Wide Awake
The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
"Excellent."-Wall Street Journal * Lincoln Forum Book Prize Winner * Finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize
A propulsive account of our history's most surprising, most consequential political club: the Wide Awake anti-slavery youth movement that marched America from the 1860 election to civil war.
At the start of the 1860 presidential campaign, a handful of fired-up young Northerners appeared as bodyguards to defend anti-slavery stump speakers from frequent attacks. The group called themselves the Wide Awakes. Soon, hundreds of thousands of young White and Black men, and a number of women, were organizing boisterous, uniformed, torch-bearing brigades of their own. These Wide Awakes--mostly working-class Americans in their twenties--became one of the largest, most spectacular, and most influential political movements in our history. To some, it demonstrated the power of a rising majority to push back against slavery. To others, it looked like a paramilitary force training to invade the South. Within a year, the nation would be at war with itself, and many on both sides would point to the Wide Awakes as the mechanism that got them there.
In this gripping narrative, Smithsonian historian Jon Grinspan examines how exactly our nation crossed the threshold from a political campaign into a war. Perfect for readers of Lincoln on the Verge and TheField of Blood, Wide Awake bears witness to the power of protest, the fight for majority rule, and the defense of free speech. At its core, Wide Awake illuminates a question American democracy keeps posing, about the precarious relationship between violent speech and violent actions.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A militant youth movement roused the North from political torpor and put it on a war footing, according to this vibrant historical study. Smithsonian historian Grinspan (The Age of Acrimony) spotlights the Wide Awakes, a Republican political club started in February 1860, by five young clerks in Hartford, Conn., to provide escorts to Republican speakers, including Abraham Lincoln. They adopted the name Wide Awakes to signify vigilance against threats from "the Slave Power," fashioned martial-looking uniforms of black capes and caps, and, as hundreds of thousands of men joined the clubs throughout the North, started practicing military drills, staging immense torchlit parades, and brawling with brick-hurling Democrats. As described in Grinspan's colorful narrative, the Wide Awakes galvanized Republicans, embodying the energy, discipline, and sense of righteousness animating the party. They also, he contends, touched off panic in the South; the specter of the Wide Awakes helped Southern firebrands prod their states into seceding. Grinspan makes the movement the centerpiece of a searching exploration of America's evolving political culture as it polarized, moving from dustups between mobs to more militarized confrontations. He conveys all this in elegant, cinematic prose that captures the sometimes thrilling, sometimes menacing atmospherics of the movement. The result is an insightful and moving analysis of how America descended into civil war.
