II
The nativist parties that had flared up in the early 1840s died back to embers after the elections of 1844. Recovery from the depression mitigated the tensions between native and foreign-born workers which had sparked the riots of that year. Even as the volume of immigration quadrupled following the European potato blight of the mid-forties, the accelerating
27. Don E. Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the i850's (New York, 1962), 37–39. This balloting was not for Douglas's seat in the Senate. Having been reelected in 1852, Douglas would come up again in 1858 when he faced Lincoln in a more famous contest.
28. Holt, Political Crisis of the 1850s, 157–58.
American economy seemed able to absorb all who came. The Mexican War and the ensuing controversy over slavery focused political energy on those issues. War against a Catholic nation might have been expected to fan anti-Roman sentiments—except that the Democratic war party was also the party of immigrants, while the Whigs, who had earlier dallied with nativism, opposed the war.
In the 1852 presidential election the Whigs, led by anti-nativist William H. Seward, tried to appeal for the Irish and Catholic vote. General Scott, Whig presidential candidate, was a high-church Episcopalian who had educated his daughters in a convent. As commander of American forces in Mexico he had protected Church property. In 1852 the Whigs planted friendly Irish questioners in audiences addressed by Scott, giving the candidate a chance to declare how much he "loved to hear that rich Irish brogue."29 But this clumsy effort backfired, for while Irish Americans as usual voted Democratic, many Whigs were offended by the appeal to "paddies" and stayed home on election day. As the slavery issue knocked southern Whigs loose from their party, a renewal of ethnic hostilities did the same in a number of northern states.
Several causes contributed to this revival of nativism. Immigration during the first five years of the 1850s reached a level five times greater than a decade earlier. Most of the new arrivals were poor Catholic peasants or laborers from Ireland and Germany who crowded into the tenements of large cities. Crime and welfare costs soared. Cincinnati's crime rate, for example, tripled between 1846 and 1853 and its murder rate increased sevenfold. Boston's expenditures for poor relief rose threefold during the same period.30 Native-born Americans attributed these increases to immigrants, especially the Irish, whose arrest rate and share of relief funds were several times their percentage of the population. Natives were not necessarily the most nativist. Earlier Protestant immigrants from England, Scotland, and especially Ulster had brought their anti-Catholic sentiments with them and often formed the vanguard of anti-Irish rioters and voters in the United States. Radicals and agnostics among the Forty-eighters who had fled Germany after suppression of the 1848 revolutions carried to America a bitter enmity toward the Catholic Church which had sided with the forces of counterrevolution.
29. Potter, Impending Crisis, 245.
30. Jed Dannenbaum, "Immigrants and Temperance: Ethnocultural Conflict in Cincinnati, 1845–1860," Ohio History, 87 (1978), 127–28; Oscar Handlin, Boston's Immigrants: A Study in Acculturation (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), 240.
Indeed, the Church entered a period of reaction during the papacy of Pius IX (1846–78). The 1848–49 revolutions and wars of unification in Italy made Pius "a violent enemy of liberalism and social reform." He subsequently proclaimed the doctrine of papal infallibility and issued his Syllabus of Errors condemning socialism, public education, rationalism, and other such iniquities. "It is an error," declared the Pope, "to believe that the Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself to, and agree with, progress, liberalism, and modern civilization." The American Catholic hierarchy took its cue from the Pope. Archbishop John Hughes of New York attacked abolitionists, Free Soilers, and various Protestant reform movements as kin to the "Red Republicanism" of Europe.31
Immigration had caused Catholic church membership to grow three times faster than Protestant membership in the 1840s. Pointing with pride to this fact (which Protestants viewed with alarm), Archbishop Hughes in 1850 delivered a well-publicized address The Decline of Protestantism and Its Causes. "The object we hope to accomplish," said Hughes, "is to convert all Pagan nations, and all Protestant nations. . . . There is no secrecy in all this. . . . Our mission [is] to convert the world—including the inhabitants of the United States—the people of the cities, and the people of the country . . . the Legislatures, the Senate, the Cabinet, the President, and all!" The archbishopric's newspaper proclaimed that "Protestantism is effete, powerless, dying out . . . and conscious that its last moment is come when it is fairly set, face to face, with Catholic truth."32
Such words fanned the embers of anti-Catholicism. Folk memories of Bloody Mary, the Spanish Armada, the Gunpowder Plot, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and Foxe's Book of Martyrs were part of the Anglo-American Protestant consciousness. The Puritan war against popery had gone on for two and one-half centuries and was not over yet. In 1852 the first Plenary Council of American bishops, meeting in Baltimore, attacked the godlessness of public education and decided to seek
31. Quotations from Robert Kelley, The Transatlantic Persuasion: The Liberal-Democratic Mind in the Age of Gladstone (New York, 1969), 106; Eric Hobsbawm, TheAge of Capital, 1848–1875 (New York, 1976), 106; Walter G. Sharrow, "Northern Catholic Intellectuals and the Coming of the Civil War," New-York Historical Society Quarterly, 58 (1974), 45.
