Making Freedom: Resisting and Abolishing Slavery in New England and Beyond

1857-1860

1857  "The Weeping Time": Enslaver sells 429 people in two days 

Those selected for sale are brought to Savannah, a slave trading center, by steamboat and train. They are housed in the stables at a racecourse where the auction takes place over two days. Prospective buyers from Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana flock to Savannah in hopes of getting good deals. It is known that the workforce on Butler plantations include enslaved people skilled in shoemaking, cooperage, blacksmithing, carpentry, machine operation, and more.  

Four hundred and thirty-six persons are advertised in the sale catalog, but only 429 – most of them rice and cotton field workers – are sold. The remaining seven are either ill or disabled. The two-day sale nets $303,850 ($9.16 million today.) The highest price for a family (a mother and her five grown children) is $6,180. The highest for an individual is $1,750, and the lowest $250. Butler has stipulated that couples with young children will not be sold separately, but relatives of mature age are. Families who have spent generations on his plantations are ripped apart.

Rain falls unceasingly during the two days of the sale. It is said that “the heavens are weeping” for the inhumanity that is being committed. The enslaved and their descendants refer to the event as The Weeping Time. 

Soon after the last sale of an enslaved person, the rain stops. According to some accounts, champagne bottles pop in celebration. And Pierce Butler, once again wealthy, makes a trip to southern Europe before returning home to Philadelphia.

Butler’s cruel and callous behavior as an enslaver had led his wife, the famed English actress Fanny Kemble, to divorce him eight years before. Shocked by the living and working conditions of the enslaved workers on Butler’s plantations, and the sexual exploitation of enslaved women by his manager, Kemble increasingly embraces abolitionism and writes an eyewitness indictment of slavery: Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839. Butler has retained custody of their two daughters, and threatens to deny Kemble access to them if she publishes anything about her observations of plantation conditions. She waits to do so until after the start of the Civil War when her daughters have come of age.

The story of the 1857 Savannah auction is told by historian Anne C. Bailey in The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History, published in 2017. 

In 2022, information about an even larger single sale comes to light: that of 600 enslaved people who were put on the auction block in Charleston, South Carolina on February 24, 1835. They were sold as part of the estate of John Ball Jr., a wealthy Harvard University-educated planter who operated at least five plantations. An advertisement for the auction was discovered by Lauren Davila, a graduate history student, while scouring local newspaper archives.

1857  Supreme Court: Black Americans have no rights  

In 1833, Emerson moves his place of residence several times as part of his service in the U.S. military, and he takes Scott with him – from Missouri (a slave state), to Illinois (a free state), and finally into the Wisconsin Territory (a free territory). During this period, Scott meets and marries Harriet Robinson, an enslaved woman, who becomes part of the Emerson household. 

John Emerson marries in 1838, and he and his wife return with the Scotts to Missouri, where Emerson dies in 1843. Scott attempts to purchase his freedom from Emerson’s widow, Eliza Irene Sandford, but is refused. 

In 1846, with the help of anti-slavery lawyers, Harriet and Dred Scott file separate lawsuits with the Missouri state court to try to gain freedom for themselves and their daughters, Eliza and Lizzie. They claim that their residence in a free state and a free territory had released them from the bonds of slavery. The cases are later combined by the courts in a single suit under Dred Scott’s name. 

Scott v. Sandford takes years to resolve, finally reaching the U.S. Supreme Court, which announces its decision in March 1857. Seven of the nine justices had been appointed by pro-slavery presidents from the South, and of these, five are from enslaving families. The majority opinion is written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, a staunch supporter of slavery. He asserts that no African-American, free or enslaved, had ever enjoyed the rights of a citizen under the U.S. constitution. For more than a century Blacks had been "regarded as beings of an inferior order, altogether unfit to associate with the white race ... and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." 

The main issues for the court are whether it has jurisdiction to try the case and whether Scott is indeed a citizen. It states that because Scott is Black, he is not a citizen and therefore has no right to sue. The court also declares that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 – legislation that restricts slavery in certain territories – is unconstitutional. 

