The "Wide Awake" organization grew out of the first campaign meeting in Hartford on February 25, 1860--State election campaign. Hon. Cassius M. Clay was the speaker, and after the meeting was escorted to the Allyn House by a torch-light parade. Two of the young men who were to carry torches, D.G. Francis and H.P. Blair, being dry goods clerks, in order to protect their clothing from dust and the oil liable to fall from the torches, had prepared capes of black cambric, which they wore in connection, with the glazed caps commonly worn at the time. Colonel George P. Bissell, who was marshal, noticing the uniform, put the wearers in front, where the novelty of the rig and its double advantage of utility and show attracted much attention. It was at once proposed to form a campaign club of fifty torch-bearers with glazed caps and oil-cloth capes instead of cambric; the torch-bearing club to be "auxiliary to the Young Men's Republican Union." A meeting to organize formally was appointed for March 6; but before the new uniforms were all ready, Abraham Lincoln addressed a meeting in Hartford on the evening of March 5. After his speech, the cape-wearers of the previous meeting with a number of others who had secured their uniforms escorted Mr. Lincoln to the hotel. The club was definitely organized on the following night. William P. Fuller, city editor, had, in noticing this meeting for organization, written in the "Courant" of March 3: "THE WIDE AWAKES.--The Republican club-room last evening was filled as usual with those who are going to partake in the great Republican triumph, in this State in April next," etc., etc. The name "Wide Awakes" was here applied to the Republican Young Men's Union, torch-bearers included; but at the meeting of March 6, the torch-bearers appropriated it by making it the distinctive title to their own special organization, which almost immediately, there as elsewhere, swallowed up the names and the memberships of other Republican clubs. Just one year after they escorted Mr. Lincoln in their first parade, he was inaugurated President of the United States.