32. Hughes's address is quoted in Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade 1800–1860 (New York, 1938), 291; Freeman's Journal, March 4, 1848, quoted in ibid., 290.
tax support for Catholic schools or tax relief for parents who sent their children to such schools. During 1852–53 this effort set off bitter campaigns in a dozen northern cities and states (including Maryland). "Free School" tickets drawn from both major parties, but especially from the Whigs, won several elections on the platform of defending public schools as the nursery of republicanism against the "bold effort" of this "despotic faith" to "unite . . . the Church and the State," to "uproot the tree of Liberty" and "substitute the mitre for our liberty cap." Archbishop Hughes replied in kind, branding public schools as wellsprings of "Socialism, Red Republicanism, Universalism, Infidelity, Deism, Atheism, and Pantheism."33
In the midst of these school campaigns, Hughes threw the hierarchy into another emotional struggle, this one over control of church property. Catholic churches in many areas were owned by a lay board of trustees representing the congregation. This accorded with Protestant practice but defied Catholic tradition. Attempts by the clergy to gain control of church property reached into several state legislatures, which refused after acrimonious debates to sanction clerical control—and indeed, in some cases tried to mandate lay control. In July 1853 Monsi-gnor Gaetano Bedini arrived in the United States as a papal nuncio to adjudicate the property dispute in certain dioceses. After doing so in favor of the clergy, Bedini toured the country to bestow the papal blessing on American Catholics. Much of the Protestant and nativist press erupted in frenzy. "He is here," exclaimed one journal, "to find the best way to rivet Italian chains upon us which will bind us as slaves to the throne of the most fierce tyranny the world knows." The Church's role in suppressing Italian nationalist uprisings in 1848–49 also aroused radical expatriates from several Catholic countries against Bedini, whom they labeled the "Butcher of Bologna." As Bedini's tour continued, riots broke out in several cities that he visited, and upon his departure for Italy in February 1854 he had to be smuggled aboard a ship in the New York harbor to escape a mob.34
The temperance movement also exacerbated ethnic tensions. Before 1850 this movement had been primarily one of self-denial and moral
33. Dannenbaum, "Immigrants and Temperance," loc. cit., 129; Holt, Political Crisis of the 1850s, 162; Vincent P. Lannie, "Alienation in America: The Immigrant Catholic and Public Education in Pre-Civil War America," Review of Politics, 32 (1970), 515.
