Later, the event’s overwhelmed organizer begs the Pearl Street Church boys to help at every Republican Party gathering. The next rally, he explains, will be in a week, hosting an unknown former Whig Party Congressman from out west named Abe Lincoln.
Newspaper reports of the nighttime rally spread nationwide thanks to America’s new telegraph lines. Chalker’s knock-out blow gets as much ink as the speech, and newsmen dub the boys “The Wide Awakes.” Chalker is quick to violent action, but lazy. He declines to lead the club. This is when a bookish, aspiring newspaperman named Henry Sperry reluctantly steps up to lead our heroes. At only 23-years-old, it is Sperry who steers the growth of the Wide Awakes into a national phenomenon that shapes the Republican Party for a generation. But, before he could tussle with the expected pro-slavery political opposition, Sperry first had to contend with Chalker.
James Chalker is a classic selfish nemesis to the selfless hero. With a salesman’s talent for self-aggrandizement, James Chalker undermines the club repeatedly for his own personal gain. When Chalker figures out how to use the popular club to get rich, he suddenly appears again, agreeing to serve as figurehead… but with a catch that lines his pockets: a fabric importer by trade, he would sell “officially authorized” uniforms – black cambric capes. Members must pay dues so that the club can buy advertisements in newspapers to sell Chalker’s mail-order uniform kits.
B-STORY
Meanwhile in New York City, a newly-arrived Pearl Street Church alum named Sidney Gladwin (19) introduces the Wide Awakes to his new town. In turn, New York’s uncompromising gang-based politics help prime the club for later success in big cities. Sidney Gladwin partners up with an Irish immigrant hustler named Francis Lambert (29).
They both soon become Wide Awake chapter captains. Francis Lambert starts the first of many affinity-group Wide Awake clubs; he leads Brooklyn’s “Irish Wide Awakes.” He recruits former Dead Rabbits gang members, and through his Machinists Union, he spreads the Wide Awakes up the Irish job pipeline to the Hudson River factories where a large Irish community works and lives. Similarly, women and African Americans use the Wide Awakes as the vehicle by which they demand representation and respect.
The story passes back and forth from Sperry and the Hartford team finding their feet, to young Gladwin in New York having his eyes opened to how power operates in a city as cutthroat as New York.
ACT II
But the Wide Awakes are still just 30 kids in Hartford when Lincoln arrives in Connecticut to rally voters for the Spring governor’s race. As before, the Wide Awakes provide security and earn themselves free media coverage in Connecticut’s newspapers. Lincoln stays for several days of speeches around the state and in each town he encounters copycat Wide Awake chapters marching beside his carriage. Soon, Sperry finds himself coordinating a growing network of young chapter Captains. Sperry assigns dates and locations for their evening marches and rallies. With a map and pushpins, Sperry tracks the club’s growth, and schedules Wide Awake events so as to best boost the fledgling Republican Party.
The fun and games continues as the Wide Awakes grow from one club to a dozen chapters across the state. Sperry’s communications hub – an old desk in a tent erected in an empty lot – becomes the de facto headquarters for the otherwise formless Republican Party. Sperry also needs a plan to contend with belligerent pro-slavery Democrats, so he partners with a 28-year-old soldier in the Connecticut State Militia who teaches the Hartford club proper marching discipline. Sperry prints a handbook that he mails out to chapter leaders teaching them martial technique and media-outreach strategy – a skill that Sperry is learning on the fly with help from a friendly editor at The Hartford Courant.
When newspapers cover Lincoln’s many speeches in Connecticut, Sperry’s media advisory is often printed verbatim alongside Lincoln’s national newspaper write-ups and the two become synonymous. The Wide Awakes’s strident militancy, their youth, proud liberalism, and “cool” costumes – jet black capes beneath burning firemen’s torches – spark a dozen more chapters to spring up across the Tri-State area. This popularity, in-turn, spurs local Republican candidates to adopt the club’s language and militant edge. The Wide Awakes are beginning to form the identity of the embryonic Republican Party.
