The Fathers and Saviors of Our Country: A Presidential Sale

47 x 42 in. shield-shaped silk banner, hand-painted and double-sided, blue fringe along edges, silk ties at top edge at corners, eyelets at corners. The obverse reads: "Keene Wide Awake. 'Liberty and Union Now and Forever One and Inseparable.'" The reverse bears a quotation from Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address (1860): "'Let Us Have Faith that Right Makes Might.' A. Lincoln."

A MONUMENTAL 1860 ABRAHAM LINCOLN BANNER.

The Wide Awakes were a grassroots Republican phenomenon that emerged during the presidential campaign of 1860, giving public and highly visible expression to Northern opposition to the expansion of slavery. The movement began in February 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut, after abolitionist Cassius Marcellus Clay delivered a forceful speech on slavery and the stakes of the coming election. When the talk ended, five young textile clerks took to the streets in an impromptu torchlight parade. To shield themselves from dripping torch oil, they wore military-style kepis and black oilcloth capes—an appearance that quickly became the hallmark of the Wide Awakes. What began as a spontaneous demonstration soon spread, with hundreds of Wide Awake clubs forming in towns and cities across the North, giving Republicans a shared visual identity and a sense of collective purpose.

New Hampshire was quick to embrace the movement. Wide Awake clubs appeared in many towns, including Claremont and Keene, which were close rivals in both population and political engagement. Each town organized its own club, and during the state election of March 1860, the Republicans of the two communities agreed to a friendly wager: the town receiving fewer votes for the Republican ticket would present the other with a silk banner from its Wide Awake club. Claremont prevailed by only a narrow margin, and in September 1860 the Keene Wide Awakes formally presented this banner to the town of Claremont. A former Wide Awake member, B. F. Thompson of Springfield, Massachusetts, later recounted this episode in an article, remarking of the banner’s fate, “what has become of it?” (“Minor Topics: The Wide Awakes of 1860,” The Magazine of History with Notes and Queries, Vol.X (Jul–Dec, 1909), pp.293–296).

Both sides of this awe-inspiring banner—almost certainly carried in one of Keene’s torchlight parades during the summer of 1860—feature distinct and compelling imagery and slogans. The obverse displays the bold declaration “LIBERTY AND UNION, Now and Forever, One and Inseparable,” a phrase that became a Republican rallying cry in 1860 but originated three decades earlier. The words were famously spoken by Senator Daniel Webster in 1830 during his debate with South Carolina Senator Robert Y. Hayne over protective tariffs championed by Andrew Jackson. 

Lincoln adopted and championed the core idea of “Liberty and Union, now and forever," integrating it into his own political philosophy and rhetoric. He echoed this principle in major addresses such as the so-called “Lost Speech” of 1856 and the “House Divided” speech of 1858, using it to argue that the American Union must be preserved precisely because it was the guarantor of liberty—most critically, freedom from slavery. For Lincoln, liberty and union were inseparable principles, each dependent upon the other and together essential to the nation’s survival.

The reverse bears an equally consequential statement on the same theme, this time voiced by Lincoln himself. Lincoln delivered his Cooper Union Address on 27 February 1860, in New York City, at a moment when the nation stood on the brink of sectional rupture. Invited east by Republican leaders who were uncertain of his national stature, Lincoln used the occasion to present himself as a sober constitutional thinker rather than a radical agitator. The speech was carefully researched and methodically argued, drawing on the public record of the Founders to demonstrate that opposition to the expansion of slavery was not only morally justified but firmly grounded in the intentions of those who framed the Constitution. By anchoring his argument in history and law, Lincoln sought to reassure Northern moderates while directly challenging Southern claims that the Republican Party threatened the constitutional order.

The closing line of the address—“Let us have faith that right makes might”—summarized Lincoln’s central conviction that moral principle, rather than force or expediency, was the true source of national strength. At a time when Southern leaders increasingly justified secession through appeals to power and inevitability, Lincoln asserted that the Union’s legitimacy rested on adherence to justice and constitutional right. The phrase reversed the common maxim that “might makes right,” affirming instead that the preservation of the Union depended upon fidelity to its founding ideals. It was this speech, and these words in particular, that propelled Lincoln into national prominence, earning him strong support in New England and helping to secure his nomination at the Republican National Convention (the “Wigwam”) in May.

A small appliquéd square of fabric was sewn over the “S” in “Wide Awakes.” This appears to be a period alteration, likely intended to shift the banner’s wording from a reference to the name of the organization to the adjective “Wide Awake,” emphasizing alertness, vigilance, and political consciousness rather than merely identifying the club itself.

Read in hindsight, this subtle modification carries an almost prophetic weight, suggesting a heightened awareness of the gravity of the moment and the forces gathering beyond the campaign season. As one contemporary later reflected on the movement and its participants: "Every town, village and city had its company of Wide Awakes—marching, drilling,—marching. They were made up of men who knew the issues at stake. They marched with firm step and determined look; there was no hilarity, no buncombe; they realized that whatever way the election resulted it was freighted with momentous consequences to all future generations. Alas! In a few months the boys were 'really' marching over the hills and valleys of the South. They had 'real' guns in their hands which became 'real' torches of fire. So true that 'coming events cast their shadows before them'" (ibid).