34. Billington, Protestant Crusade, 300–303.
suasion aimed at persuading the Protestant middle and working classes to cast out demon rum and become sober, hard-working, upward-striving citizens. As such it had enjoyed an astonishing success. But conspicuous holdouts against this dry crusade were Irish and German immigrants, for whom taverns and beer gardens were centers of social and political life. A perceived rise of drunkenness, brawling, and crime especially among the Irish population helped turn temperance reform into a coercive movement aimed at this recalcitrant element. Believing that liquor was a cause of social disorder, prohibitionists sought passage of state laws to ban the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. They achieved their first major victory in Maine in 1851. This success set off a wave of "Maine law" debates in other legislatures. The Democratic party generally opposed temperance laws while the Whigs were divided. Fearful of alienating "wet" voters, Whigs refused to take a stand and thereby estranged the large temperance component in their ranks. Coalitions of drys from all parties captured control of enough legislatures from 1852 to 1855 to enact Maine laws in a dozen additional states including all of New England, New York and Delaware, and several midwestern states.35
These laws, like Prohibition in a later generation, were frequently honored in the breach. Nonenforcement was widespread; legislatures or courts in several states subsequently repealed the laws or restricted their scope. Those who wanted to drink could continue to do so; those who did not had stopped doing so under the influence of the earlier moral-suasion phase of the crusade. By 1861 only three of the thirteen states that had legislated prohibition were still dry. The larger significance of the prohibition movement in the 1850s was not the laws it enacted but the impetus it gave to nativism. A Catholic newspaper classified prohibition with "State Education Systems, Infidelity, Pantheism," abolitionism, socialism, women's rights, and "European Red Republicanism" as "parts of a great whole, at war with God." Temperance advocates replied in kind. "It is liquor which fills so many Catholic (as well as other)
35. There are a number of good studies of drinking and the temperance movement in this era: see especially Ian R. Tyrrell, Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America, 1800–1860 (Westport, Conn., 1979); W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York, 1976); Jed Dannen-baum, Drink and Disorder: Temperance Reform in Cincinnati from the Washingtonian Revival to the WCTU (Urbana, 1984); and Norman H. Clark, Deliver Us from Evil: An Interpretation of American Prohibition (New York, 1976), chaps. 2–4.
homes with discord and violence . . . fills our prisons with Irish culprits, and makes the gallows hideous with so many Catholic murderers," declared Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. "The fact that the Catholics of this country keep a great many more grog shops and sell more liquor in proportion to their number than any other denomination, creates and keeps alive a strong prejudice against them."36
Buffeted by the winds of anti-Nebraska, anti-liquor, anti-Catholic, and anti-immigrant, the two-party system in the North was ready for collapse by 1854. And it was not only the antislavery Republicans who picked up the pieces. In several states a new and powerful nativist party seemed to glean even more from the wreckage. A number of secret fraternal societies restricted in membership to native-born Protestants had sprung up by the 1850s. Two of them in New York, the Order of United Americans and the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, had merged in 1852 under the leadership of James Barker. Against the background of Protestant-Catholic clashes over public schools, the Bedini visit, and temperance campaigns, the dynamic Barker organized hundreds of lodges all over the country with an estimated membership ranging up to a million or more. Members were pledged to vote for no one except native-born Protestants for public office. In secret councils the Order endorsed certain candidates or nominated its own. When asked by outsiders about the Order, members were to respond "I know nothing." Because of their secrecy and tight-knit organization, these "Know Nothings" became a potentially powerful voting bloc.37
They drew their membership mainly from young men in white-collar and skilled blue-collar occupations. A good many of them were new voters. One analysis showed that men in their twenties were twice as likely to vote Know Nothing as men over thirty. Their leaders were also "new men" in politics who reflected the social backgrounds of their
36. Cincinnati Catholic Telegraph, March 19, July 9, 1853, quoted in Dannenbaum, "Immigrants and Temperance," loc. cit., 134; New York Tribune, quoted in Nevins, Ordeal, II, 329.