Although they lose in court, the Scotts do gain their freedom. Their suit before the state courts had been backed financially by the adult children of Peter Blow, Dred Scott’s first enslaver; they had turned against slavery in the decade since their father sold him. One of them, Henry Taylor Blow, is now a U.S. representative for Missouri. He is deeded “ownership” of the Scotts by Eliza Irene Sandford and he emancipates them on May 26, 1857. 

Dred Scott works as a porter in a St. Louis hotel, but sadly his freedom is short-lived; he dies from tuberculosis in September 1858. His wife, Harriet, lives another 18 years. Dred Scott is buried in St. Louis, and a local tradition later develops of placing Lincoln pennies on top of his gravestone for good luck.

Among constitutional scholars, Scott v. Sandford is widely considered one of the worst decisions ever rendered by the U.S. Supreme Court. It has been cited in particular as the most egregious example in the court’s history of wrongly imposing a judicial solution on a political problem. A later chief justice, Charles Evans Hughes, famously characterizes the decision as the court’s great “self-inflicted wound.” It is nullified by President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and the post-Civil War Reconstruction amendments to the U.S. Constitution – the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments.

The Supreme Court’s ruling also clearly reflected a belief that “Black people were not merely enslaved but a slave race,” according to The New Times Magazine's 1619 Project. This belief “is the root of the endemic racism we cannot purge from this nation to this day.”

1858  Plan hatched for guerrilla war against slavery 

1858  Illegal slave ship brings 400 African captives    

Ship records show that Lamar’s agents purchase some 487 Africans in present-day Congo and Angola and bring them aboard Wanderer. Seventy-eight of them die during the six-week return voyage to the U.S. Hoping to avoid arrest, Lamar has many of the survivors transported to slave markets in Savannah and Augusta, Georgia, and in South Carolina and Florida. 

News of the slave ship and its cargo triggers anger and disgust in the North, while Southerners press Congress to reopen the Atlantic slave trade. In 1860, the federal government tries Lamar and his co-conspirators three times for piracy and related offenses but fails to secure a conviction. Prosecutors are unable to convince a jury of a connection between Lamar and Wanderer. 

The verdicts come as no surprise: Lamar is one Savannah's leading citizens with many powerful connections; pro-secession sentiment in Georgia is increasing following radical abolitionist John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia in 1859; and Abraham Lincoln, an anti-slavery Republican, has been elected president.

At the start of the Civil War in 1861, the U.S. government seizes Wanderer to prevent the ship from falling into the hands of the Confederate forces. For the duration of the war, it is used variously as a gunboat, tender, and hospital ship.

Among the known survivors of the Wanderer’s slave ship voyage is Ward Lee, whose real name is Cilucängy. Many years after his arrival in Georgia in chains, he writes a public letter asking for donations to help him return to Africa before he dies. “I am bound for my old home if God be with me,” he writes. Sadly, his wish is unfulfilled. 

A copy of his letter is now part of a permanent multimedia exhibition about the Wanderer in St. Andrews Beach Park on the southern end of Jekyll Island, where Cilucängy touched ground more than 160 years ago. His great-great-grandson, Michael Higgins, and other relatives have visited Jekyll to pay homage to their ancestor. 

1859  First novel by African American woman published 

Some scholars believe that Our Nig did not receive critical acclaim from abolitionists when it was first published because the novel chronicles some uncomfortable truths about the racism and physical and emotional abuse endured by free Black people as indentured servants in the North. Moreover, unlike the slave narratives of the time, Our Nig fails to offer the promise of freedom. It also features a protagonist of color who is assertive towards a White woman.

The Harriet Wilson Project – a nonprofit established in 2003 to honor Wilson and raise public awareness of her contribution to American literature and history – commissioned a statue of her in 2006. Sculpted by Fern Cunningham, the statue is located in Milford, New Hampshire's Bicentennial Park.

