BHOHHHHHHMHnai The Know- Nothingr Party. ^ A Sketch By Humphrey J. Desmond. Washington : The New Century Press. 190l|- ^^'^ J'^^J.i'^ COPYRIGHT, Woif- BY H. J. DESMOND. PREFACE. A GENERAL view of the Nativist Movement in American politics has many points of interest for the student of history, and not a few instructive lessons probably applicable to future conditions. Movements of this nature are quite likely to recur; if, perhaps, in a somewhat varied and feebler form, nevertheless in their salient character- istics, closely modeled after the I^ow- Nothing party of 1854. In the pages of Von Hoist and Rhodes, in the special pleadings of Lee and Whitney, in more careful local studies such as those of Scisco, in the annals of Congress, in the biographies or memoirs of men prominent in Amer- ican public life fifty years ago, in the political text books of the time, and in a variety of other publications, thei*e is a vast amount of information bear- ing upon the Nativist and Know- Nothing movements ; but, so far as the 3 writer of these pages is able to ascer- tain, no attempt has heretofore been made to gather, from all the best sources, a survey at once complete (at least within the limitations of brev- ity here proposed), connected and free from the spirit of advocacy. I CONTEXTS. xative-a:mericaxism. 1. A Prelimiuary View, - - 7 2. Nativism in Local Politics, - 22 3. Ite High Tide (1844), - - 34 THE KXOW-XOTHIXG PARTY. 1. Origin and Growth, - - - 48 2. High Tide (1854), - - - - 59 3. Disturbances and Acrimony, - TO 4. Democratic and Republican Attitudes, ------ 82 5. Know-Nothing Issues, - - 91 6. Solvent Influences, - - - - 100 7. The Campaign of 1856, - - 110 8. Know-Xothings in Congress, 117 9. Last Years, - 122 10. Local Sketches, ----- 126 11. Personnel, ------ 139 12. Afterwards (1860-90), - - - 149 Native Americanism. I. A PRELIMINARY VIEW. T OOKING back, from the threshold ■*— ' of a new century, at the move- ments of Nativism and anti-Catholic- ism which transpired in the United States during the period 1835-60, we can feel little surprise in the premises. The mighty immigrations of the nine- teenth century jostled the" settled col- onists of the seventeenth and* eigh- teenth centuries, established here in a political and industrial ascendancy. A total of over five million immigrants landed on our shores up to 1850; a to- tal of nearly twenty million up to 1900. At the close of the century ov- 7 NATIVE AMERICANISM. er ten million foreign bom persons are residents of the United States, and more than twenty-six million* of the sixty-six million white inhabitants are of foreign parentage; making it quite certain that a majority of the Ameri- cans of today are descendants of fore- fathers who came here since Jefferson was president — the old Americans of Revolutionary lineage being outnum- bered by the children of ancestors who were not here when Washington lived. So mighty an invasion, peaceable though it was, could not transpire without much collision and many read- justments. The arrival in our large cities of thousands of immigrants, differing in race and religion from the native inhabitants, created conditions for social and political compromise. The Irish, for instance, while exhibit- ing a capacity to assimilate their neighbors, and sometimes (as in the case of the Norman and English set- tlers in Ireland) to make them "more ♦ By the census of 1900 more than half the people of foreign parentag-e in this countrj- are of non-English speaking races. More than half, too, are in race neither Teutonic 'nor Anglo-Saxon. 8 NATIVE AMERICANISM. Irish than the Irish themselves" — also have, for some reason or other, excited antagonisms more bitter than assailed any other race of immigrants.f In the sequel, Nativism met with ut- ter defeat in all its cherished conten- tions ; yet substantially the victory was on the side of the Americans of the older lineage. There was always a larger-viewed element among them dis- posed to welcome immigi*ation to this country as "the asyhim of the op- pressed;" to see in the imported brawn of the Irish and German, mater- ial for national enrichment — the in- dustrial army needed for the develop- t Scisco, in his "Histor>' of Political Na- tivism in New York," says (ch. I.): "An anonymous writer to the press touched on the truth when he complained of the Irish Catholics that 'they are men, who having professed to become Americans by accept- ing our terms of naturalization, do yet, in direct contradiction to their professions, clan together as a separate interest and retain their foreign appellation.' No bet- ter statement of Nativist complaint could have been made." Yet to a large extent this going apart of the Irish was but na- tural, in view of the contemptuous manner in which the "nativist" Americans treated them, ridiculing their appearance, their country and their religion. NATIVE AMERICANISM. ment of the country. History, too, re- cords no more notable instance of spee- dy and complete assimilation