37. General treatments of the Know Nothings include Billington, Protestant Crusade, especially chaps. 11–26; Ira M. Leonard and Robert D. Parmet, American Nativism, 1830–1860 (New York, 1971); and Carleton Beals, Brass-Knuckle Crusade: The Great Know-Nothing Conspiracy, 1820–1860 (New York, 1960), a sensationalized and untrustworthy account. In addition to several state studies of the Know Nothings, there is one regional monograph: W. Darrell Overdyke, The Know-Nothing Party in the South (Baton Rouge, 1950). For the Catholic response, see Robert Francis Hueston, The Catholic Press and Nativism 1840–1860 (New York, 1976).
constituency. In Pittsburgh more than half of the Know-Nothing leaders were under thirty-five and nearly half were artisans and clerks. Know Nothings elected to the Massachusetts legislature in 1854 consisted mainly of skilled workers, rural clergymen, and clerks in various enterprises. Maryland's leaders were younger and less affluent than their Democratic counterparts.38
As a political movement, the Know Nothings had a platform as well as prejudices. They generally favored temperance and always opposed tax support for parochial schools. Their main goal was to reduce the power of foreign-born voters in politics. Under federal law, immigrants could become naturalized citizens after five years in the United States. In a few large cities Democratic judges obligingly issued naturalization papers almost as soon as immigrants got off the boat. Most states limited the vote to citizens, though several allowed immigrants to vote within a year of establishing residence. By the early 1850s the heavy wave of immigration that had begun in 1846 was showing up in voting rolls. Since immigrants were preponderantly young adults, the number of foreign-born voters grew faster than their proportion of the population. In Boston, for example, immigrant voters increased by 195 percent from 1850 to 1855 while the native-born vote rose only 14 percent. Because this "foreign" vote was mainly Democratic, Catholic, and wet, its rapid growth had alarming implications to Whigs, Protestants, and temperance reformers—and even to some native-born Democrats of the working class who found themselves competing with foreign-born laborers willing to work for lower wages. Rural residents also resented the growing power of the immigrant vote in the cities. The Know Nothings called for an increase of the waiting period for naturalization to twenty-one years. In some states they wished to restrict officeholding to native-born citizens and to impose a waiting period of several years after naturalization before immigrants could vote. They did not propose limits on immigration per se, though some Know Nothings probably hoped that by making citizenship and political rights more difficult to obtain they might discourage immigrants from coming to the United States.
Most Know Nothings in northern states also opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
38. Holt, Political Crisis of the 1850s, 186–89; Gienapp, "Origins of the Republican Party," 348–49; Jean H. Baker, Ambivalent Americans: The Know-Nothing Party in Maryland (Baltimore, 1977), 63–68; Robert D. Parmet, "Connecticut's Know-Nothings: A Profile," The Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin, 31 (July 1966), 84–90; Dale Baum, The Civil War Party System: The Case of Massachusetts, 1848–1876 (Chapel Hill, 1984), 27–28.
In some areas they joined anti-Nebraska coalitions in 1854. This raised the complex question of the relationship between Know Nothings and the new Republican party. The antislavery movement grew from the same cultural soil of evangelical Protestanism as temperance and nativism. Some free soilers viewed slavery and Catholicism alike as repressive institutions. Both were "founded and supported on the basis of ignorance and tyranny," resolved a Know-Nothing lodge in Massachusetts, and thus "there can exist no real hostility to Roman Catholicism which does not embrace slavery, its natural co-worker in opposition to freedom and republican institutions."39 The support of immigrant Catholic voters for the proslavery "Hunker" wing of the Democratic party cemented this perceived identity of slavery and Catholicism. So did frequent editorials in the Catholic press branding the free-soil movement as "wild, lawless, destructive fanaticism." Competing with free blacks at the bottom of the social order, Irish Americans were intensely anti-Negro and frequently rioted against black people in northern cities. In 1846 a solid Irish vote had helped defeat a referendum to grant equal voting rights to blacks in New York state. "No other class of our citizens was so zealous, so unanimous in its hostility to Equal Suffrage without regard to color," commented the New York Tribune bitterly. " 'Would you have your daughter marry a naygur?' was their standing flout at the champions of democracy irrespective of race and color." In 1854 a Massachusetts free soiler summarized the issues in the forthcoming elections as "freedom, temperance, and Protestantism against slavery, rum, and Romanism."40
On the other hand, many antislavery leaders recognized the incongruity of nativism with their own ideology. "I do not perceive," wrote Abraham Lincoln, "how any one professing to be sensitive to the wrongs of the negroes, can join in a league to degrade a class of white men." William H. Seward had battled the nativists in his state for more than a decade. The New York Republican platform in 1855 declared that "we repudiate and condemn the proscriptive and anti-republican doctrines of the order of Know-Nothings."41 An "anti-slavery man," said George W. Julian, founder of the Republican party in Indiana, "is, of
39. Billington, Protestant Crusade, 425. For a fuller treatment of this question, see William E. Gienapp, "Nativism and the Creation of a Republican Majority in the North before the Civil War," JAH, 72 (1985), 529–59.
