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A Civil War Story
The Youth Movement that Remade America. This is the story about the liberal kids who formed an activism club which went viral, elected Lincoln, and started a war. Today, the American electorate and political climate are deeply fractured. The political divisions are typified by a disgust with the political status quo amid a sense of
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Lincoln’s Caped Crusaders
Introduction This is a true story about a new generation seizing power. Candidate Lincoln saved an odd letter from an orphan who requested money, claiming that he wore out his shoes in his local chapter of the Wide Awakes. Stemming from this scribbled note we begin to question: Who were the Wide Awakes? How did this
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The Chaotic Roots of American Politics
An Adolescent Nation’s Partisan Divide Explodes. The 19th century saw a raucous political culture characterized by hard cider bribery, polling place brawls, and consequently…very high voter turnout. In cities, armed gangs provided muscle for party bosses. The Bowery Boys, associated with New York’s firefighters and the nativist American Party, marched in intimidating election-eve midnight parades that sometimes ransacked
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Enter The Republicans
Carried on the Shoulders of America’s Youth Vote. Kentucky Congressman Cassius Clay was famous not only for surviving assassination, but for fighting back and killing his attackers. Despite Clay’s courage, his Party was decimated in 1856. The Republican’s rivals in northeastern cities employed gangs to help win elections. Without a “ground game” like the fire brigades that rallied
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Hartford’s Beadle Boys
Progressive Christian Soldiers. A Hartford community leader, the Reverend Elias Beadle mentored a generation of lower and middle class boys and girls (including his very politically-active son) in an after-school program at Hartford’s Pearl Street Presbyterian Church. Rev. Beadle succeeded in teaching the kids leadership skills, organizational management, and inspiring the youngsters to live as “good Christian soldiers”
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The Beadle Boys Muster for Clay
The Accidental Birth of a Movement. Beadle’s former students, a dozen members of The Pearl Street Congregational Church Young Men’s Society volunteered to usher at Cassius Clay’s rally speech. A mix of poor and working-class boys, the Church group existed partly to teach the boys leadership skills and to find respectable employment for the youngsters. In 1860, many
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The First March
The Accidental Birth of a Movement. The Wide Awakes are born from violence. With details collected from a careful analysis of contradictory versions of the night, we can recreate the dramatic moments that made these boys famous: Our boys’ march as a bodyguard encircling Cassius Clay’s carriage. Holding leaky fireman torches they escort him from the speaker’s hall
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The First Youth Organizers
Henry Sperry’s Engine for Generational Change. In the days after The Hartford Courant dubs the boys the “Wide Awakes,” they feverishly race to prepare for the 9-week gubernatorial campaign. Based out of the tiny studio apartment of one of the boys, they recruit friends from work and school to join their club. Mostly in their early 20s
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Lincoln Meets The Wide Awakes
The Wide Awakes are just 30 kids in Hartford when Lincoln arrives in Connecticut to rally voters. As with Rep. Cassius Clay, the boys provide security and earn themselves media coverage. Needing to correspond with the newspaper reporters writing to the boys for comment, 23 year-old aspiring newspaperman Henry Sperry volunteers to lead the club’s communications. Sperry sends
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A Connecticut Craze
Early Growing Pains. Keen to maximize excitement for the Connecticut Republican Party, Henry T. Sperry and the other Pearl Street Church boys are elated by news of their club’s spread. However, James Chalker grows upset that kids in distant towns are evidently making their own black capes rather than buying from him. Personifying the corrupting influence of
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Chalker Makes His Move
The Matter of Patent #332319 Chalker leverages his title with the Wide Awakes to hang his own business shingle. In his late 20s, with the pressures of an infant daughter at home, Chalker had already failed once trying to start his own business as an importer of high end fabric. Chalker proposes a partnership with a failing
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Sperry Gets Serious
Sperry and Hinckley’s published marching guidebook. In contrast to the Chalker-Pitkin symbiotic relationship of opportunistic parasites, the five true workhorse founders meet a key collaborator; A student at Connecticut’s military academy, Lieutenant Arthur Hinckley finds Sperry and offers to teach the boys proper marching technique. Hinckley and Sperry write and illustrate a marching guide that they will soon
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A Fracas in Waterbury
Steady “word-of-mouth” growth turns tidal wave following a fight. A fracas in Northern Connecticut on March 15th rocks the state. Now numbering 100, the Hartford Wide Awakes are invited to Waterbury CT to join a Party Convention rally. The boys arrive well-drilled and decked out in matching uniforms. They are amazed to find 500 other young people
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Boosters Become Brokers
The first office-seeker who comes seeking their endorsement. Each newspaper story about the rally/riot, or about these satellite chapters forming, causes extra waves of new members and even more companies. These new Wide Awake chapters write to Sperry asking for instructions. Quickly outgrowing their cramped headquarters in the long narrow room above Buck’s Drug Store, they quickly
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Pressure Comes From Above