of a vast influx of population. The social, polit- ical and educational institutions of the Americans Qf'feevol^tionai'y line- age survived and absorbed and won ov- er the mighty army of immigrants, and welded all. elements- into a unified nationality. There never was any deep-seated an- tipathy to foreigners, as such, in this country. Nativism in its restricted sense (dislike of European immigrants on account of their birth) was always more or less accidental and sporadic. It is usual in discussing the genesis of the Native-American movement to refer to the Alien acts of 1798 as one of the first manifestations of this feel- ing, or to the mythical order of Wash- ington at Valley Forge: "Put none but Americans on guard tonight." That which gave !N ative- American- ism its real strength and animus, how- ever, was anti-Catholicism;:}: and % Brownson in his Quarterly Re\'iew for January 1845, in a survey of Native Ameri- canism, says that the reaJ objection to the 10 NATIVE AMERICANISM. the roots of this feeling lie far back in colonial days. The colonists carried the "No Popery" sentiment from their English homes. Founded on sectarian lines, the colonies naturally were more deeply tinctm-ed with this feeling than was England herself; and cir- cumstances, such as warfare with the French Catholics on the north and west, and with the Spanish Catholics in Florida, deepened the sentiment. One reason that the French-Canadians did not join with the American colon- ies in revolt against England was their sense of being fairly treated, by the English, in their religious interests; and although the continental congress sent a Catholic priest§ among its emissaries to them, with proffers of an equal partnership and independent statehood, they distrusted colonial big- otry. France's providential assistance to the struggling colonies, the presence of her Catholic soldiers with their af- foreigner lay deeper than the accident of birth. "The party is truly an anti-Catho- lic party." § This was Rev. John Carroll after- wards the first Catholic bishop of the United States. 11 NATIVE AMERICANISM. fable chaplains and courteous officers, remained a liberalizing memory with the Revolutionary generation. From 1780 to 1830— a period of fifty years — the No Popery sentiment slept with but little awakening. The brief crusade against aliens during the lat- ter part of Adams' administration was strictly incidental to the division be- tween the parties — the Jeffersonian party, as the friend of France, having the adhesion naturally of all the French, Irish and Scotch immigrants of that time. The Alien act which had extended the period of residence re- quired for naturalization to fourteen years, was repealed in 1802, and the five years' requirement of residence re- stored. The demand made by the Hartford Convention (1814-15), that aliens be debarred from civil office|i may have been suggested by the enthusiasm with which the Irish im- migrants hailed the war of 1812 — so unpopular with New England. British Minister Foster, who had labored to prevent this war, said that among the II This was one of the seven amend- ments to the constitution proposed by the Hartford Convention. 12 NATIVE AMERICANISM. congressmen who voted to declare war were six members of the Society of United Irishmen.** There was really little ground for alarm in the number of immigrants which reached our shores in the de- cades ending with 1840. Up to 1820 foreigners came to America at the rate of 10,000 a year. From 1821 to 1830, inclusive, 143,439 landed. From 1831 to 1840, the immigration increas- ed to a total of nearly 600,000, or about three per cent, of the total population (seventeen millions) in 1840. From 1840-50 (principally in the last half of the decade) 1,700,000 immigrants ar- rived, or seven per cent, of the popula- tion in 1850. The percentage of the foreign born population in the decades prior to 1850 was considerably less than it has been since the close of the Civil War. In 1850 the foreign born element was 9.7 per cent, of the whole population. During the period 1860- 1900 it has varied between 13 and 14 per cent. The really alarming symptom was ** See Alexander Johnston's article on "The American Party," in the "American Cyclopaedia of Politics." 