40. Hueston, The Catholic Press and Nativism, 211; New York Tribune, Aug. 26, 1854; Boston Advertiser, quoted in Gienapp, "Origins of the Republican Party," 500.
41. CWL, II, 316; Gienapp, "Nativism and the Creation of a Republican Majority," loc. cit., 537.
necessity, the enemy of [this] organized scheme of bigotry and proscription, which can only be remembered as the crowning and indelible shame of our politics." Since "we are against Black Slavery, because the slaves are deprived of human rights," declared other Republicans, "we are also against . . . [ this] system of Northern Slavery to be created by disfranchising the Irish and Germans."42
Genuine free soilers also deplored the Know-Nothing craze as a red herring that diverted attention from "the real question of the age," slavery. "Neither the Pope nor the foreigners ever can govern the country or endanger its liberties," wrote Charles A. Dana, managing editor of Greeley'sNew York Tribune, "but the slavebreeders and slavetraders do govern it." Dana vowed in 1854 never to mention the Know Nothings in the Tribune "except to give 'em a devil of a whale."43 George Julian even suspected that this "distracting crusade against the Pope and foreigners" was a "cunning" scheme of proslavery interests "to divide the people of the free states upon trifles and side issues, while the South remained a unit in defense of its great interest."44
Nevertheless, as a matter of political expediency, free-soil leaders in several states formed alliances with the Know Nothings in 1854 and 1855. In some cases they did so with the intention of taking over the movement in order to channel it in an antislavery direction. Massachusetts provided the clearest example of this. In that state the issues of the Mexican War and Wilmot Proviso had reshuffled political alignments so that a coalition of Free Soilers (including Conscience Whigs) and Democrats had gained control of the legislature from 1850 to 1852. The coalition elected Charles Sumner to the Senate and proposed or passed a number of reforms: a mechanic's lien law, a ten-hour law for laborers, general banking and incorporation laws, prohibition legislation, and re-apportionment of the legislature to shift some power from Boston (with its Cotton Whigs and its large Irish vote) to central and western Massachusetts. The conservative Whig and Boston vote narrowly defeated re-apportionment in a referendum in 1853. This provided the main spark for the Know-Nothing fire of 1854 that swept out of western Massachusetts
42. Gienapp, "Origins of the Republican Party," 641; Hans L. Trefousse, The RadicalRepublicans: Lincoln's Vanguard for Racial Justice (New York, 1969), 86; Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 269; Holt, Political Crisis of the 1850s, 171.
43. Liberator, Nov. 10, 1854; Dana quoted in Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, FreeMen: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970), 234, and in Trefousse, The Radical Republicans, 85.
