“very anxious to fight for the liberation of enslaved nations and colonies.” He showed how Young America was different now in other ways, too. The Republicans, like the Whigs before them, were the party of technological and social improvement. Lincoln in his lecture harked back to earliest history to show that improvement was endemic to humans, revealed in the discovery of clothing, language, iron, printing, and, more recently, the power of steam. He sarcastically identified the early fifteenth century as the time of “the invention of negroes, or the present way of using them,” and suggested that thoughtful Americans had passed beyond such old fogyism. He used antislavery metaphors to describe the dramatic advance of humanity caused by printing. It is difficult to realize, he said, “how strong this slavery of the mind was [before printing]; and how long it did, of necessity, take, to break its shackles.” America was the site of the world’s greatest progress, because “a new country is most favorable—almost necessary—to the immancipation [sic] of thought, and the consequent advancement of civilization and the arts.” Freedom of the mind, he subtly suggested, must lead to an end to old-fashioned ideas like slavery.
Between the 1859 lecture and the early months of the Civil War in the spring of 1861, Lincoln got a close look at—and a deep appreciation for—the new version of Young America, which now leaned Republican.
He was, like Whitman, a b’hoy writ large. If, as George Thompson wrote, the b’hoy had proliferated nationally as the Indiana Hoosier, the western trapper, and other male types throughout the nation, Lincoln was, in the words of a campaign song, the rail-splitting “son of Kentucky, / The hero of Hoosierdom through; / The pride of the Suckers [Illinoisans] so lucky.” If the b’hoy loved both Shakespeare and minstrel shows, so did he. If the b’hoy was ill educated yet shrewd, he brandished his lack of education. In his autobiographical sketches, he not only emphasized his lack of formal schooling, but he once wrote “Education defective” and another time highlighted his primitive background by erasing the g in his phrase about learning “Reading—writing—ciphering to the rule of three.”90 When Stephen Douglas in a debate derided him by recalling the time when Lincoln was “a flourishing grocery-keeper [that is, saloon keeper] in the town of Salem” who “could beat any of the boys wrestling, or running a foot race, in pitching quoits or tossing a copper, [and] could ruin more liquor than all the boys of the town together (uproarious laughter),” Lincoln went with the joke, saying that while he never ran a saloon, he “did work the latter part of one winter in a small still house, up at the head of a hollow. [Roars of laughter.]”91 He earned great political capital from his identification with average Americans. His uncle Charles Hanks tried to shock the public when during the 1860 campaign he recalled Abe as “nothing more than a wild harum scarum boy,” and lazy to boot, but this combination of disorder and idleness held great attraction for young roughs.92
And the roughs were ready to channel their energy into tightly focused action when he ran for president. The young Wide Awakes who backed him during the campaign originated in Hartford, Connecticut, where he spoke on March 3, 1860, during his post–Cooper Union tour of New England. His audience that evening consisted mainly of young men who were thrilled when the city’s twenty-nine-year-old mayor introduced Lincoln as one who had done “yeoman service” for the Republicans, and when Lincoln announced himself as a “dirty shirt” Republican—words confirmed that night by his “gaunt, homely figure, unpretending manner, conversational air, careless clothing and dry humor”—it made him seem “a man of the people.” After making an antislavery speech, he entered a carriage. Quickly the vehicle was surrounded by scores of young men who spontaneously arranged themselves in military order. They escorted the carriage to the hotel. Lincoln remarked to the mayor, “The boys are wide awake. Suppose we call them the Wide-awakes.”93
When Lincoln, momentously, won the presidential nomination in May, inquiries poured into Connecticut from all over the North about the procedures of the Wide Awakes. The name had gotten out, and soon a pro-Lincoln Wide Awake club formed in Hartford and, before long, in many other Connecticut towns as well. There was the nighttime parade, in which the Wide Awakes wore long oilskin coats and carried torches along with placards and banners that read “Lincoln Against Slavery,” “Free Soil and Free Men,” and the like. Mass demonstrations by the Wide Awakes became a defining feature of the campaign to elect Lincoln and his running mate, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine.