13 NATIVE AMERICANISM. tLe large proportion of Catholics among the iramigrants. More than a third of the immigrants for the de- cades ending 1830 and 1840 were from Ireland, and nearly one-half of the 1,700,000 who landed from 1841-50 were Irish. More than a half, and probably nearly three-fifths, of the im- migrants up to 1860 were Catholics. It is probable that the English "No- Popery" agitation (1815-29), which antagonized the movement for Catho- lic emancipation in Ireland and Eng- land, had some influence in alarming the more sectarian portion of the American public. The opposition to Catholic emancipation in England nec- essarily reverted to the position of Elizabeth's and Cromwell's time — that the Catholic religion was not entitled to toleration — that it was a political danger — that it inculcated a divided allegiance, etc. This argument was adopted in America. The pulpit alarmist could point to new object les- sons, up to this time unfamiliar to the American population: bishops (there were only ten American Catholic bish- ops in 1833), cathedrals (rather unpre- 14 NATIVE AMERICANISM. tentious affairs), sisterhoods in a pecu- liar garb and convents or nunneries. A consciousness of this change in public feeling is shown in some pas- sages Tvhich occur in the pastoral is- sued in 1833 by the Catholic bishops on the occasion of their second pro- vincial council. They refer to the cal- umnies current in the press. "We no- tice with regret," they say, "a spirit exhibited by some of the conductors of the press engaged in the interest of those brethren separated from our communion, which has, within a few years, been more unkind and unjust in our regard. Not only do they assail us and our institutions in a style of vituperation and offence. * * but they have even denounced you as en- emies of the republic, etc." The first outbreak of nativism oc- curred in 1834 — the burning of the TJrsuline convent at Charlestown, near Boston. In 1833, one Rebecca Reed had left this institution and told such tales of harsh treatment that when, in the following year. Miss Harrison (Sister Mary John), left the same con- vent in a dazed and hysterical condi- tion, the public became excited. She 15 NATIVE AMERICANISM. suifered from nervous prostration caused by overwork in preparing her pupils for an exhibition. Her brother induced her to return to the convent, where she was placed under a physi- cian's care. On August 9, 1834, u mob composed of the lower element of Boston's population, surrounded the the convent, and, although Miss Har- rison came forth and assured them that she was not detained against her will, they ransacked and burned the building. The better class of Boston citizens held an indignation meeting in Fanueil hall, at which the mayor presided, and the outrage was de- nounced. The perpetrators were put on trial, but weakly prosecuted and consequently acquitted. The sisters never obtained compensation for their loss of property, although a coramit- tee of the Legislature subsequently recommended this act of public jus- tice. In 1836 a book was published which has been termed "The Uncle Tom's Cabin of Know-ISI^othingism. Maria Monlv, a girl of evil character, had been placed by her mother in a Magda- len asylum at Montreal, under the 16 NATIVE AMERICANISM. charge of a Catholic sisterhood. Aid- ed by a former paramour, she escaped and shortly fell into the company of one Rev. J. J. Slocum, who, with oth- ers, concocted a sensational and ob- scene narrative of her experience in the assumed capacity of a nun. This book was brought out with Howe & Bates as nominal publishers — these men being employees of Harper Broth- ers (which publishing firm, it is said, really stood behind the enterprise, but: was reluctant to assume direct respon- sibility). Maria Monk's "disclosures" had an immense sale, exceeding that of any American book up to that time published. Ministers recommended it and churches feted its author. She was taken into the bosom of Christian homes, where, after a time, her de- pravity was perceived. It is to be re- gretted that one so useful to evangel- icalism should have been allowed to sink in the social scale so that she af- terwards died in a public institution. The parties to this literary enterprise began litigation among themselves for the profits. A party of Protestant clergymen visited Montreal to verify- the "awful disclosures" and pro- 17 NATIVE AMERICANISM. nounced them a fabrication. Colonel W. L. Stone, editor of The New York Commercial Advertiser, also made a thorough investigation, visiting the Hotel Dieu at Montreal from cellar to garret. "The result," he wrote, "is the most thorough conviction that Ma- ria Monk is an arrant impostor, that she never was a nun, etc." These two early manifestations of anti-Catholicism are particularly dwelt upon because they are prototypes of its campaign tactics in the following years. Edward Wilson, in 1845, Ga- vazzi and the "Angel Gabriel" in 1853- 5, and a score of others followed in the line of Maria Monk; and what Prof- essor John B. McMaster calls the "riotous career of Know-Nothings," was a repetition of the convent burn- ing of 1834. The ex-priest, the es- caped nun and the incendiary led the way, as the radical exponents of a cause, which nevertheless numbered among its followers some respectable elements. In the year following 1830, a new ex- uberance overtook the electoral life of the American people. They talked pol- itics with vigor and gesticulation ; they 18 NATIVE AMERICANISM. interrupted each others political meet- ings; they jostled each other at the polls. It became part of the election day program for each party to be rep- resented at the voting precincts by partisans, loud of lungs