44. Quoted in Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 233, and in Sewell, Ballots forFreedom, 267.
and kindled the whole state, electing the governor, an overwhelming majority of the legislature, and all of the congressmen. The Whig establishment was traumatized by this conflagration. "I no more suspected the impending result," wrote a Whig journalist, "than I looked for an earthquake which would level the State House and reduce Fa-neuil Hall to a heap of ruins."45
Free Soil/Republican leaders like Charles Francis Adams and Charles Sumner were taken equally by surprise. But that was not true of all free soilers. Indeed one of them, Henry Wilson, had much to do with the outcome. Like many of the younger Know-Nothing voters, Wilson had been an apprentice and journeyman shoemaker in his youth. The "Natick Cobbler," as he was called, became a shoe manufacturer, went into politics as a Whig, and in 1848 helped found the Free Soil party. In 1854 the new Republican party nominated Wilson for governor. Whigs, Democrats, and Know Nothings also nominated candidates. Shrewdly perceiving that the nativist frenzy would overwhelm the other parties, Wilson joined the Know-Nothing movement in the hope of controlling it. Some free soilers expressed disgust with this strategy. "When the freedom of an empire is at issue," wrote one of them, "Wilson runs off to chase a paddy!"46 Wilson remained on the ticket as Republican candidate but came in a distant fourth, having persuaded most of his free-soil followers to vote Know Nothing.
There was method in Wilson's apparent madness, as a choleric Cotton Whig recognized. The Know Nothings, he wrote, "have been controlled by the most desperate sort of Free Soil adventurers. Henry Wilson and Anson Burlingame have ruled the hour. . . . Our members of Congress are one and all of the ultra-agitation Anti-Slavery Stamp."47 The Know-Nothing legislature elected Wilson to the Senate, where he did nothing for nativism but much for the antislavery cause. The only nativist laws passed by this legislature were a literacy qualification for voting and a measure disbanding several Irish militia companies—and the latter was in part an antislavery gesture, since these companies had provided much of the manpower that returned Anthony Burns to bondage.48 The legislature also enacted a new personal liberty law and a
45. Gienapp, "Origins of the Republican Party," 493.
46. Edward L. Pierce to Horace Mann, Jan. 18, 1855, quoted in ibid., 592.
47. Robert C. Winthrop to John P. Kennedy, Jan. 3, 1855, quoted in Nevins, Ordeal, II, 343.
48. The legislatures of Connecticut and Rhode Island also enacted literacy qualifications for voting. Only some 4 or 5 percent of adults in these states were illiterate—but most of them were Irish immigrants. Know Nothings with Republican support subsequently passed a law requiring naturalized citizens in Massachusetts to wait two years after naturalization before they could vote. This requirement was repealed during the Civil War. In 1850 Republican legislatures in New York and Michigan passed voter registration laws designed to curb illegal voting, measures aimed in part at practices attributed to big-city Democratic machines and Irish voters. Joel H. Silbey, The Partisan Imperative: The Dynamics of American Politics Before the Civil War (New York, 1985), 141–54; Ronald P. Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827–1861 (Princeton, 1971), 285–87.
bill forbidding racial segregation in public schools—the first such law ever passed. In addition, these Know-Nothing lawmakers passed a series of reform measures that earned them an ironic reputation as one of the most progressive legislatures in the state's history: abolition of imprisonment for debt, a married women's property act, creation of an insurance commission, compulsory vaccination of school children, expansion of the power of juries, and homestead exemption from seizure for debt.49
Republicans and Know-Nothings had succeeded in breaking down the Whigs and weakening the Democrats in most parts of the North. But in 1855 it remained uncertain which of these two new parties would emerge as the principal alternative to the Democrats. In about half of the states, Republicans had become the second major party. In the other half the American party, as the Know Nothings now named their political arm, seemed to prevail. But a development of great significance occurred in 1855. The center of nativist gravity began to shift southward. While the Know Nothings added Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and California to the state governments they controlled, they also won elections in Maryland and Kentucky, gained control of the Tennessee legislature, polled at least 45 percent of the votes in five other southern states, and did better in the South as a whole than the Whigs had done since 1848.
In much of the South the American party was essentially the Whig party under a new name. To be sure, a tradition of nativism existed in the South despite the relatively small number of immigrants and Catholics there. This nativism undergirded the American party in Maryland, Louisiana, Missouri, and to some degree in Kentucky—states that contained cities with large immigrant populations. "Citizens of New Orleans!!" proclaimed a political handbill of 1854. "You have an important duty to perform tomorrow in the election of a District Attorney. . . .
