America Aflame

by David Goldfield

  Just when it seemed things in that troubled land could get no worse, they did. First came the potato blight and then the British repeal of the Corn Laws, which had protected Ireland’s wheat farmers from foreign competition. The English landlords evicted their Irish tenants, throwing nearly a million people out of work. A general breakdown of law and order followed. An Englishman visiting a village in County Mayo in 1847 left this account: “Out of a population of 240 I found 13 already dead from want. The survivors were like walking skeletons.” America offered a better alternative. By the mid-1850s, Ireland had lost one quarter of its population to either famine or emigration. By the late 1850s, there were 1.6 million Irish-born immigrants in America, more than 20 percent of whom crowded into the three cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. That these rural people typically settled in cities is hardly surprising given the association between farming and poverty in their native land.3

  Poor, mostly illiterate, and Roman Catholic, the Irish arrivals faced a rocky reception. Irish neighborhoods became synonymous in the public mind with intemperance, prostitution, gambling, violence, and disease. Illnesses that some cities thought they had conquered, such as smallpox, reappeared in the Irish slums. Not all Irish immigrants fit this profile, but stereotypes would prove difficult to dispel. Unremarked at the time was the fact that hardworking Irish immigrants were remitting millions of dollars annually to the folks back home, a remarkable feat given the circumstances and recency of their arrival. These impressive sums underscored how much Irish labor pushed the urban economy. The Irish filled positions in the growing municipal services sector, heaved cargo on docks, built railroads, descended into mines, and manned looms in mills. In turn, many native-born young men and women moved into higher-paying occupations in the expanding urban economy. In tribute to the Irish immigration, Boston Unitarian clergyman Edward Everett Hale noted in 1852, “The consequence is that we are, all of us, the higher lifted because they are here.”4

  Carl Schurz, like many other German forty-eighters, differed from the majority of Irish immigrants in terms of education, skills, and wealth. Many Germans had arrived in America to escape the oppressions of the petty German princes, especially Jews, whose civil liberties were progressively eroded during this era. Others, like Schurz, arrived as failed revolutionaries or because of the same problems the Irish encountered: a potato blight in 1845, oppressive landlords, and a shortage of tillable land. Often traveling in groups, the Germans settled more diversely than the Irish, selecting midwestern farmland as well as cities from the Northeast to the Mississippi River. Nearly as numerous as the Irish, 1.3 million German immigrants had arrived in the United States by 1860.5

  The Germans were builders: factories, refineries, distilleries, musical instruments, professions, and associations of all kinds. Henry Steinway, chafing under production restrictions established by his guild in Germany, migrated to New York in 1851. Together with his four sons, he began to manufacture pianos. Within eight years, he employed eight hundred workers turning out sixty pianos a week. Although most of the Germans were Protestants or Catholics, some ten thousand Bavarian Jews entered the migration stream in the 1840s. Mainly middle-class, they brought their mercantile skills and traditions of philanthropy and mutual assistance to American cities. One young Jewish German woman, Rebecca Gratz of Philadelphia, pioneered the profession of social work, and her good deeds so impressed Sir Walter Scott that he may have modeled the character of Rebecca in Ivanhoe after Miss Gratz.6

  Ivanhoe and Scott were immensely popular throughout the country, not only in the South. Scott’s works were among the most read across a broad geographic and social spectrum in the United States in the three decades prior to the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In America’s Romantic Age, chivalry, sacrifice, and the triumph of good over evil resonated widely. Fred Bailey, a young black runaway, changed his last name to Douglass in honor of Scott’s epic poem The Lady of the Lake. The hero of the epic was Lord James of Douglas, who was willing to give up his life to avert a bloody civil war between highlanders and lowlanders. Bailey’s black benefactor, Nathan Johnson of New Bedford, Massachusetts, suggested adding an extra s for good measure. Bailey would now be known as Frederick Douglass.7