These demonstrations were very different from the turbulent rallies for Stephen Douglas. The difference was noted by John Hay, a young Springfield law apprentice who, along with his journalist friend John G. Nicolay, worked for the Lincoln campaign in 1860; the two “boys,” as Lincoln called them, became his private secretaries in the White House.94
Describing a tremendous Lincoln rally held on August 8 in Springfield, Hay wrote, “There was none of that . . . rowdy plebeianism which outcrops in all Douglas crowds . . . no pandering to the vile groundswell of ruffian passions; no barefooted rangers; no hangings in effigy,” and none of the “yelling diabolism that spiced the Douglas turnout of July.”95 Twenty Wide Awake clubs from different parts of Illinois poured into Springfield in horse- or oxen-drawn wagons that carried log cabins, rail-splitters who mauled logs, blacksmiths who made horseshoes, weavers who spun jeans, carpenters who hammered nails, and so on. Trains from all over the state brought more Lincoln supporters. At the Fair Grounds, Lincoln showed up in a carriage and was carried to a platform, where he stood as the crowd cheered for ten minutes, after which he confessed he had nothing to say but he was glad to see the crowd. With the help of an efficient Wide Awake, he mounted a horse and rode away. That night, thousands of Wide Awakes paraded by torchlight through Springfield as fireworks blazed above them—a scene that looked like “the onward march of a vast conflagration.” The whole affair, Hay wrote, came off with “intense decency and tremendous cohesion”—an assessment seconded by a local reporter who noted that “the most admirable order was preserved,” with the Wide Awakes marching “in a very gentlemanly manner, [and] dispersing in a becoming way.”96
The Wide Awakes channeled the enthusiasm of young voters, which became wild under Douglas, into disciplined campaigning. This was the new Young America, pro-Lincoln and pro-Republican. The clubs that backed Lincoln had names in which “Wide Awake, “Young,” and “Young America” were used interchangeably, as in a rally represented by the Young Men’s Lincoln Club, the Upper Alton Wide Awakes, and the Young America Lincoln Club of Alton.97 At another event, “the German Republican Wide Awakes turned out in full force, assisted by about three hundred of the Lincoln and Young America Wide Awakes, for escort duty.” The fate of the nation seemed to be in the hands of Republican Young America. The popular magazine Harper’s Weekly, which was supportive of Lincoln, printed in its September 1, 1860, issue a cartoon of Young America Rising at the Ballot-Box and Strangling the Serpents Disunion and Secession. Based on the legendary story of the infant Hercules killing two snakes sent by Queen Hera to kill him, the cartoon shows America’s symbolic goddess Columbia assuring her snake-murdering baby, Young America, that only he can save the Union. “Well done, Sonny!” Columbia says. “Go it while you’re young, for when you’re old you can’t.”
Young America indeed helped elect Lincoln, but killing the serpent of secession would be far from easy.
On November 6, Lincoln spent the day in his office at the State House. He created a scene when at 3:30 p.m. he went to a polling booth to cast his ballot. Admirers mobbed him, shouting his nickname. “The cheers were perfectly deafening,” a journalist wrote. “‘Old Abe,’ ‘Uncle Abe,’ ‘Honest Abe,’ . . . and other remarks abounded, and altogether the scene was one of rare interest.”99 At 5:00 p.m., he went home for dinner, and at 7:00 p.m., went to Springfield’s telegraph office to keep track
of the election results. The news was positive until 10:30 p.m., when silence came from New York. But soon notice came that he had not lost New York City and Brooklyn by as great a margin as had been expected and had won the state. The telegram read, “We tender you our congratulations upon this magnificent victory.”100
Nationally, Lincoln had won nearly 40 percent of the popular vote, with about 30 percent going to Douglas, and the remainder divided between Breckinridge and Bell. Lincoln won 180 electoral votes to his opponents’ combined 123.
At the news of his victory, he was calm. Others were not. “The Springfield boys had heard it, too,” an observer recalled, “and the great crowd which had filled the State House surged into the street and began cheering, yelling and shouting like a thousand madmen suddenly let loose from their keepers.”101 Lincoln said that a little woman was waiting at home to hear from him, but as he was leaving the telegraph office, supporters insisted that he go with them to a nearby restaurant, where in an upstairs room the wives and daughters of Republicans wanted to congratulate him. He said that because he had been “in the hands of his friends for the past five months he might as well make it one night more.” At the reception, mothers and their daughters filed by him, kissing him—not always on the cheek. At first their affection made him uneasy, but then he cheerfully surrendered to it, calling it “a form of coercion not prohibited by the Constitution or Congress.” He went home at around midnight and found Mary asleep. When he told her the news, she at first stirred groggily without responding. Raising his voice, he exclaimed, “Mary, Mary! we are elected!”102
The next morning, cannon boomed all over town, and crowds flocked to see him in his State House office. Always ready to greet the people, he held a levee—the kind of welcoming event that he would hold regularly in the White House during the Civil War.
Despite the victory, visitors noticed that he looked sad. To several groups of callers, he said, “Well, boys, your troubles are over now, but mine have just begun.”103
Blondin was now walking on the rope, and the roar of the falls below was growing ever louder
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