1859  John Brown hanged for treason after failed armory raid 

Ceremonies to honor Brown and his fallen comrades are held in 11 other cities and in Canada. At Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, students reportedly break into the chapel and drape it in black, too late for school officials to remove it before Saturday service. In Albany, New York, thousands gather and a four-minute ovation greets the declaration that in a just society the Virginia governor, and not John Brown, would hang. In Detroit, Michigan church bells toll all day. 

Within days of the Harper’s Ferry raid, Frederick Douglass, who did not participate in it, is named by newspapers across the country as a co-conspirator. He escapes to Canada six hours before federal marshals arrive at his home in Rochester, New York to arrest him. Douglass is soon on a ship to England, where he spends the next six months on the anti-slavery speaking circuit. He returns to the U.S. after a Congressional inquiry effectively clears him of direct involvement in the Harper’s Ferry raid.

In planning and executing the raid, John Brown is inspired and deeply influenced by Black abolitionists in the U.S., by rebellions of the enslaved – especially that led by the charismatic preacher Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831 – and by the formerly enslaved Black Haitian revolutionaries who employed political violence to win the country’s liberation from the French colonial regime.

In her book, Force and Freedom, Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence, historian Kellie Carter Jackson writes that “as a radical abolitionist, Brown always went one step further than most antislavery sympathizers…. He understood that the goal of black leadership was always twofold: emancipation and equality, which were inseparable.” 

According to Carter Jackson, Brown saw himself as an outsider and “he valued the collective support and affinity the black community offered.” In his extensive travels, Brown meets with the most influential leaders of the Black communities in major cities. In Philadelphia, he spends time with William Still, Frederick Douglass,  Henry Highland Garnet, and Robert Purvis. (It is believed that Brown carries Purvis’s musket with him on the Harper’s Ferry mission.) In Brooklyn, New York he stays at the home of Elizabeth and James Newton Gloucester, prominent local leaders and financial supporters.   

“It was during these meetings and visits that Brown was mentored and counseled,” writes Carter Jackson. “Only through these relationships could Brown begin and complete his vision.”

Several Black female abolitionists are also key advisors and supporters of John Brown. These include the formerly enslaved Harriet Tubman, the Underground Railroad legend who makes 13 forays back into slave state territory to lead some 70 enslaved people – including members of her family – to freedom. Carter Jackson writes that Brown and Tubman meet at least twice in April 1858 to discuss recruiting formerly enslaved people for the Harper’s Ferry raid. Brown believes that Tubman’s knowledge of the terrain in Maryland and Pennsylvania will be crucial to the success of the venture.

Brown is also assisted by Anna Murray Douglass, wife of the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass. She hosts Brown at their Rochester home – which is also a “stop” on the Underground Railroad – while he plans the raid. 

Another critical ally for Brown is Mary Ellen Pleasant, a Black entrepreneur, real estate magnate, and Underground Railroad supporter, who donates $30,000 to his cause – a much larger contribution than that of the “Secret Six,” a group of White male abolitionists who also help Brown finance the Harper’s Ferry operation. 

When Brown is captured, a letter is found on him that reads: “The axe is laid at the root of the tree and after the first blow is struck there will be plenty more money coming.” The letter is signed “W.E.P.” On her deathbed in 1904, Pleasant explains that the initials are hers – “I always made the M so that it looks like a W. I suppose that mistake was all that saved me from being captured and hanged alongside of John Brown, and sometimes I wished that I had gone up on the scaffold with him, for I would have at last died in a good cause and in good company.”

1860  Last known slave ship carries over 100 captive Africans  

Foster successfully completes the return voyage. He steers the schooner into the port of Mobile, Alabama under the cover of darkness and has it towed up the Spanish River. The enslaved Africans are then transferred to a river steamboat, and the Clotilda is taken upstream, burned, and sunk to conceal the evidence of the illegal activity. Most of the Africans are distributed to the financial backers of the Clotilda venture, with Timothy Meaher retaining 30 of them on his property north of Mobile. 