  The large Irish and German immigration of the late 1840s and 1850s did not meet with universal approbation, especially outside the Democratic Party. Never before or since has the proportion of immigrants coming to American shores been greater. Although the total number of immigrants arriving between 1845 and 1854—2.9 million—was considerably less than the 9.2 million who came between 1905 and 1914, they represented nearly 15 percent of the total population compared with the latter group, which comprised less than 11 percent of Americans living at that time. In some cities, especially the northeastern ports and the major midwestern cities, immigrants accounted for more than 50 percent of the total population in the 1850s. Southern cities also experienced an unprecedented influx of immigrants. The foreign-born in Richmond, for example, comprised 40 percent of the white workforce. While some reveled in the dizzying diversity of American cities, others looked upon the exploding foreign population with alarm. Already skittish about the potential of disorder to disrupt democracy, added to the always-present concern about an aggressive Roman Catholic Church, nativist sentiment flared anew in American cities, growing into a formidable political force.8

  The presidential election of 1852 confirmed some of the nativists’ fears. Most of the Irish and German immigrants voted Democratic. The party had forged this affiliation during the presidency of Andrew Jackson and had solidified the connection in the succeeding decades. Although evangelical Christians could be found in both political parties, those evangelicals who particularly feared the Catholic Church adhered to the Whig Party. That party’s promotion of temperance and Sabbath legislation further alienated Irish and German immigrants, many of whom voted for the first time in 1852 and contributed to Pierce’s victories in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.9

  With the slavery issue temporarily quieted and economic questions less salient, nativism filled the political void as former Whigs cast about for a viable party and cause. Political nativism had attracted some northern Whigs since the early 1840s as conflicts over school prayer, electoral fraud, and job competition erupted in the rapidly growing cities. One group, the Order of United Americans, combined a strong belief in free labor with an equally strong inclination to limit immigration and restrict the rights of foreigners already on American soil. The Order singled out Catholic immigrants in particular.

  A new group, the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, appeared in New York City in 1849, a nonpartisan secret organization promoting nativist candidates for elective office. The organization packaged an amalgam of traditional nativist ideas such as lengthening the period of naturalization from five to twenty-one years, limiting the political rights of foreigners and their sons unless they were educated in American schools, and prohibiting foreigners from holding elective office, along with traditional Whig principles favoring the construction of a Pacific railroad and a homestead act to provide western land for settlers. These retreaded Whigs named their organization the American Party, though more commonly called the Know Nothings because its members claimed ignorance of the party’s existence. Secrecy, its supporters hoped, would veil the party’s actual strength until election day.

  Although the Know Nothings presented themselves as the advocates of a modern, industrial economy—super-Whigs promoting electoral reform, land for workers and the poor, the expansion of urban services, and city planning—their appeal rested on good old religious bigotry. As much as they qualified their proposals for restricting the political and civil rights of immigrants, their animus against foreigners, especially Catholics, drew a significant following. It was true that in some Democratic-controlled cities and precincts, registrars ushered immigrants into citizenship with remarkable alacrity. It was also true that Democrats spent freely on spirits and financial emoluments to ensure
a good turnout at the polls. Both parties engaged in such chicanery, and there was no evidence that fraud ever swung a major election to one candidate or another. These complaints reflected more the fear of Roman Catholics as a threat to American democracy than a genuine effort to cleanse the electoral system. William Brownlow, a newspaper editor, expressed the raw prejudice behind the veneer of reform: “We can have no peace in this country until the CATHOLICS ARE EXTERMINATED.”10

  The Order’s anti-Catholic position tapped into the broad evangelical Protestant movement that perceived the Roman Catholic Church as a threat both to America’s millennial aspirations and its democratic traditions. Immigration restriction, like anti-slavery, became a Bible-based political issue. Charles Elliot, a noted evangelical minister, quoted the Book of Deuteronomy as justification for restrictive laws against the foreign-born: “The Almighty, in conceding that Israel might choose a king, laid down the law that they must not choose a stranger, but a Hebrew of their own nation.”11

  The immigrant diversity and energy that inspired Whitman repulsed Know Nothings. New arrivals brought distinctive languages, cultures, and traditions that challenged prevailing customs such as keeping the Sabbath. To many, they represented the underside of the urban and economic transformation, a transformation that in itself concerned many Americans who grew up in small towns or on farms and who believed in the Jeffersonian ideal that attachment to the land guaranteed a republican government.