and strong of arm. The native American had prac- ticed all the tricks and frauds of poli- tics, such as intimidating voters, stuf- fing ballot boxes, repeating and tam- pering with the returns, long before the foreigner was instructed in these processes. In the history of the Aboli- tion moveinent, we have an illustratioa of the riotous spirit of the American polities of that generation. In 183.5, Thompson, an Abolition advocate, was mobbed in Boston and forced to leave the city. Garrison, too, felt the wrath of "a broadcloth mob." November 7, 1837, Lovejoy, an Abolitionist editor, was murdered at Alton, 111., because he refused to suspend liis publication. May 17, 1838, Pennsylvania hall, the Abolitionist headquarters at Philadel- phia, was burned to the ground by the intolerant opponents of the anti-slave- ry movement. And thus on to 1860, did Abolitionism meet with disorderly and riotcms opposition. The party fac- 19 NATIVE AMERICANISM. tions quarrelled ■with each other, Whigs assailed Whigs, and Democrats as- sailed Democrats. The expression ''Lo- co Focos" applied to one of the Demo- cratic factions in Xew York, originated over the incident of an interrupted meet- ing (October 29, 1835). Emissaries of one Democratic faction turned off tho lights at a meeting held by another fac- tion. Immediately the engloomed Dem- ocrats, who had prepared for the emer- gency beforehand, took from their pockets the new Loco Foco match which had just come into use, and relighted their meeting. Know-Xothingism ran its course at a time when this sort of exuberant politics had reached its cli- max. The Know-Xothings were not the inventors, but they carried the method, especially in Baltimore, to its worst excesses.* From a survey of disorder of this kind, we are led to wonder where the * Volunteer fire companies, which existed In the principal cities of the United States at this time, -were largely responsible for street disorders. There was an intense rivalry between the companies, and some- times fires were started on purpose to bring the rival firemen into collision. 20 NATIVE AMERICANISM. American notion of free speech de- veloped; yet it did evolve. If at first a mere glittering generality; if more honored in the breach than in the ob- servance; if more as a pretence than a practice, it was nevertheless finally fixed in the customs and principles of the people. 21 n. NATIVISM IN LOCAL POLITICS. T^ HE first political flurry of Nativism •*• in the local politics of New York seems to date from the year 1835. It is associated with the name of Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of the tele- graph. Early in 1834 he publisLed twelve letters in The New York Obser- ver (a weekly paper), over the signa- ture of "Brutus." These were after- wards republished under the title "Eor- eign Conspiracy Against the United States," a book much read up to 1860. It appears that while in Europe dur- ing 1829-32, Morse had heard of the Leopold Foundation, an Aid Society es- tablished in Austria to heli) with finan- c'cA assistance th^ missionary and poor 22 NATIVE AMERICANISM. Catholic churches of the New World. This was the most material fact in the clangers Morse discussed. The "Bru- tus Letters" had an important local influence. The Irish immigrants in the city were gathering antagonisms, chiefly on account of their religion, and the "Brutus Letters" gave form to the argument. A Protestant asso- ciation was founded to antagonize the Catholics, and it seems that on March 13, 1835, one of its meetings on Broad- way was disturbed by Irish interrup- tion, perhaps after the fashion com- mon at that time of counter demon- strations at public meetings; but rath- er imprudent tactics for foreigners. In the fall election a Nativist com- mittee put lip Colonel Monroe (a neph- ew of ex-President Monroe), for Con- gress, and the Whigs endorsed him. But the Democrats, who cast tlu-ee- fifths of the vote, elected their ticket. In the spring election of 1836, the Na- tivists nominated Samuel F. B. Morse for mayor, and he received about 1-, 500 votes out of a total of over 26,- 000 cast. A Democratic mayor was elected. The Nativists tried a separ- ate ticket again in the fall elections, 23 XATIVE AMERICANISM. with no better success; but in the spring of 1837 they put up Aaron Clark for mayor, and at the same time drew up an address denouncing the Irish. The ^^Tiig party,f which had all along exhibited a kindly interest in the Xa- livist doings, endorsed Clark, and he was elected by 3,300 plurality. The af- fair was treated as a TVhig victory, and the Nativists disappeared as a separ- ate political activity. Nativist senti- ment continued, however, to exhibit itself in petitions to the state legisla- ture and to Congress, praying for a registry law and an extension of the period of residence required^ for nat- uralization to twenty-one years. In other portions of the country the same sentiment manifested itself. A native American movement is said to have organized at Germantown, near Philadelphia, in 1837, growing out of t In New York city the Irish vote was cast largely with the Democratic party. Admiration for AndreTT Jackson, the hero of Nev^.' Orleans a.nQ a man of Irish line- age, had drawn the vanguards of Irish immigration close in sympathy v»-ith the Democratic party. The politicians of that party did not fail to use every means to attach the adopted citizen to their organi- zation. 