In 1861, the federal government prosecutes Meaher and Foster in Mobile for illegal slave importation, but the case is dismissed for lack of evidence from the ship or its manifest, and perhaps because of the outbreak of the Civil War.

The Africans who were on board the Clotilda are effectively emancipated at the end of the Civil War. Many establish the all-Black independent community of Africatown with other ethnic Africans after pooling their resources and purchasing land from the Meaher family. They adopt community rules based mostly on Takpa tribal customs, and maintain the use of their Yoruba language and cultural traditions into the 1950s. Children born in the community begin to learn English, first at church, and then in schools founded there in the late nineteenth century. 

Africatown’s population grows to 12,000 as new industry – including paper mills built after World War II – attracts workers. But by early in the 21st century, industrial decline and job losses have reduced the number of residents to 2,000. 

The community has long been plagued by environmental racism, and in 2013 Africatown residents found the Mobile Environmental Justice Action Coalition (MEJAC) to confront industrial polluters. MEJAC and its allies defeat a proposed expansion of petrochemical facilities, and the success provides a foundation for organizing around other environmental concerns.

In 2012, the Africatown Historic District is recognized and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The community’s cemetery is also listed. 

It was long believed that the last survivors of the Clotilda were Cudjo Lewis – whose life story is told in Zora Neale Hurston’s book Barracoon – and Redoshi (Sally Smith). They lived until 1935 and 1937 respectively. But new research, made public in 2020, suggests that Matilda McCrear, who died in Selma, Alabama in 1940 at the age of 83, was the last known living survivor in the U.S. of the transatlantic slave trade and of the Clotilda. 

Matilda McCrear’s remarkable life story has now been established in some detail. She is two years old when she and her family are kidnapped by slave traders in West Africa. They are immediately split up, and she never sees two of her brothers again. Matilda also permanently loses contact with her two older sisters after the three of them, and their mother, Gracie, are transported to Alabama aboard the Clotilda. Matilda, her mother, and her 10-year-old sister, Sallie, are purchased by an enslaver called Memorable Walker Creagh. Gracie is forcibly paired with Guy, another Clotilda survivor. Matilda’s two other sisters are bought by a different enslaver and they are never reunited.  

After surviving the horrors of slavery and gaining her freedom following the Civil War, Matilda defies conventional expectations for a Black female sharecropper in the South. She never marries; she has 14 children with her White, German-born common law husband; she changes her surname from Creagh – her former enslaver’s name – to McCrear; and she becomes a staunch advocate for women’s rights, including the vote, and human rights. Even though she had left West Africa when she was a toddler, she appears throughout her life to have worn her hair in a traditional Yoruba style, presumably taught to her by her mother.

Matilda McCrear is in her 70s when she undertakes what researcher Hannah Durkin, author of The Survivors of the Clotilda: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade, calls “one of her most striking acts of resistance”: She travels 15 miles from her home to a county courthouse in Selma to claim compensation as a Clotilda survivor. Her claim is  dismissed, and she leaves empty-handed. At the time, Cudjo “Kossola” Lewis is widely considered to be the ship’s last survivor, and he had received financial assistance as a result.

In December 1931, Matilda and Redoshi embark on a 300-mile round trip from their homes in rural Dallas County, Alabama to Africatown to visit Lewis. Upon their arrival, he acknowledges them as fellow Clotilda survivors.

In 2018, record low tides leave the wreckage of a ship visible above the river mud a few miles north of Mobile. Researchers later confirm that it is the Clotilda. On April 13, a diving team pulls up the first piece of the slave ship to see the light of day in 160 years.

Further investigation reveals that the vessel is "substantially intact," preserved by the soft mud of the Mobile River, according to the Alabama Historical Commission (AHC). The lower hull, interior bulkheads, and compartments are largely still in place, and as much as two-thirds of the original structure is believed to be in good condition. "Archaeological remains ... including DNA, likely survive in the sealed, anaerobic conditions inside the hull, which is filled with silt," says the AHC. 

