The Wide Awakes did not just march for show; they embodied the very real struggles dividing the United States in 1860. Over ...

The Wide Awakes started as a small group of young men demonstrating during the 1860 election and became a mass movement of working-class Americans marching to end slavery.

Throughout the 1860 election, the Wide Awakes held mass rallies, marches and demonstrations to combat slave power. Appealing to a generation disillusioned by the political instability of the 1850s ...

The denizens of Broadway were startled last evening by the sudden appearance of a Wide-Awake Torchlight Procession. Quiet people possibly hoped that the monster demonstration of Tuesday night was ...

By the time Lincoln won election in November 1860, hysterical editors predicted a Wide Awake attack on the South. Secessionist newspapers used fears of Wide Awakes to help push states out of the ...

An impromptu procession of Wide-Awakes from the Fourth, Ninth, Tenth, Seventeenth, Eighteenth and other Wards -- in all about 1,000 men -- formed in the vicinity of Cooper Institute on Thursday ...

None other than Abraham Lincoln owed his 1860 election to this kind of movement. New research is proving that youth activism played a critical role in the form of an organized movement who called ...

An image from Harper’s Weekly depicts the ‘Grand procession of Wide-Awakes at New York on the evening of October 3, 1860.’ Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division There’s one ...