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Between late January and Election Day of i860, 23-year-old Charles O'Neill, Jr. of New Haven, Connecticut spent his free time practicing military maneuvers. But he was not preparing to face the Army of Northern Virginia - the Civil War didn't start until April 12, 1 86 1. O'Neill, an elected first lieutenant of the Washington Wide Awakes, a Republican Party-affiliated paramilitary campaign organization (Figure 1), was instead readying for electoral battle against Democrats like the rival Douglas Invincibles. To the young laborer the torch-lit processions, serenades, and occasional brawls were an important part of the most important political campaign of his life: "You may imagine me in a silver and green cape, blue lantern in one hand, a yellow cane in the other, trooping though the mud giving orders, file left, march, shoulder arms, &c.," he wrote his fiancée the week of the momentous election. "Hurrah for old Abe. We are going to win, true as you five" (1).
While O'Neill and his men rarely carried a live firearm or intended to continue drilling after election day, the very public military display of the Wide Awakes further unnerved Southerners already panicked about the election (Figure 1). Formerly moderate newspapers like the Baltimore Sun splattered their pages with secessionist arguments. In the halls of Congress, Texas Senator Louis Wigfall accused New Yorker William Seward of encouraging his "John-Brown, WideAwake Praetorians" to remain organized following Lincoln's election. "One half million of men uniformed and drilled, and the purpose of their organization ... to sweep the country in which I live with fire and sword" (2).
O'Neill and Wigfall were hardly alone that fateful year in ascribing particular significance to an election and, to a larger degree, politics in general. After all, it was a political act - the election of Abraham Lincoln, the first overtly antislavery candidate, to the presidency - that sparked first secession and then war itself. While few historians would disagree that the Civil War had important economic, social, and cultural causes, the fact remains that the Southern states didn't secede because the North had built a vast, industrial economy and wanted to expand it to the West, or because more people read Northern rather than Southern books and periodicals. Secession was a response...