To honor their ancestors and help secure their community’s future, Africatown residents collaborate with local and state agencies to create a cultural tourism destination around the discovery of the Clotilda and the community’s quest for justice and healing. The outcome is the Africatown Heritage House and its “Clotilda: The Exhibition,” opened with dedication ceremonies in July 2023. 

That same month, descendants of Timothy Meaher meet for the first time with Clotilda descendants to begin exploring reconciliation. Topics of discussion include a possible land trust for Africatown and scholarships for residents’ children. Sisters Meg and Helen Meaher, great-great-granddaughters of Timothy Meaher, had already sold a piece of land in Africatown to the city of Mobile at a nominal price to house a new food bank and community development agencies. At the meeting, they pledge to donate more land around the food bank for community use, and to begin removing Meaher property markers in Africatown. They say they are consulting with financial planners and community organizations in Africatown as they weigh next steps.

The moving story of the Africatown community and the Clotilda is told in the award-winning 2022 documentary film, Descendant. 

1860  Ballot loss shows White hostility to voting rights  

This is only the latest demonstration of White hostility to equal voting rights in New York. For 50 years, the state’s White voters firmly resist the notion that Black males should enjoy the same access to the ballot as White males. (Women and Native Americans cannot vote at all.) Only the adoption in 1870 of the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution – guaranteeing all citizens the right to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” (and defined as including African American men) – officially ends the legal discrimination against Black males voting in New York State.  

1860  New schooner linked to illegal slave trade circle

In New York, the Mariquita is made ready to sail to Africa, but officials detain the ship in New York harbor on suspicion that it is being outfitted for the slave trade. The shipping manifest includes gunpowder, muskets, and rum — all commodities commonly traded for enslaved Africans — as well as foodstuffs such as preserved meat, sardines, pickled tongue, rice, beans, and cornmeal, which are essential provisions for slave “factories” (slave trading posts on the West African coast).  

Two weeks later, after a $24,000 bond has been collected, the Mariquita is allowed to proceed, and, as a local paper puts it, is “making tracks … for Congo river and a market.” (“Market” is a euphemism for slave factories.) 

Soon after the Mariquita’s departure, a Gloucester “correspondent” visits New York City to report on the flourishing illegal slave trade. He quotes an official that “on an average one vessel a week is fitted out and sails from the ports of New York, Boston or Salem [Massachusetts] for the coast of Africa and a human cargo.” If caught, he adds, the owners and crew are rarely convicted because “Judge Betts always favors the slavers.” (Massachusetts-born Samuel Betts is a U.S. District Court judge in New York, and later a Congressional representative.) 

In 1859 and 1860, the peak years of the illegal slave trade from East Coast ports, as many as 20,000 Africans may have been carried into bondage by ships originating in New York.

After two African trading voyages, the Mariquita is captured by the British Navy in early 1863 off Porto da Lenha, in what is now Angola, near several slave factories, including one owned by Lima Viana, the New York slave ship agent. The ship’s hold is crammed with an estimated 459 captive Africans who are then freed. The Mariquita is legally confiscated, and impounded on the remote island of St. Helena, a British colonial possession. 

The full story of the Mariquita has been uncovered by historian Lise Breen. Her groundbreaking research also reveals important context: The engagement of a group of ship captains and investors in Gloucester and the nearby town of Beverly, Massachusetts in the illegal slave trade during the 1840s and 1850s.  

For example, as Breen has documented, two schooners, the Leda and the Illinois, are built for legitimate purposes at an Essex, Massachusetts shipyard before their captains, William Pearce Jr. and Joseph Swift, sail them to Africa to purchase slaves. In a deathbed deposition, a Louisiana captain asserts that another schooner, the Mary E. Smith – said to be the last U.S. vessel to disembark captive Africans in Brazil – was commissioned at the same Essex shipyard. 

