Sensationalism In Historical Context: Wide-Awakes & The Civil War

If you think the spread of sensationalism and “alternative facts” and their divisive effect on the American people are 21st century phenomena, think again. There may be no comparison between the instantaneous, often individually provocative communication of our Internet and the communication technologies of the mid-19th century.

Nevertheless, the pre-Civil War media landscape was hardly calm or trustworthy.

The mid-1800s coincided with a sudden boom in communication. Newspapers had existed for centuries. But the growing rate of literacy in that era gave rise to an explosion of print media and millions of news junkies.

Consider that in the year 1800 there were just a handful of publications nationwide. Yet by 1860, their number had swelled to some 4,000 brawling broadsheets, tabloids and magazines generating hundreds of millions of pages annually.

And as one might imagine, they ran the gamut of style, subject matter and points of view, from the irreverent, very popular New York Herald to the lurid true crime reports of the National Police Gazette to the anti-slavery screeds of The Liberator.

The truth is there was no concept of journalistic ethics or independence at the time (not until the early 20th century). Most of the newsmen (they were nearly all men) of the day were less than upstanding, rational or non-partisan. They fed their papers scandals, rumors, reputational assaults, all of which were published and consumed by a ravenous public who could not get enough.

In addition, 95 percent of news publications had explicit political affiliations. Many were even bankrolled by the parties directly. The atmosphere was a  journalistic free-for-all that incited frequent attacks on editors — often by other editors, and riled mobs.

Well into the 20th century, communities were still pulling newspaper presses out of local rivers, hurled there by angry rioters.

New Technology

Into this already inflammatory mix came the telegraph. Before its introduction in the 1840s, the majority of disputes and hostilities revolved around local issues. The major parties were able to avoid discussing slavery, which they did punctiliously.

Now, however, opinion and events in one locale could be disseminated along electrical wires to far-flung corners of the country and the topic of slavery shot to the forefront.

An abolitionist press, The National Era, first printed Harriet Beecher Stowe’s revolutionary Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the most influential antislavery novel in history. At the same time, the radical pro-slavery magazine De Bow’s Review proselytized the expansion of slavery to our very borders.

Americans living thousands of miles from one another argued the issue. The only gatekeepers were editors who, let’s face it, profited from spreading outrage. Somewhat parallel to today, the seething exchanges fomented activism.

The North, in particular, reacted to the abhorrent daily feed of slavery’s evils. Early in the 1860 election, a group of young clerks in Connecticut formed a club to help campaign for Abraham Lincoln and the antislavery Republican Party.

When a local editor wrote that the Republicans seemed “Wide Awake” in their campaign, the boys named their club “The Wide-Awakes”— a movement that ultimately became so huge, its offensive in newspapers and polling places helped lead to the Civil War.

Organization and Polarization

The Wide-Awakes were generally anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic. But they were perhaps better known for their caps, capes and dramatic torchlight parades. They donned militaristic uniforms, held midnight rallies and adopted an open eye as their all-seeing symbol.

Publicized through the country’s vast newspaper network, the movement caught fire. Within months of its founding, young Republicans were forming clubs from Connecticut to California.

Emulating the strategies they read in the papers, they aligned themselves with news organizations, cheering friendly publications’ offices and harassing pro-slavery  Democratic press headquarters. Friendly editors reciprocated, demonstrating with the Wide-Awakes and encouraging readers to form more clubs.

Certainly this was not an example of independent journalism. But it was effective. In short order the Wide-Awakes amassed some 500,000 members, one of the largest partisan groups America had ever seen.

Irrational Panic, Outright Lies

Much of the South saw the clubs as a partisan paramilitary organization and fear shaped its response. Newspaper accounts were wild. Misinformation, deliberate disinformation and exaggeration ruled the day. Supposedly:

• The Wide-Awakes were preparing, not for an election, but a war.

• Based on a few hundred African-American members in Boston, the Wide-Awakes were a “Negro organization” plotting a race war.

• Lincoln was elected president, so now a Wide-Awake invasion of the South was imminent.

• In response, states should secede from the Union.

Wide-Awake editors reacted in kind and what began in ink spiraled into lead and steel.

• German newspapermen in St. Louis helped arm Wide-Awake clubs for combat.

• In Pennsylvania an editor ordered Republicans to form military companies, take up muskets and “let the earth shake to the tread of three millions of armed Wide-Awakes.”

It took 16 years after the telegraph was introduced for the Civil War to be declared. Undoubtedly, the fight over slavery caused the conflict, but newspapers fed it, amplified it and exaggerated it.

Mid-19th century Americans lived with an odd combination: an unprecedented ability to spread information, but also a siloed and partisan system of  interpreting it. This history can add a needed perspective to today’s political conflicts, so often magnified by social media.

In both eras, new technologies supercharged existing political tensions. The lesson is not that they are an unstoppable force that will consume democracy; they are rather a succession of new, havoc-wreaking media landscapes that must be tamed.

Adapted from Jon Grinspan, Political History Curator, “How a Newspaper Revolution Sparked Protesters and Influencers: Disinformation and the Civil War,” Smithsonian Magazine—The Daily, October 8, 2024. Grinspan is also author of Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force that Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024).

A version of this article was first published in the Blackwell’s Almanac, a quarterly journal of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society. The Roosevelt Island Historical Society, founded in 1977 to recover, maintain and disseminate the record of Roosevelt Island’s heritage from colonial times to the present. Visit their website at www.rihs.us.

Illustrations, from above: Wide Awakes parade past newspaper offices in Lower Manhattan  during one of a series of political rallies held in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, and Boston during the first week of October 1860; anti-slavery political cartoon, 1856 (Library of Congress); George Baza Woodward, a member of the Wide Awakes, in his oil cloth cape and hat, holding a whale oil torch, taken some time in 1860 (Library of Congress); and a pro-slavery newspaper column from The Crisis, Columbus, Ohio, September, 24, 1862.