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 club inspire the boy to such efforts? Why did he march? Clues in the boy’s letter begin to paint a picture of the movement. To answer the rest of our questions, we must go to the beginning of the Wide Awakes – in a Hartford Church, in the years before the Wide Awakes exploded across an anxious country on the brink of Civil War.