  In the South, the Order muted its anti-Catholic rhetoric, given the long-standing Catholic presence in places such as Mobile and New Orleans, emphasizing a broader xenophobia combined with devotion to the Union. Know Nothings enjoyed some electoral success in the South, especially among former Whigs in border cities, where immigrants comprised a growing percentage of the white workforce, but religious bigotry generally did not fare well in southern politics. Many southerners agreed with Virginia governor Henry A. Wise (a Democrat) that “Knownothingism was the most impious and unprincipled affiliation of bad means, for bad ends, which ever seized upon large masses of men of every opinion and party, and swayed them for a brief period blindly.” It was “a proscription of religions, for the demolition of some of the clearest standards of American liberty, and for a fanatical and sectional demolition of slavery.” When the Know Nothings eventually folded as a national party, many of its members joined the new anti-slavery Republican Party, thus confirming Governor Wise’s suspicions.12

  “Coming to America; Returning for a Visit.” (Picture Collection, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

  The Know Nothings’ secrecy and bigotry provided easy political targets for the opposition, Democrats and some Whigs. Abraham Lincoln had little use for the party and turned away a delegation that came to his Springfield law office soliciting his membership. Alexander Stephens, a nationalist Whig congressman from Georgia and good friend of Lincoln’s, rejected their ideas as un-American, looking “not to how the country shall be governed, but who shall hold the offices.” Besides, “I am utterly opposed to mingling religion with politics in any way whatever.”13

  It was not surprising that Stephens and Lincoln shared the same views on religion and politics. There were similarities in their backgrounds. Stephens’s family had moved from Pennsylvania to farm the incredibly red loam of central Georgia, earning a modest living growing tobacco, Indian corn, and assorted grains. Then Eli Whitney came to Georgia and demonstrated a cotton gin, and soon everyone in the neighborhood discovered that green-seed upland cotton grew splendidly in the blood-red soil. By the time he was thirteen years of age, in 1826, both his mother and father had passed away. That death was a common occurrence in these frontier lands was little solace to the boy, and grief consumed him. A dark melancholy hung over him forever, not unlike that which periodically plagued his soon-to-be friend from Illinois. And as with Lincoln, such fatalism did not paralyze him; it energized his endeavors, as if he were constantly challenging his demons to throw what they had at him and he would return it double.14

  Small for his age and bookish—he dazzled his classmates by memorizing huge chunks of the Old Testament—he often displayed a combativeness that belied his frailty. But it was his intellect that others noted, and a series of benefactors intervened and shipped him off to schools to prepare for the ministry. The Second Great Awakening did not, however, capture this slight college boy any more than it had moved Lincoln. The young Georgian liked the intellectual sparring of biblical debates but had little use for theology.

  Stephens gave up the ministry for the law. Like Lincoln, he had discovered that the law afforded fellowship, income, and access to politics. In 1835, at the age of twenty-two, he was admitted to the Georgia bar. Like Lincoln, he was fascinated by railroads. He pronounced it “stupendous” when he whizzed through the countryside at fifteen miles per hour. And, like his Illinois friend, Stephens was gifted in court. Initially, it may have been low expectations that generated the good notices; for this five-foot-seven-inch ninety-seven-pound creature looked so frail and deathly pale that a cadaver would have appeared more lifelike. Then he began in a voice barely audible, almost feminine in its high pitch, and by the time he reached his crescendo he had the gallery and the jury and the judge enrapt.15

  Stephens shared with Lincoln an unshakable belief in the rule of law. When abolitionist literature flooded his state during the 1830s, local postmasters meddled with the mail and terrorized dissenters. Though Stephens abhorred the material, the reaction of local officials left him cold. When he ran for his first political office, the Georgia House of Representatives in 1836, the state was in turmoil over the literature. To root out potential distributors of the materials, several counties mounted vigilante groups to deal summary justice to the offenders. Stephens opposed these measures from the stump, arguing that such matters belonged to the courts, not the mob. He won his election by a resounding two-to-one margin.