Meanwhile, in NYC, Sidney Gladwin gets an education in how city politics is war by other means. His Irish friend Francis Lambert has to cut deals with Ward Bosses and even with police for everything – from marching permits to protection against attack. But, juiced by newspaper articles coming out of Connecticut, Gladwin and Lambert promise they have the potential to deliver votes, and with this promise they get a foothold in NYC’s political machine for their Wide Awake chapters. In a world of rapacious competition like New York City, everything is negotiable because nothing is off-limits. Sidney Gladwin learns that for the powerless, such as the poor immigrants living in tenements, turning the other cheek can get you killed. Sidney will bring this harsh lesson back to Connecticut soon, precisely when it is needed most.
As the original club in Hartford grows, the 20-somethings have to decide who they stand with. A “Lady Wide Awakes” chapter is formed by a pair of first-generation suffragettes, members of the radical Women of Hartford Club. Once plugged into the larger Wide Awakes movement, these women help push the Republicans toward embracing women’s rights. But some Party insiders worry that is too much progress.
MIDPOINT
After a fracas at a northern CT Party convention rally where the Wide Awakes defend the Waterbury gazebo stage against bottle-throwing Democratic goons, a politician from the tough western territories arrives at Sperry’s makeshift tent HQ asking these youngsters for their endorsement. This prominence comes at a cost: with their greater fame, Party advisors like George P. Bissell caution the boys to become more moderate so as to attract older voters. For starters, the boys are advised to make themselves a club for white men only – no Lady Wide Awakes or African American clubs should be allowed. Chalker is happy to comply.
Betrayals mount: Capitalizing on “his” club’s popularity, Chalker goes so far as to trade away a fellow Wide Awake member’s invention of a gimbaled marching torch in order to land himself a business partnership with an unscrupulous Hartford investor. The investor files the patent for the Wide Awake torch, which is shipped out in starter kits. By the time the patent is secretly filed by Chalker’s business partner, Chalker had sold over 1,000 uniforms. Additionally, Chalker leveraged his leadership status to force club members to work in his fabric shop fulfilling “starter kit” orders without pay. Sperry and his fellow anti-slavery activists know they need to cut ties with their celebrity spokesman just as the statehouse race is coming to a head.
The weekend before the election, Sperry and the boys join other Wide Awake chapters at the southern CT Party convention rally on New Haven’s green. Sidney Gladwin is visiting from New York, supporting his older brother’s long shot run for Sheriff in a Democratic stronghold a few miles to the east. The event goes off the rails when 50 High School kids from a chapter in those eastern suburbs limp into view, hours late, wrapped in bloody bandages and splints. Eleven of their crew are still at the hospital. The boys had walked into a Democratic Party trap. Pinned down by a shower of bricks thrown from rooftops, and penned in by fences, most of the kids suffered broken bones. One boy’s skull was cracked so badly that he loses an eye.
ALL IS LOST
The rally takes a dark turn. Prepared speeches are dropped. The mood of the crowd shifts with each speaker; local Republican candidates such as Sidney’s brother praise the spirit of the young Wide Awakes. But other speakers like Sidney himself, with his newly-hardened New Yorker edge, rejects calls to turn the other cheek. Wide Awake scrappers like Chalker rise to demand revenge. Moderate Party leaders speak trying to steer the anger toward election day, the battle to “get out the vote.” Thankfully, sensible people like Henry Sperry shift the moment’s pressure back onto Republican Party leadership. The Republican politicians in attendance are pushed to swear an oath, aloud, to never compromise with the Democrats and thereby earn the support of the Wide Awakes. It is agreed.
News of the New Haven attack speeds around the state on Connecticut’s telegraph wires. It is 2:30 AM when the Hartford boys arrive back home. At the downtown train station, they find that a marching band awaits them with a crowd of proud citizens. Touched by the outpouring of love, all 300 Hartford Wide Awakes button up, pull themselves into their ranks, and march to their tent HQ as onlookers light fireworks and walk along on the sidewalks. Naturally, most of the crowd ends up falling-in behind the boys in the ad-hoc parade.
