slavery. Connecticut’s election for governor was viewed as a bellwether for the upcoming presidential election.
“It is the commencement of the contest between free and slave labor,” announced the Hartford Daily Courant, adding that “a vote this spring in Connecticut for Thomas H. Seymour, is a vote for slave labor in the territories. Laboring men—young men of enterprise and muscle—you are interested in this decision! … Shall the territories become plantation of negroes?—or shall they be the homes of … every man following his own plow, on his own soil, working for his own family?”9
The young men that the Courant addressed were not asleep. Daniel Francis, twenty-four, and Edgar Yergason, nineteen, were clerks in a dry-goods store in Hartford. In February of 1860, the two attended a meeting of Hartford Republicans, which closed with an enthusiastic torchlight parade. Several hundred men lined up and lit kerosene torches, only to find that many were leaking. Just a few steps away was the store where Francis and Yergason worked; they hurried in and emerged with lengths of inexpensive black fabric which they and a few others tied around their necks like capes to protect their clothing from the kerosene. The capes gave the men a military look, and the procession’s organizer put them at the head of parade.
A few days later, Dan Francis, Ed Yergason, and thirty-four other young working men formed a Republican club. The group would promote the election of Republican candidates, beginning with William Buckingham. The members decided their organization would assume a military air: they would wear dark capes and caps as they escorted Republican speakers, kept order at political rallies, and generated enthusiasm for the upcoming elections. Francis, Yergason, and the others might as well have slapped the Democrats in the face with their gloves—the challenge was clear.10
Several weeks earlier, the Republican state convention’s chairman had spoken of the party’s “wide-awake spirit.”11 Now the young men took up the phrase for their club: they became the Wide Awakes. For decades, political questions had been decided by older, established men; now, suddenly, the young men found they had a voice.
THE RAIL-SPLITTER ARRIVES
The club’s inception could not have come at a better time. Just a week before, Abraham Lincoln had come east. In New York, 1,500 people came to hear what the ungainly Illinois lawyer had to say about the issue facing the nation. Deftly, Lincoln showed that America’s founders had expected to regulate slavery. President Washington had signed a bill modifying slavery, and a majority of the signers of the Constitution voted in Congress to limit slavery.
Members of Hartford’s Wide Awakes, with their distinctive capes and swinging lanterns, posed for a historic portrait in 1860. In just a few short months, the group of young Republican men from Connecticut would create an astonishing impact on the presidential election.
As he drew to a close after more than an hour, he urged quietly, “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”12 The audience exploded into cheers.
The next day Lincoln’s speech graced the front page of the New York Times, and suddenly his name was everywhere. Republican leaders in Connecticut invited him to speak. On March 5, he faced a large and curious audience at Hartford’s City Hall. Lincoln got right to the point: “Whether we will have it so or not, the slave question is the prevailing question before the nation.”
As he often did, Lincoln drew his listeners in with stories and metaphors.
Suppose, he said, he found a rattlesnake out in the field. “I take a stake and kill him. Everybody would applaud the act and say I did right. But suppose the snake was in a bed where children were sleeping. Would I do right to strike him there? I might hurt the children; or I might not kill, but only arouse and exasperate the snake, and he might bite the children … Slavery is like this.” Getting rid of the rattlesnake, he cautioned, took careful preparation.13
In New Haven the following evening, Lincoln met with “the wildest scene of enthusiasm and excitement.”14 But his next appearance was to be the blockbuster. In spite of rain, sleet, and the resulting mud, the streets of Meriden were thronged with people. When Lincoln’s train arrived, the crush at the station included Wide Awakes, several bands, and thousands of citizens who marched along with the speaker’s carriage to the hall. As an estimated 3,000 people crammed in, with hundreds more standing outside the open doors, Lincoln held the crowd spellbound.15
Lincoln’s visit left Connecticut Republicans primed for the turbulent campaigns. Around the state, young men immediately launched more Wide Awake chapters. As the gubernatorial election approached, the Wide Awakes rallied for Republican William Buckingham. The Democrats, just as tenacious, assailed Republican rallies and parades, hurling derision and rocks. On April 2, over 88,000 Connecticut voters cast their ballots. Buckingham won by 541 votes. The Wide Awakes breathed a collective sigh of relief.
WIDE AWAKE FOR LINCOLN
Six weeks later, the nation’s Republican convention chose Abraham Lincoln as its presidential nominee. “Momentum” can’t begin to describe the energy that the Wide Awakes now spread. All over the North and West, from Maine to California, hundreds of Wide Awake chapters sprang up and filled with members. In bigger cities, Wide Awakes filled car after car on special trains that brought them to rallies with other clubs.
Getting Lincoln into office promised to be a vicious battle. “Wherever the fight is hottest, there is their post of duty, and there the Wide Awakes are found,” declared the Hartford group in a circular it sent to other chapters.16
The day after Lincoln’s victory, the Hartford Times—a Democratic newspaper—predicted that the states that allowed slavery would “form a separate confederacy, and retire peaceably from the Union … We can never force sovereign States to remain in the Union when they desire to go out, without bringing upon our country the shocking evils of civil war, under which the Republic could not, of course, long exist.”17
Democrats were bitter. Many would nurse their resentment against Lincoln, the Republicans, and abolitionists for years.
The Hartford Evening Press, November 7, 1860.
Daniel Gould Francis, a Hartford dry-goods clerk, helped found the Wide Awakes in March of 1860. When war broke out, Francis was one of the earliest to enlist, joining Connecticut’s 1st Regiment.
Females couldn’t enlist in the military, but that didn’t stop them from holding strong political opinions. This unidentified woman had her portrait taken in May of 1861, perhaps to give to a departing soldier. Like many civilians in the early weeks of the war, she donned a red, white, and blue ribbon that showed her loyalty—as did her inscription, “Union now and forever.”
The Wide Awakes, exultant in Lincoln’s victory, had little left to do. Their role in the presidential campaign had very possibly changed history.
It would be just a few months before Dan Francis and Ed Yergason put away their capes, donned the blue wool uniforms of Union infantry, and faced bullets instead of rocks as the fight moved from the political arena to the battlefield.
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