24 XA TI YE A MEBICA XI SM. an election episode. At Boston on Sunday, June 11, 1837, an engine company returning from t-. fire came into collision vrith an Irisli funeral procession. The ensuing trou- ble, which is known in the annals of Boston as "the Broad street riot," was participated in by fifteen thousand, persons. The Irish quarter was sacked, and though there were no fatalities^ many persons were severely wounded. The intervention of the mayor at the head of a military company quelled the riot. As a result of this affair, the fire department was reorganized (Win- sor's Boston HI, 245). Boston had a Xativist mayor, Thom- as Aspinwall Davis, in 1845, as a re- sult of a triangular contest. In the following year the control of the city reverted to the 'WTiigs. During the presidential campaign of 1840, the Whig central committee of Maryland was moved to formally re- pudiate all sympathy with the Xativist journalism of General Duff Green, ed- itor of The Baltimore Pilot. The com- mittee declared that "the native and natural citizens are equally entitled to the blessings of our government." Ma- 25 NATIVE AMERICANISM. ryland was, politically, a close state. The Whigs carried the state at the ensuing election. Similar action was taken by a large Whig public meeting at Louisville, Ky. (October 27, 1840). Its resolutions recited that "a newspa- per called The Louisville Tribune, re- flecting on the Catholic persuasion, of a most anti-republican character, re- cently established in this city, profess- ing to be a Whig paper, has published editorials and a communication, one of which is signed 'Native American,' etc. The Whigs as a party, therefore, utterly repudiate and denounce The Louisville Tribune." (McClusky Poli- tical Text Book, pp. 681-2.) New Orleans felt the impulse also. The "Address of the Louisiana Native American association," issued in 1839, contains this rather ornate passage: "So long as foreigners entered in moderate numbers into the states and territories of the United States and be- came imperceptibly merged and incor- porated into the great body of the American people, and were gradually imbued and indoctrinated into the principles of virtue and patriotism, which formerly animated the whole 26 NA Tl VE A MERICANI8M. American community, so long their ad- vent was an advantage and a benefit to our coranmnity. But when we see hordes and hecatombs (sic) of beings in human forms, but destitute of any intellectual aspirations — the outcast and offal of society, the pauper, the va- grant and the convict — transported in myriads to our shores, reeking with the accumulated crimes of the whole civ- ilized and savage world, and inducted by our laws into equal rights, immuni- ties and privileges with the noble na- tive inhabitants of the United States, v/e can no longer contemplate it with supine indifference. We feel con- strained to warn our countrymen that unless some steps are taken to protect our institutions from these accumu- lated inroads on oiir national character, from the indiscriminate immigration and naturalization of foreigners, in vain have our predecessors, whether na- tive or naturalized, toiled and suffered and fought and bled and died to achieve our liberties and establish our hallowed institutions." In 1841, a state convention was called in Louisiana to form an American Re- publican party. The convention fa- 27 XATIVE AMERICAXISM. vored the exclusion of foreigners from office. It exerted some influence in the succeeding municipal election in Xew Orleans.]] New York city, in 1840, had a pop- ulation of 312,700, of whom not over a third were foreign born. The Catho- lic population of the city possessed eight churches and numbered perhaps 70,000. Philadelphia, in the same year, had a population of 258,000, of whom less than sixty thousand were Catholics. (Bishop Kenrick, in 1840, placed the entire Catholic population of Pennsylvania, Delaware and Wes- tern Xew Jersey at 120,000.) Boston, with a population in 1844 of about 120,000, had less than 30,000 Catholic residents. It seemed strange, in view of what has come to pass in later years, that the presence in these larger cities of a foreign population not exceeding a fourth of the whole population, should have occasioned alarm in the II Congressman Eustis, of Louisiana, in the House of Representatives, January 7, 1856. claimed that Louisiana was the first State whose Legislature called for an ex- tension of the term of residence required for naturalization. 