1860  Abolitionist plot rumors spark deadly rampage  

But some White leaders speculate that the fires have a more sinister origin. In Dallas the previous year, a mob had whipped and expelled two allegedly abolitionist Methodist ministers. Charles Pryor, editor of the Dallas Herald – whose office has been burned down – writes letters to editors of pro-Democratic newspapers, alleging that the fires are the result of a vast abolitionist conspiracy, aimed at devastating northern Texas and freeing the region's slaves. White preachers from the North, he asserts, have recruited local enslaved people to set the fires, murder the White men of their region, and rape their wives and daughters. 

After these sensational allegations, paranoia among White Texans escalates into fully-fledged panic. Within three weeks, communities and counties throughout North and East Texas establish secretive vigilance committees to root out and punish the alleged conspirators. 

The vigilantes soon claim to have uncovered an extensive abolitionist plan to use enslaved people to poison numerous White settlers and wipe out entire towns with fire. Most of this information comes from forcibly elicited confessions – soon magnified by more dramatic reporting – from enslaved Texans. Meanwhile, law-enforcement agencies step aside to allow the vigilantes to do their grisly work. 

“We will hang every man who does not live above suspicion,” writes “J.W.S.” of Fort Worth’s Vigilance Committee. “It is better for us to hang ninety-nine innocent (suspicious) men than to let one guilty one pass, for the guilty one endangers the peace of society.” 

Some members of the Dallas Vigilance Committee want to hang all the enslaved people in the county, but authorities worry that this would “entail a great loss of property.” So the committee settles on three Black men: Patrick Jennings, Sam Smith, and “Old Cato.” Cato had been entrusted by his owners, the Overton family, with running their mill; Sam Smith is a preacher; Jennings, who had come from Virginia with his “master,” is later described by the master’s son as “an agitator.” The three Black men are hanged on the bank of the Trinity River.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of enslaved people across Texas are interrogated and an unknown number whipped or lynched. Donald Reynolds suggests that possibly hundreds die as a result of vigilante action; a number of non-Black suspects – notably, White Northerners, foreigners and Mexican Americans – are hanged or banished from the state before the panic and the violence finally subside.    

According to Reynolds, author of Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South, Southern-rights extremists in Texas and throughout the South make skillful use of the Texas Troubles “in fire-breathing speeches and editorials to whip up secessionist sentiments.” 

They depict Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate for president, as an abolitionist whose party is really behind the Texas Troubles. Many Texans who formerly had been moderate on the issue of the Union now embrace secession in the event of Lincoln's election “as the only way to protect their firesides from the horrors of insurrection.”

Reynolds asserts that the Texas Troubles, as much as any other single issue, explain why a state that elected Sam Houston as governor on a Unionist platform just the previous year – he had been the first regularly elected president of the Republic of Texas after it gained independence from Mexico – voted three-to-one for secession in March 1861.

1860  Lincoln victory hailed as historic turning point

1860  South Carolina is first to secede from the Union

1860  Boston mob disrupts meeting to honor John Brown 

1860  Wide Awake: The movement that helps Lincoln win

Their grassroots ranks are overwhelmingly male, with a core of White working-class Northerners in their early 20s. Enthusiastic support comes from thousands of young women in a “generational awakening against slavery,” in the words of historian Jon Grinspan. The women contribute by preparing food, sewing banners, playing horns and drums in marching bands, and sometimes marching along with the Wide Awake men, dressed as goddesses or symbols of the states. The burgeoning movement is joined by formerly enslaved African Americans, radical new immigrants, and some Southerners who “brave furious crowds to march on slavery’s front porch.” 

Grinspan, author of Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force that Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War, writes that the Wide Awakes “marched to protest slavery’s death grip on democracy. Though not all abolitionists, most were antislavery in one way or another. They united around the fear that a small minority of enslavers, aided by northern allies, were perverting America’s fragile politics. After watching their elders slumber for decades, a rising generation was eager to wake up. A culminating clash was coming. Wide Awakes would form companies and elect officers, don uniforms and organize rallies, vote for Lincoln and then fight for him, driven by this militarized grievance.”

