Political Pendulums in America

Early success of Republican Party was driven by wokeness. It started with a clerk, a cape and a speech, and became a movement that grew into a significant percent of the Union Army when the Civil War broke out a year later.

It was 1860, several weeks before the Republican National Convention, where Abraham Lincoln would become the nominee. The clerk was Edgar S. Yergason. He worked at Talcott & Post’s textile shop in Hartford Connecticut. The cape was Yergason’s quickly sewn protection from oil that dripped down the torch he would carry on February 25, 1860. The speech that evening was given by Cassius Marcellus Clay, a passionate abolitionist who advocated for insurrection against slavery.

Slavery was a contested issue in every way possible, whether to ban or allow slavery to persist in new states as they joined the Union, or requiring Free States to return runaway slaves. There was more at work in the abolition movement than doing the right thing. For every abolitionist who recognized that humans owning each other is wrong, there many other antislavery Americans who saw slavery as a way of southern states to count slaves as members of the population for the purpose of increasing southern representation in Congress, without having to give any rights to the enslaved. Lots of people who do the right thing are also self-serving. Other people join in when they see purpose gaining momentum. When Yergason’s co-workers saw his new outfit, they wanted one too. The quickly sewn capes became a uniform of sorts.