National Wide Awakes Day 2023: Date, History, Facts about Abraham Lincoln

In Hartford, Connecticut, in early March 1860, Abraham Lincoln spoke passionately against the spread of slavery and the significance of workers' rights, including the right to strike.

National Wide Awakes Day is observed every October 3. It honors the Wide Awakes, a youth organization and subsequently paramilitary organization fostered by the Republican Party, specifically the Lincoln campaign, during the crucial presidential election of 1860 in the United States. It was an open-source network of individuals who believed in universal emancipation, abolition, and laborers’ rights. In spite of adversity, false accusations, and multiple plots to bring them down, the revolutionary group’s members continued to march forward.

The background of National Wide Awakes Day

In Hartford, Connecticut, in early March 1860, Abraham Lincoln spoke passionately against the spread of slavery and the significance of workers’ rights, including the right to strike. Five store clerks established a Republican group known as the Wide Awakes and decided to carry torches along a parade route for Abraham Lincoln, who was charmed by the torchlight escort back to his hotel after his speech, which contributed to the group’s popularity. In the following weeks, the Lincoln campaign utilized Wide Awakes to spearhead massive voter registration drives, recognizing that new and youthful voters have a tendency to support new and young parties.

Republican Party members boasted that they had Wide Awake chapters in every county of all free northern states by the middle of the 1860 campaign. By the time Lincoln was elected president, the Wide Awakes organization boasted 500,000 members and had been active for decades. On October 3, 1860, the Wide Awakes, wearing oilcloth cloaks and carrying lanterns, marched in enormous torchlight parades in support of emancipation in cities such as Chicago, Boston, Cleveland, and Lower Manhattan, among others.

Popular social events, an aura of competitive fraternity, and even promotional comic books were among the group’s activities. It introduced a large number of individuals, primarily young people, to political participation and hailed itself as the newly discovered representative of younger voters. Later, the generation that was profoundly disturbed by the partisan instability of the 1850s was drawn to the organized, militant Wide Awakes. In addition, the group provided much-needed political identity to youthful northerners.

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