The attack on the Wide Awakes is the big news story going into election day. Newspapers from Boston to New York agree: If the Republican could manage to win this race, this crew of young liberals that had started as a church youth group would be in the driver’s seat of a political party with momentum and a shot at the White House.
ACT III
Nineteenth-century gangs did insane things on election day. Our heroes, and all 10,000 members of Connecticut’s Wide Awake chapters, help run the Republican Party’s “Get-Out-The-Vote” efforts. Like today, G.O.T.V. can entail literally running to knock on doors of known supporters, and then physically bringing them to the polls. Ballot-harvesting in those days had volunteers running ballots to a likely voter, waiting for the citizen to fill out the card, sign it, then running the card back to be stuffed into a locked box. All day long, from dawn until dusk, Wide Awakes run – to or from – Republican Party headquarters carrying ballots. They wring every vote they have in their member network, and the sight of so many young people running around on a mission draws a bandwagon effect, adding new volunteers even on election day. When polls close and the counting starts, only then does GOTV rest.
At 3:00 AM, news breaks that by a margin of 561 votes, the upstart Republicans had outrun Democratic Party and won the governor’s mansion. The boys then run cheering through the streets waking up the voters who they had canvassed. A rifle salute is fired across from the State House. Voters across the rest of the North are about to be awoken.
Soon thereafter, Sperry agrees to take a moment and let a committee organize a victory party. But it comes on their terms: They defy the sexists and welcome the radical Women of Hartford Club to not only host their Grand Ball, but to speak and introduce program portions. They end Chalker’s power to sell “official” merchandise, instead, they distribute free uniform patterns to any manufacturer who inquires. They drop mandatory membership dues – the Political Party they wish to become welcomes the poor, it does not put up barriers. The Wide Awakes allow any affinity group to start chapters anywhere, no matter the race, ethnicity, or gender. They invite reporters from only the most supportive daily newspapers to document their “Grand Ball.” They even invite Sidney’s Wide Awake chapter in New York, and the others springing up in New Jersey to come celebrate.
The Monday after the gala, on his desk, Sperry finds hundreds of letters from more States requesting to start new chapters. Sperry surely knew that their Spring “victory” ball was always, in truth, a launch event for the November race. By the November Election Day, Sperry’s decentralized network swelled to 2,000 chapters and 100,000 members across 22 states. In the Summer and Fall, Wide Awakes engaged in thousands of mass demonstrations attracting a overwhelming wave of young voters and immigrant laborers to the liberal Republican Party.
On the eve of the November election, the Hartford Wide Awakes are the guests of honor at a Wide Awake parade of all the New York City chapters, 20,000 Wide Awakes stretches for 5 miles in the largest political gathering in the history of the city. Days later, Lincoln was President-elect. Aside from a few insiders, no individual contributed more to Lincoln’s election than Henry Sperry, Lincoln himself said so after his victory.
With little fanfare, Henry Sperry receives a letter from President-Elect Abraham Lincoln in the days before his inauguration acknowledging the great service of the Wide Awakes during the campaign.
AFTERWORD
One of the first five of Lincoln’s caped crusaders, James Francis died in the Civil War after a battle in Louisiana.
Sidney Gladwin and Francis Lambert both joined the Twenty-Third of New York Volunteer Infantry Company-A. They fought on the front lines repelling Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania. When the draft riots broke out in New York City, the 23rd was ordered back to the City to quell the violence.
James Chalker skipped military service and was indicted for bribery and fraud while overseeing textile imports, he died bankrupt at 57 years-old.
Sperry wrote a coming of age romance about flirting with great fame and wealth only to return home to Connecticut. He became the Editor and General Manager of the Hartford Daily Post in the suburbs of Hartford from where he had miraculously emerged in the winter of 1860 to change the world with a few of his friends.