49. Baum, The Civil War Party System, 27–31.
Father Mullen and the Jesuits can no longer rule this city. . . . The Irish are . . . making our elections scenes of violence and fraud. . . . Americans! Shall we be ruled by Irish and Germans?"50 Nativist riots and election-day violence figured more prominently in southern cities than in the North. In Baltimore various gangs such as the Plug Uglies and Blood Tubs became notorious enforcers of Know-Nothing dominance at the ballot box. Ethnic political riots killed four people in New Orleans, ten in St. Louis, seventeen in Baltimore, and at least twenty-two in Louisville during the mid-1850s. In some areas of the upper South, especially Maryland, the American party appealed equally to Democrats and Whigs. But elsewhere in the South it drew mainly from former Whigs who preferred the political company of nativists to that of Democrats. And the Know Nothings' nationalism became a unionist counterweight to the increasingly sectionalist Democrats.51
The slavery issue soon split the Know Nothings along sectional lines. At the first national council of the American party, in June 1855 at Philadelphia, Henry Wilson led a bolt of most northern delegates when southerners and northern conservatives passed a plank endorsing the Kansas-Nebraska Act. From this time forth the party wasted away in the North while it grew stronger in the South. The logical place for antis-lavery Know Nothings to go was into the Republican party, which stood ready to receive them if it could do so without sanctioning nativism. Abraham Lincoln voiced the Republican dilemma in this matter. "Of their principles," Lincoln said of the Know Nothings, "I think little better than I do of the slavery extensionists. . . . 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 pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy." Nevertheless, in central Illinois the Know Nothings "are mostly my old political and personal friends." Without them "there is not sufficient materials to combat the Nebraska
50. Overdyke, The Know-Nothing Party in the South, 21–22, 24.
51. Ibid., passim; Baker, Ambivalent Americans, passim; James H. Broussard, "Some Determinants of Know-Nothing Electoral Strength in the South," Louisiana History, 7 (1966), 5–20.
democracy." Lincoln was willing "to 'fuse' with anybody I can fuse on ground which I think is right." The only hope of carrying Illinois was to "get the elements of this organization" on our own terms after "Know-Nothingism has . . . entirely tumbled to pieces."52
In Ohio, Salmon P. Chase showed how this might be done. After winning all of the congressional districts in 1854, the Ohio anti-Nebraska coalition looked forward to electing Chase governor in the state elections of 1855. But could they do it without Know-Nothing support? Militant free soilers like Joshua Giddings thought so. The nativists, he said, were "unjust, illiberal, and un-American. We will never unite with such a party, in any compact whatever." Chase seemed to agree. "I cannot proscribe men on account of their birth," he wrote. "I cannot make religious faith a political test." He therefore recognized in January 1855 that the strength of "the Know-Knothing movement . . . may make the election of a man in my position impossible."53
But Chase's ambition soon caused him to waffle. He privately expressed a willingness to work with antislavery Know Nothings if he could do so without "sacrificing principle." "It seems to me you have said enough against the Kns, and had better hold up," he told a journalistic ally in February 1855. "My idea is to fight nobody who does not fight us." We might acknowledge "that there was some ground for the uprising of the people against papal influences & organized foreignism" so long as we insist on "the importance of keeping the anti-slavery idea paramount."54 In effect, Chase wanted Republicans to spurn nativist policies while recognizing nativism as a cultural impulse. In particular, he was willing to make a gesture toward anti-Catholicism but not to alienate Protestant immigrants, especially the large German vote, whose support Republicans wanted and needed. This shading toward anti-Romanism but away from a generalized nativism became a way for Republicans
52. Lincoln to Owen Lovejoy, Aug. 11, 1855, Lincoln to Joshua F. Speed, Aug. 24, 1855, CWL, II, 316, 323.
53. Giddings quoted in William E. Gienapp, "Salmon P. Chase, Nativism, and the Formation of the Republican Party in Ohio," Ohio History, 93 (1984), 11; Chase quoted in Trefousse, Radical Republicans, 84, and in Stephen E. Maizlish, The Triumph of Sectionalism: The Transformation of Ohio Politics, 1844–1856 (Kent, Ohio, 1983), 207.