28 NATIVE AMERICANISM. minds of Americans during the '40's. Since these days, the increased tide of immigration has foreignized, by actual majorities (counting all of foreign par- entage), most of our large cities and even some of our western states, with- out the slightest danger to our insti- tutions or any similar alarm to our people. Had the foreigners and Catholics re- mained quiescent, Nativism might have run its course as a milder protest. But this was not to be. The American at- mosphere v:ould not suffer any element long to demean itself as a subject class. The colonization of the nine- teenth century challenged, in the name of religious equality, the Protestant as- cendancy established by the colonists of the seventeenth century in the laws, and customs, and opinions of the sev- eral states. In Massachusetts, long af- ter the adoption of the Federal con- stitution, Congregationialism was vir- tually the religion of the state. In the Carolinas a Catholic could not hold of- fice. Other states, like New Hamp- shire, had similar sectarian provisions in their constitutions and statutes. Immigration endangered this ascen- 29 NATIVE AMERICANISM. dancy, and as soon as that fact was ap- parent, the Protestant pnlpit became alarmed. The particular issue in which this clash of forces came had reference to the schools. Under the New York school law of 1812, denom- inational schools received a pro rata share of the school fund raised by the state. But in New York city a pri- vate corporation called the Public School society, gradually absorbed all the public funds for that city. It claimed to be an unsectarian body, and declared that it excluded positive re- ligious instruction from its schools. The Protestant Scriptures, however, were read, and in some cases comment- ed upon. The Catholics presented a pe- tition to the Common council, and Bishop Hughes spoke in its behalf, praying that eight Catholic schools be granted a share of the school fimd (October, 1840). The Catholics do not appear to have asked the exclusion of the Bible, but prejudice was stirred upon the representation that such was their purpose. The Common council, which was Democratic, rejected the bishop's peti- tion after a full hearing, in which the 30 ! NATIVE AMERICANISM. Public School society fought strenu- ously for its monopoly. The Catholics thereupon carried their grievances to the state Legislature at Albany. Wil- liam H. Seward was then governor of New York. He had expressed himself in favor of the establishment of schools where the foreigners, now debarred from public education by religious pre- judices, might be instructed by teach- ers of their own race and faith. For twenty years (1840-60) this idea of Se- ward's made him the target of the poli- tical anti-Catholics in New York state, and he reciprocated that antagonism by holding the major element of the Whig party intact as a bulwark against the successive waves of Nativist and Know-Nothing assimilation.* The Catholic appeal to the Legisla- • Colonel A. K. McClure, in his "Political Recollections," a&serts that Sev.^ard's atti- tude on the school question lost him the nomination to the Presidency in 1860; that the leaders of the Republican party in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana were fav- orable to Seward personally, but on ac- count of his stand in the New York school controversy they could not hope to attract to his candidacy the anti-slavery Know- Nothing vote in those states, which were regarded at the time as doubtful states. 31 NATIVE AMERICANISM. ture again stirred up a Xativist par- ty, Samuel F. B. Morse once more oc- cupying the leadership. All local par- ties having taken sides with the Pub- lic School society in the nomination of candidates for the Legislature in 1841, Bishop Hughes decided to put up a Catholic ticket— the so-called ''Car- roll Hall" ticket. He did this against the vociferous objections- of the entire local press, Democratic as well as TThig. The result! of the election was as follows: Whig ticket 15,980 Democratic ticket 15,690 Catholic ticket 2,200 Nativist ticket 470 Anti-Slavery ticket 120 It was said that Bishop Hughes (himself, if anything, a Whig), had sought to show to the Democrats that the Catholics held the balance of pow- er in New York city as between the V»"liig and the Democratic parties. He succeeded in the demonstration, at least to the extent of defeating the Democratic ticket, which would other- wise have won. But it seems that on- ly a half or a third of the Catholic t See New York Tribune, Nov. 12, 1841. 32 NATIVE AMERICANISM. voters supported the Carroll Hall tick- et. In a Catholic population of 70,- 000, there were at that time probably from 5,000 to 7,000 Catholic voters in New York city.