The first Wide Awakes act as a “political police,” fighting back against frequent attacks on anti-slavery speakers like Clay who regularly face mobs of Democrats and other slavery supporters wielding bricks, bowie knives, and pistols. But the Wide Awakes literally embody their cause, according to Grinspan. “Their uniforms, torches, and parades declared their defense of democracy, a public combative, disciplined uprising in a system being dragged down by suppression, compromise, and chaos.”

The Wide Awakes prove to be a major boon to Abraham Lincoln in his quest to be president. Thousands of uniformed members throng the streets in Chicago in May when the Republicans gather for their nominating convention. Many delegates have never heard of the movement – and their thrilled reports upon returning home spark the creation of hundreds of new Wide Awake companies. 

But this post-convention momentum collides with mob politics in many contested areas of the country. In St. Louis, Missouri, for example, Republicans who gather to endorse Lincoln’s nomination are harangued and pelted with stones and other missiles by a large mob of Democratic ruffians. The attacks prompt those on the receiving end – including young northern businessmen, restaurateurs, and brewers – to launch the St. Louis Wide Awakes. The new club proves more committed than most to self-defense: its members’ torches are attached to heavy sticks filled with lead weights.

As the Wide Awake movement gains popularity and strength, it becomes more diverse by class but not by race. Indeed, early Wide Awake organizers in Connecticut use White supremacy as a campaign tool during the race for governor, pushing the idea that the Slave Power is foisting “the pestilential presence of the black race” on the North. By this twisted logic, White supremacy could be anti-slavery because expanding slavery could expand Blackness to the detriment of Whites. Certainly, a large faction of the Republican Party finds such views repellent, according to Grinspan, and the Wide Awakes do attract participation and support from some African Americans.  

On October 5, the first all-Black Wide Awake company debuts in Boston, Massachusetts. Calling themselves the West Boston Wide Awakes, 144 Black men wearing shiny black capes and caps and holding torches assemble “to parade and arouse an enthusiasm among all voters in securing the election of our much beloved Abraham Lincoln.” The new group has been organized by prominent Black abolitionist and community leader Lewis Hayden, who is also active in the Massasoit Guards. Named for Massasoit, a 17th-century Wampanoag leader, this private African American militia polices the Black community in the city’s Beacon Hill neighborhood, and protects residents from slave catchers.   

While Wide Awake rallies around the country independently mobilize support for Lincoln, the man himself lies low in Springfield, Illinois – honoring the tradition of the time that a candidate should not campaign for himself to avoid seeming desperate. But the Wide Awakes bring the crowds to him. The Springfield Wide Awakes organize a “political carnival” that attracts over 19,000 people – possibly thousands more – to their town of just 9,000 residents. The excited activists travel to Springfield in “monster excursion trains,” sleep under their capes in barns, back rooms, and offices, and are fed by female Wide Awake volunteers with thousands of sandwiches.  

When the Civil War begins following Lincoln’s historic victory in November and the secession of the first seven Southern states, thousands of Wide Awakes sign up to fight for the Union. Anecdotal evidence suggests that they make up a “huge proportion” of Union army volunteers, according to Jon Grinspan. “It seems fair to guess that around three in four Wide Awakes made the leap from faux militarism to the real thing. In at least six northern states, recruiting offices even saw whole companies of Wide Awakes showing up together to volunteer.” 

As to the historical significance of the movement, Grinspan writes: “Today, Americans have been jolted awake by a furious energy, latent in our democracy. It helps make the Wide Awakes more comprehensible than they were just a few election cycles ago. Their story only seemed strange in contrast to the American exceptionalism that taught us that political violence can’t happen here. Among the many uncanny elements of their movement, the most recognizable to us today may be the conception of American democracy as a noisy, confrontational, symbolic performance, just on the verge of a fight.”