The Wide Awakes emerged from the militia culture and mass rallies that defined mid-nineteenth-century American politics. Across the country, ethnic, fraternal, and worker organizations mustered companies of “Zouaves,” “Minute Men,” and “Continentals” for marching drills; meanwhile, national political parties, including the nascent Republicans, held enormous political gatherings, often attracting tens of thousands of participants.
It was within this context that the first Wide Awake club emerged in Hartford, Connecticut. Composed of a dozen young textile clerks and rifle makers, its purpose was to escort antislavery candidates and shield them from Democratic hecklers during the March 1860 gubernatorial contest. When the Republican candidate scored a narrow victory, one of the local Wide Awakes, an aspiring newspaperman, made sure that he and his comrades received the credit. Unique in its marriage of “militia fever” to mass politics, young Republicans elsewhere quickly mimicked the Hartford model.
National units adopted the “Connecticut style.” Clubs drafted a constitution, held weekly meetings, elected officers, issued membership certificates, published pamphlets and songbooks, and adopted the wide-open and unsleeping eye as an official logo.
Wide Awake culture blended martial symbolism with a sense of historical mission, employing militaristic pageantry to claim the legacies of the American and French Revolutions (opponents likened them to Jacobins in a Republican “Reign of Terror”). “Captains” commanded close-order drills from West Point manuals that units then displayed during imposing nighttime parades. Marchers in symbolic combat formed columns of “rails” (to symbolize their candidate as the “Rail-splitter”) replete with drums, trumpets, flags, and politicized banners. They carried tin lamps on pine sticks (or “rails”) as they tramped.
The Wide Awake uniform consisted of a glazed cap with a red, white, and blue ribbon and a black enamel cloak, which protected members from rain and dripping lamp oil. Demand was so high that tailors ran out of enamel cloth.
At the same time, Wide Awakes reflected traditional gender roles and racial norms. Clubs were universally male, with women, sometimes called “Wide Awake ladies,” sewing flags and serving as sponsors. Abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton presented a banner to the Wide Awakes of Seneca Falls, New York. Though at least one company of black Wide Awakes, “the Sumner Grays,” marched through Boston in 1860, the vast majority of chapters were white. Membership appeals to “Free White Labor,” or economic opportunity for laboring men designated as “white,” demonstrated the resilience of the white racial identity that blight class consciousness and hinder worker organization. Yet Wide Awake descriptions of “armies,” “battles,” and “soldiers” enlisting in a battalion of freedom were provocative, even radical, and aimed broadly at the power of the slaver class.
Public spectacle was a means to a new manner of politics. Accelerated by advances in communication and print media, the Wide Awakes grew from the bottom up, often independent of elite party managers. Members were young, overwhelmingly between fifteen and forty years of age, and their ethos offered an unapologetically partisan challenge to the party instability and failed moderation politics of the previous generation.