54. Chase to E. S. Hamlin, Nov. 21, 1854, Feb. 9, Jan. 22, 1855, quoted in Maizlish, Triumph of Sectionalism, 206, 208, and in Gienapp, "Salmon P. Chase, Nativism," 10.
to absorb some Know Nothings without feeling that they were "sacrificing principle."
Chase managed to walk this tightrope without falling. The conservative Know Nothings nominated a separate ticket in Ohio. Radical free soilers threatened to do the same if Chase made any concessions to the nativists. The Republican state convention nominated Chase on an an-tislavery platform that, in the candidate's words, did not "contain a squint toward Knism." The nominees for other state offices, however, were men of Know-Nothing background—though Chase considered them "honest men . . . sincerely opposed to slavery" who "adhere but slightly to their order." Proclaiming that "there is nothing before the people but the vital issue of slavery," Chase privately predicted that Know Nothing-ism would "gracefully give itself up to die."55
Perhaps. In any case, the main ethnocultural issue in the campaign was anti-black racism injected by the Democrats, who rapidly perfected the technique of tarring "Black Republicans" with the brush of Negro equality. Labeling the Chase candidacy "Sambo's State Ticket," Ohio Democrats proclaimed that Republicans intended to sacrifice "the interests of more than twenty millions of people . . . to those of three millions of blacks." The Republican policy of limiting the expansion of slavery would inevitably become a program of emancipation, which would let loose "three to five millions of uncivilized, degraded, and savage men . . . to roam the country" and take bread from the mouths of white laboring men.56
Chase survived these onslaughts and won the governorship with 49 percent of the vote to 43 percent for the Democrats and 8 percent for the separate American ticket. Though they could not have won without Know-Nothing support, Republicans came to power in Ohio committed to an antislavery platform and not bound by promises to nativists. They demonstrated this political legerdemain once again in the prolonged battle over the speakership of the national House of Representatives that convened in December 1855.
The chaos of parties at the opening of this Congress reflected the devastation wrought by the 1854–55 elections. Most estimates counted somewhere in the neighborhood of 105 Republican congressmen, 80 Democrats, and 50 Americans. Of the last, thirty-one came from slave
55. Gienapp, "Chase, Nativism," 22, 24, 26.
56. Maizlish, Triumph of Sectionalism, 220.
states and a half-dozen of the rest were conservatives on the slavery question. Of the Democrats, only twenty-three came from free states and a few of these were uncomfortable in the traces with southern colleagues. Of the Republicans (not all of whom yet acknowledged that label), perhaps two-thirds had at least a nominal connection with Know-Nothingism, though half or more of these placed a higher priority on antislavery than on nativism. One of the latter was Nathaniel P. Banks of Massachusetts, a onetime Democrat and then a Know Nothing who like his colleague Henry Wilson in the Senate now wanted to harness the Know-Nothing cart to the Republican horse. The Republicans nominated Banks for speaker, but in ballot after ballot during two increasingly tense months Banks fell short of the 118 votes needed for election. The process, however, crystallized his supporters as Republicans, and when the House on February 2, 1856, finally changed the rules to allow a plurality to prevail, Banks won the speakership with 103 votes on the 133rd ballot. If any one moment marked the birth of the Republican party, this was it.
What made possible this remarkable eclipse of Know Nothings and surge of Republicans to become the North's majority party within less than two years? Part of the answer lay in a dramatic decline of immigration, which during the years after 1854 fell to less than half of the level it had attained in the first half of the decade. But the main reason could be expressed in two words: Bleeding Kansas. Events in that far-off territory convinced most northerners that the slave power was after all a much greater threat to republican liberty than the Pope was.