Party bosses push back against the boys’ liberalism This prominence comes at a cost: with their greater fame, the gubernatorial campaign advisors caution the boys to become more moderate so as to not scare older voters. The youngsters are advised to make themselves a club for white men only; no “Lady Wide Awakes” or African-Americans should be
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Sidney Gladwin Comes Home
How the city hardened the country boy Sidney Gladwin, one of the Pearl Street Church boys from the Wide Awakes’ first march with Rep Cassius Clay returns to Connecticut from his new home in New York City with news: He had just started a Wide Awake chapter in New York City with the help of an Irish
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The Riot in New Haven
Resolved: Never Compromise with Evil The Southern Connecticut Republican Party Convention rally begins on New Haven’s green. Hours late, 50 High School kids from a Wide Awake chapter in the racist Southeastern suburbs limp into view. Wrapped in bloody bandages and splints, eleven of their crew are still at the hospital. The boys had marched into a Democratic
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State House Election Day
The Wide Awakes run ballots. After the brutal attack, the hospitalized grade school Wide Awakes become the top political story in Connecticut with 72 hours before Election day. Newspapers in Boston and New York echo Connecticut papers implying that if the Republicans go on to lose, it would not be the fault of the Wide Awakes. But
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Wide Awakes v Gangs of New York
Nineteen-year-old Pearl Street Church alum, Sidney Gladwin struggles to introduce the Wide Awakes to his new, heavily-Democratic town, New York City. Gladwin partners up with a 29-year-old Irish immigrant mechanic friend named Francis Lambert who teaches the Connecticut farm boy how to cut deals with Ward Bosses for parade permits, how to grease wheels with police for protection
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Growing Pains
The symbolism of milestone members 500 & 501. Using the military’s growth framework, Captains are promoted to Major, more boys are made into Captains. As the Hartford club nears 500 members, Wide Awake chapters from New York City and nearby towns are invited to an “excursion” with Hartford to celebrate the Connecticut Governor’s victory. The Hartford boys
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Wherever the Fight is Hottest
The Irish & German & French Vote Sperry wants The Wide Awakes to spread into swing districts – the specific towns and regions that always prove vital to winning each State. The Connecticut gubernatorial race proves the efficacy of his “excursions,” intercity joint parades, as a way to goose membership in the host town. Following Sperry’s orders,
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The Fire Upstate
Harriet Tubman’s Presence in Troy Buoyed by the Republican victory in Connecticut, a Massachusetts anti-slavery coalition announces a convention and invites Harriet Tubman to attend. On her way there in late April, she stops in Troy, New York just as a mob of angry liberals begins to form around a jail. Inside, a captured runaway slave is
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New York Songsters
A multimedia phenomenon captures American pop culture The Wide Awakes become a cultural phenomenon. It is not only scrappy organizers who spread Wide Awake chapters, it is also America’s top entertainers who write and perform political anthems which many Wide Awake chapters sing at rallies and their own nighttime parades. Before radio, audiences learned popular tunes thanks to
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Far Off in Iowa
Prairie Socialism and the Wide Awakes. Poor farmers in the frontier west simply cannot compete with slave labor, they want a political party that will directly pay them in case of crop failures, they want guaranteed homes for the homeless, and they want price controls. These prairie socialists forge the Republican Party’s policies on key economic issues
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The Populist Aristocrat
Charles Francis Adams Jr. betrays his legacy Charles Francis Adams Jr, the great-grandson of founding father John Adams, is a 25 year-old Congressional aide during the election of 1860. In defiance of his family dynasty’s legacy of moderate conservatism, young aristocratic Charlie changes his life on a journey to the hardscrabble western states while assisting a family friend’s
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James Garfield the Self-Made Man
The Republicans: warriors for science and progress Many orators tour the same speaking circuit that Charles Francis Adams’ boss traveled. Some of these rally speakers are local young men who use the Wide Awake movement to springboard themselves into political careers. In Ohio, a young adjunct college professor known by his students as Jimmy Garfield emerges from Wide
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The Hartford Ball
The Wide Awakes Gear Up for Three More Governors Races The Wide Awake’s gubernatorial victory celebration is on their terms: They defy the sexists and welcome the radical Women of Hartford Club to host their Grand Ball and speak and introduce program portions. The 10,000 members vote to end Chalker’s power to sell “official” merchandise, instead, they
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Late Campaign Rallies
Giant Multi-state “Exchanges” Unite the North The Governor’s race in Connecticut was merely the first of a wave of summertime State House elections before the November Presidential. That summer, there are gubernatorial elections in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. To mobilize all of the young people in these 3 states, Sperry’s idea of intercity excursions is built to
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The Texas Threat
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
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Camp Jackson Massacre in Missouri
The Wide Awakes fight a Civil War skirmish Missouri’s German Wide Awakes compete in dueling parades with rival clubs of Democrat John Bell’s “Bell-Ringers”, and Douglass’ “Chloroformers” and “Minute Men.” The antagonism builds in intensity from the summertime parades trading insults, to ostentatious tit-for-tat public displays of firearms, to shots fired. On Lincoln’s inauguration day,
the kids who started the civil war – a true story