Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (30 page)

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's
New 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