|| The following year the Legislature at Albany, doubtless through the in- fluence of Governor Seward, extended to New York city the provisions of the general act relating to common schools, thus obliterating the private Public School society corporation, and putting the state and the people in its place as a controlling power over the city schools. This was a victory, in prin- ciple, for Bishop Hughes, but it brought no funds to his parish schools. The JvTativist element of all parties combined for some years in electing a union school ticket. II This Is the only instance in American politics of a Catholic ticket at the polls. It seemed necessary at the time to clear the political atmosphere. Of course it did not lack provocation either, in the existence of a menacing' anti-Catholic movement. 33 III. NATIVISM AT HIGH TIDE, 1844. ' I ^ HE year 1843 saw a new and better -^ organized spurt of Nativism in New York city. The episode that served to arouse it was the favor shown by the Democratic party to the Irish, in re- turn for Irish support in the April (1843) elections. Not only were pet- ty offices liberally bestowed, but market licenses were given to foreign-born tradesnien. Heretofore these had been (as in the case of school control), a species of Nativist monopoly. The American Republican party was formed,§ and it came into the fall elec- § The follovN'ing appears among- the decla- rations of the Nativist meeting held in New, York, June 10, 1843: "Resolved, That we as Americans will 34 NATIVE AMERICANISM. tioiis with a statement of principles, among which was the following : "That through this school law [the legislative enactment of April, 1842] there has been a preconcerted determin- ation, followed up by an actual attempt in the Fourth ward, to put out of our schools the Protestant Bible, and to piit down the whole Protestant religion never consent to allow the government es- tablished by our Revolutionary forefathers to pass into the hands of foreigners, and that while we open the door to the op- pressed of every nation and offer a home and an asylum, we reserve to ourselves the right of administering the government in conformity with th© principles laid down by those who have committed it to our care." From this time on we hear much about the degeneracy of Am^erican local politics, due, so it is alleged, to the influence of the foreign-born voters. There has always been a strong suspicion that this opinion was merely th'e result of Nativist preju- dice. Bryce (Volume II. of his "American Commonwealth." page 241), says: "Never- theless the immigi-ants are not so largely responsible for the faults of American poli- tics as a stranger might be led, by the language of many Americans, to suppol*. There is a disposition in the United States to use them, and especially the Irish, much as the cat is used in the kitchen, to ac- count for broken plates and food which disappears. The cities have, no doubt, suf- fered from the immigrants— but New York was not an Eden before the Irish came." 35 NATIVE AMERICANISM. [therein] as being sectarian." (Journal of Commerce, November 4, 1843.) The platform further demanded that foreign-born persons should not be nat- uralized imtil they had resided here twenty-one years. The Nativist party polled 8,690 votes in the November election out of a total of 37,000. Its strength appears to have been drawn quite eqiTally from both parties. Ham- mond, in his "Political History of New York," avers that "the wealth, talent and respectability of the community" went into its ranks. In the ensuing election (April, 1844), the Nativist party selected James Harper, of the firm of Harper Brothers, publishers, as its candidate for mayor. Both Demo- crats and Whigs made their customary nominations; but tLere was a tacit un- derstanding among the Whigs that their support should be thrown largely to Harper (who had been a Whig) . Harper was electe I. The vote stood : Harper, 24,510; Coddington (Dem.), 20,538; Franldin (Vv^hig), 5,297. The Journal of Commerce ^ April 12, 1884), estimated that the native American vote was made up of 14,100 Whigs, 9,700 Democrats and 601 new voters. 36 NATIVE AMERICANISM. Harper's election was the occasion for a revival of the former alliance be- tween the Whigs and the Nativist. In the fall election of 1S44 (which was al- so a presidential election), the Whigs threw their strength solidly to the iSTa- tiyist local legislative ticket, but the Nativists did not fully reciprocate. The Nativist legislative ticket was elected, 27,440 to 26,230 (Dem.), but Polk, the Democratio candidate for president, carried New York city by several thousand plurality over Clay. Seward hcA openly disapproved of the Whig alliance with the Nativists, and this experience strengthened the posi- tion he had taken. The Whigs proceeded to drop the Nativists. At the city elec- tion in April, 1845, Harper wa 3 defeat- ed and a Democratic mayor elected, the poll showing 24,210 Democratic votes, 17,480 Nativist and 7,030 Whig. The Nativists were almost completely wiped off the official roste:-, electing but one of their candidates, a consta- ble. They continued to put up local tickets until April, 1847, but their vote diminished from 8,370 in Novem- ber, 1845, to 2,080 in April, 1847. They put up a state ticket in 1846, 37 NATIVE