Wide Awake by Jon Grinspan

Author:Jon Grinspan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

PART THREE

The Transmogrification of the Wide Awakes

CHAPTER TEN

Permit Me to Suggest a Plan

Some dapper goon had Frederick Douglass by the hair. Another tried to wrench a wooden chair from his hands. Sleeves rolled up, powerful forearms tensing, Douglass grappled manfully for the chair’s wooden spindles. Fellow abolitionists dove in on his side, the ferocious Lewis Hayden likely among them. Hoarse voices in the audience were yelling in Douglass’s direction: “Put him out! Down him! Put a rope round his neck!”1

At Wheeling, rowdies had surrounded the theater. In Baltimore they had swarmed the aisles, but Wide Awakes kept them off the stage. In Boston, weeks after the election that was supposed to have settled everything, there were no Wide Awakes in sight. Lewis Hayden had gathered the American Anti-Slavery Society to mark the one-year anniversary of John Brown’s execution and consider “the Great Question of the Age, ‘How Can American Slavery Be Abolished?’ ” But infuriated by the growing national crisis, proslavery “unionists” stormed the hall and seized the stage, proposing to save the nation by mobbing down abolition.2

The thugs in Boston were an unusual lot, a noticeably well-dressed crew of Beacon Street aristocrats, Harvard students, and conservative Constitutional Unionists. Their leader, a loudmouthed wool manufacturer named Richard S. Fay, had fifty thousand dollars to his name and a working knowledge of committee rules. Even as his buddies pulled hair, Fay commandeered the podium and introduced a series of antiabolitionist resolutions. “Resolved: That the people of this city have submitted too long in allowing irresponsible persons and political demagogues to hold public meetings,” Fay snarled. “They have become a nuisance, which, in self-defense, we are determined shall hence forward be summarily abated.” When some abolitionists in the crowd made a good-faith effort to reason with the invaders, arguing that surely “every man is entitled to express his own opinion,” mobs hooted, “No! No!”3

Frederick Douglass was more blunt. One of America’s most experienced speakers, used to being heckled and Jim Crowed, he was nonetheless surprised by the vehemence of this mob. He could only lob sentence fragments over the chaos of Boston accents arguing over whether he should be silenced: “This is one of the most impudent, (order! order!) barefaced, (knock him down! sit down!) outrageous attacks on free speech (stop him! you shall hear him!)—I can make myself heard—(great confusion) that I have ever witnessed in Boston or elsewhere.” But Douglas understood who had sent these noisy goons. “I know your masters”—he pointed a shaking finger at the rioters—“I have served the same master that you are serving. You are serving the slaveholders.”4

After three hours of warring speeches, scrums for the podium, and wrestling over chairs, the police forced everyone out, including the abolitionists who had booked the hall for a private event. As the “unionists” left, they could be heard calling, “Three cheers for South Carolina!”5

Catching word of the unfolding mayhem, the German revolutionary refugee Karl Henzein rushed to the scene. He was too late. The Tremont Temple was dark, its massive front doors padlocked, Boston’s streets deserted.

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