Know Nothings

Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s

Tyler Anbinder, 1992

Tyler Anbinder is an American Historian who focuses on the period before the Civil War. In this, his first book, he argued that the Know Nothing party was formed and motivated by combination of anti-Catholic, nativist, and anti-slavery sentiments.  Anti-slavery attracted many northerners, which helped swell the ranks of the party initially but eroded its strength as more specifically-abolitionist political options became available. Anbinder also suggested that interest in the party reflected a lot of pent-up frustration with the two main parties, the Whigs and Democrats. This generalized discontent also facilitated a lot of people’s eventual shift from Know Nothingism to Republicanism.

“From 1845 to 1854,” Anbinder said, “some 2,900,000 immigrants landed in the United States, more than had come in the seven previous decades combined. As a percentage of the nation’s total population, the influx of immigrants...amounting to 14.5 percent of the 1845 population, has never been surpassed.” Although their numbers were high, their initial political impact was probably fairly weak, due to the types of persistence issues described by Thernstron and Knights in “Men in Motion” (which I’ve reviewed already). Over time there was also a change in the fortunes of the immigrants. “Irish immigrants to the United States in the two decades after the War of 1812 tended to be...well-to-do farmers and middle-class city dwellers...[and] usually brought business or artisanal skills with them. Then the Irish Famine struck in 1845. “It is estimated that between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 Irishmen died either of starvation or of starvation-related illness (out of a total pre-famine population of 8,000,000) during the famine,” Anbinder noted. Another couple of million fled Ireland, many moving to America in desperate poverty. The population of Ireland has never recovered, and is still only about five million.

After the failed revolutions of 1848, the Irish were joined by German refugees. “Although they received less publicity than the Irish, nearly as many Germans emigrated to the United States during the mid-1800s,” Anbinder said. “In fact, in the peak year of immigration, 1854, German emigration to the United States outpaced that from Ireland by two to one.” He does mention that counterintuitively, many of “the sources of greatest emigration do not correspond to the areas of revolutionary unrest.” So maybe we should avoid oversimplifying their story.

“By 1855, immigrants outnumbered native-born citizens in Chicago, Detroit, and Milwaukee, and...would soon surpass the native in New York, Brooklyn, Buffalo, Cleveland, and Cincinnatti.” It’s significant, I think, that the new cities of the west became largely occupied by recent immigrants; but that even in the older cities of the east and Ohio, foreign-born people outnumbered natives.

This alarmed WASPs, who felt their culture was under attack. For example, artist-inventor “Samuel F. B. Morse charged in a series of published letters that the monarchies of Europe had enlisted the aid of the Catholic Church to subvert the spread of democracy by sending Catholic immigrants to take control of the under-populated American west.” Morse’s father, Jedediah, had been one of the main proponents of the Illuminati Conspiracy a generation earlier, so apparently the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

Know-Nothingism was widespread enough that everybody had to announce their position in order to participate in politics. Members of the new Republican Party, formed in 1854, worked diligently to highlight the differences between their platform and that of the Know Nothings. Abraham Lincoln wrote in a letter to his friend Joshua Speed in 1855:

I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people?  Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal”. We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes”. When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics”. When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

Anbinder thanked Harvard historian William Gienapp in his acknowledgements, but the two differed in their accounts of antebellum politics. The disagreement seemed to revolve around Gienapp’s claim that in the 1854 elections, nativism trumped anti-slavery and that’s why the Know Nothings did so well. Anbinder suggested that a Know Nothing “vote usually carried both anti-Catholic and anti-slavery connotations. The temperance issue also drew many voters to the Know Nothing ticket, as did a general resentment toward the existing parties.” This explanation seems to suggest a bit more nuance — or at least that more concerns were represented in some people’s support of the protest party. The Republican Party was equally new, but had the advantage of being formed via a coalition between the abolitionists and the Whigs. Even so, Anbinder agreed that “if the question is posed...to determine whether anti-slavery or Know Nothingism played a key role in the Democrats’ defeat” in the 1854 midterm elections, “it is evident that Know Nothingism was the decisive factor in bringing about the Democratic setback in Pennsylvania.” In this election, halfway through Democrat Franklin Pierce’s term, the Know Nothings won more seats in the House of Representatives than any other third party in US History.