  Once in the state legislature Stephens worked to keep the slavery issue off the floor. His main interest, like Lincoln’s, was economic development, particularly railroads, and in his five years in the legislature, he promoted that interest day in and day out. Stephens was a nationalist. He believed that an economically vibrant South contributed to national strength and solidarity. And he believed that railroads, industry, scientific agriculture, and an educated citizenry would render that objective inevitable. By 1844, he was a successful candidate for Congress. After Lincoln won his seat from Illinois two years later, the two young congressmen became friends. They were Clay Whigs, intent on pursuing a nationalist agenda and opposing those issues that divided Americans.

  From a political perspective, attacking the Catholic Church in the South made little sense to Stephens, as the Church had never attacked slavery. “No man can say as much of the New England Baptists, Presbyterians, or Methodists,” Stephens pointed out. Most of all, he perceived the Know Nothings as assaulting the basic right of American suffrage, the right that separated the United States from many of those European nations so recently returned to oppression. Stephens believed that northern capitalists wanted cheap labor that could not vote, very much like slaves in the South. They “bought up” cargoes of foreigners from Europe. “The whole sub stratum of northern society will soon be filled up with a class who can work, and who, though white, cannot vote.… It is a scheme … to get white slaves instead of black ones. No American laborer, or man seeking employment there, who has a vote, need to expect to be retained long when his place can be more cheaply filled by a foreigner who has none.” Such was the hypocrisy of northern entrepreneurs.16

  The Know Nothings also ran counter to America’s growing self-identification as a nation of immigrants. The failed revolutions in Europe coincided with the massive wave of immigration. If America was a beacon of hope to a troubled world, then closing the doors snuffed the beacon’s light. Newcomers would embrace the land of their liberation, not destroy it. As Henry Ward Beecher, the era’s most influential evangelical
minister, put it in terms everyone could understand, “When I eat chicken, I don’t become chicken. Chicken becomes me!”17

  Above all, the Know Nothings trampled on constitutional principles at a time when political leaders increasingly saw those ideals as holding the stretching fabric of American life together. Religious tests and the politicization of religion that the Know Nothings promoted challenged constitutional traditions. Horace Greeley articulated this sentiment when he wrote that “this whole broad assertion of a ‘predominant National Religion,’ and that Religion not the Christian but the Protestant, and not the Protestant, but such Protestant sects as the majority pronounce ‘Orthodox’ or ‘Evangelical’ is fatally at variance with the fundamental principles of our Constitution.”18

  Still, the Order enjoyed electoral successes at the local level in 1853 and 1854. For some observers, this indicated that “Roman Catholicism is feared more than American slavery.” That was a false perception. Slavery never lurked far from the surface of Know Nothing politics. Know Nothings in the Northeast were also likely to oppose slavery’s expansion into the territories. Know Nothing candidates portrayed themselves as champions of native-born workingmen, advocating restricting the power of immigrants at home and of slaveholders out West. As one prominent Know Nothing explained, slavery was “a burden to the community in which it exists;… its influence is enervating of society;… wherever it goes it carries with it the corrosion of inactivity.” Slavery defied America’s enterprising spirit and, like the lowly Irish and other slavish followers of Rome, its presence inhibited the efficient progress of capital and labor. Though the Know Nothings did not appreciate the irony, they articulated the same racial superiority as pro-slavery advocates.19