Message to Llewlladdwr & all other Southerners: Perspective on the South bashing.

[flamingdem]

56. Here's something about the North South conflict moving into the Civil war

http://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/projects/lincoln/contents/grinspan.html

These feelings have been around a LONG time.

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“Young Men for War”: The Wide Awakes and Lincoln’s 1860 Presidential Campaign

A band of “sleepy Gotham politicians” gathered in a Manhattan tavern late one evening in 1860. It was a windy Thursday night, and the atmosphere inside the dimly lit establishment was subdued. The bosses ordered ale and settled into a lazy debate about the usual political topics. They cursed the Republican party, analyzed their presidential ticket, and worried about the possibility of secession, all while getting steadily drunker in the cozy tavern.

They first heard the noise around midnight. From uptown came the clash of a marching band followed by the advancing tread of hundreds of boots on the cobblestones of the Bowery. Soon the stench of burning oil filled their nostrils, and the tavern’s dark windows began to glow from the outside. Tipsy and curious, the insiders spilled out onto the street to join a throng of dazed New Yorkers. There they watched as large formations of young men, clad in shimmering black capes and soldiers’ caps, came stomping down the middle of their island. Each bore a blazing torch, and none said a word. Pushing through the crowd, the sobered politicians shouted, “Who are these Wide Awakes?”[1]

The march that shook New York was one of thousands that poured through America’s cities, towns, and villages in 1860, started by a revolutionary new political organization. Stumping for the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, the strange movement electrified the presidential election. Young men from Bangor to San Francisco and from huge Philadelphia clubs to tiny Iowa troupes donned uniforms, lit torches, and “fell in” to pseudomilitary marching companies. They flooded every northern state and trickled into upper South cities like Baltimore, Wheeling, and St. Louis. Launched in March by “five young dry goods clerks” in Hartford, Connecticut, by November the Wide Awakes had developed into a nationwide grassroots movement with hundreds of thousands of members. Many of the movement’s supporters—and even some of its vociferous opponents—believed “there never was, in this country, a more effective campaign organization than the Wide Awakes.”[2]

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The militarism of the Wide Awakes helps explain how the election of Lincoln sparked the Civil War. Historians have long pondered the missing link between the complex politics of the 1850s and the war. It is difficult to believe that the Civil War could have erupted as a popular conflict—with hundreds of thousands of excited volunteers—unless political debates were transformed into larger cultural motivators. The Wide Awakes enabled that transformation. The movement’s dangerous use of militarism for political purposes unintentionally bled into powerful cultural agitation that terrified southerners. Young northerners equipped with uniforms and torches sent an ominous message to those already apprehensive about the Republican party’s antisouthern attitudes. While certainly not a cause of the war, the Wide Awakes’ presence ratcheted up sectional pressure and invested Lincoln’s election with weighty significance. Understanding how the organization worked helps connect the political and military campaigns.

Though observers felt “the future historian” should devote “one of his most glowing chapters” to the movement, few historians have asked, “Who are these Wide Awakes?” No scholar has recently offered an appraisal of the organization, and former Wide Awakes penned the most in-depth analyses of their club over a century ago. Those accounts contained valuable recollections, but the authors remembered their militarism through the prism of the Civil War as a prediction of the approaching conflict. Since then, the Wide Awakes have appeared as little more than campaign color in the classic accounts of the 1860 election by David Potter, Allan Nevins, and Roy Nichols. Works on Lincoln’s election may sketch a Wide Awake parade, but none truly examines the movement.[5]

The “future historian” has never appeared, and studies of the 1860 election have tended to follow a standard narrative, detailing Lincoln’s fight for the Republican nomination, his summer of quiet seclusion in Springfield, and his predictable victory in November. Such accounts affirm Lincoln’s humble calm in contrast to the terrible chaos that would consume the rest of his life. Yet if we hope to understand Lincoln’s presidency or the coming of the Civil War, we cannot fast-forward through the 1860 campaign. Lincoln’s image played a major role, but like most other nineteenth-century presidential candidates, he refused to canvass. Instead, four parties fielded complex campaign machines in a vicious public battle on behalf of their nominees. Scholars focused solely on the lives of great men have not addressed these important partisan mechanisms and cultural forces in detail. The visible, distinctive, and extremely popular Wide Awakes offer a glimpse of the neglected machinery that powered nineteenth-century American democracy. .... more at link