AMERICANISM. whicli received an aggregate of 6,170 Totes. Bishop Hughes in an editorial pub- lished February 3, 1844, in a weekly paper. The Freeman's Journal, regard- ed as the organ of the diocese, had al- luded to the new party as a movement in 'local politics." "Many will prob- ably join this party, who are really friends of foreigners," he said, " but who, for the moment, will coalesce with their enemies to accomplish some local purpose, of which foreigners form no part. The true issue is for the loaves and fishes of office, and as but a small share of these, if any, falls to the lot of foreigners, so, notwithstanding the abuse of their name, they may consid- er themselves as scarcely interested in the quarrel. The true issue is between natives and natives; there let it re- main." The school question was also one of the mainsprings of the Nativist move- ment in Philadelphia. In this connec- tion it may be remarked that in the many subsequent clashes with Protes- tant ascendancy, of which the New York and Philadelphia instances were 38 NATIVE AMERICANISM. among the earliest, the Catholic con- tention was, ultimately, almost every- where successful, because it was grounded on the logic of religious equality. If the Maine supreme court in 1854 (Donohue vs. Richards) decided that Catholic pupils in the public schools might be compelled to read the King James Bible, the victory of sectarian- ism was only temporary; the decision of the Wisconsin supreme court in 1890 (Edgerton Bible case) brought to a climax a series of educational rul- ings, both in law and practice, which have quite generally excluded the Bible from the public schools and more or less eliminated the offensive tone to Catho- lics of many of the text books, against which there were mild protests in 1840. In November, 1842, Bishop Kenrick of Philadelphia, while not asking that the Bible be excluded from the public schools of that city, petitioned the School Board that Catholic children be allowed the liberty of using the Catho- lic version where Bible reading was prescribed. In January, 1843, the Philadelphia School Board voted that no children 39 XATIVE AMERICANISM. whose parents objected to Bible read- ing be obliged to be present at Bible exercises. Out of this matter a con- troversy ensued, and Bishop Kenrick, on March 12, 1844, issued a statement that "Catholics have not asked that the Bible be excluded from the public schools." The Philadelphia riots of May, lS4r4, are connected with this episode, at least in the opinion of the grand jury called to investigate the affair. The grand jury attributed the riots to "the efforts of a portion of the community to exclude the Bible from the public school." The Catholics denied this and claimed the jury was packed. But the charge, even as it stands, would not in our day seem to justify or pro- voke rioting or incendiarism. The dis- order arose over some collision in the streets as a Xative-American meeting was dispersing before a rain storm. The riots which followed lasted for three days. Though the Mayor was knocked down in one of the encounters, it is probably true, as the Catholics al- leged, that there was half-heartedness, if not actual collusion, in the way the authorities met the disorder. The mob 40 XA TIVE AMERICANISM. moved upon the Irish quarter in Ken- sington and burned twenty-nine houses. Next day two Catholic churches, St. Michael's and St. Au- gustine's, were destroyed and a convent set ablaze. A number of lives were lost. Bishop Kenrick issued a card suspending "the exercise of public wor- ship in the Catholic churches which still remained until it can be resumed with safety and we can enjoy our con- stitutional rights to v.-orship God ac- cording to the dictates of our consci- ence." This was, at least, furnishing sub- ject of meditation for the thoughtful. The May riots were succeeded in July by another riotous outbreak. The Na- tivist sentiment profited by the public feeling against the foreigners, which had been aroused by the events of May. Their societies were nov.- established in every ward of the city. On July 4, 1844, they organized an elaborate par- ade in which 4,500 men and boys par- ticipated. During the succeeding days a report became current that anus were hidden in St. Philip Neri's (Catholic) church. There was founda- tion for this report too. Catholics had 41 NATIVE AMERICANISM. feared that the church burning of May might be repeated. They intended to defend their property. The collision of July was principally between the militia and the nativist mobs. It re- sulted in seventeen deaths. Nativism remained for some years a political power in Philadelphia. The local leader of the party was Lewis C. Levin, by birth a South Carolinian, a man of stout build and florid eloquence. For three terms he sat as a representative of the first Pennsylvania district in Congress where he made many impas- sioned anti-Catholic speeches. Levin died in 1860. Throughout the country generally, however, the Philadelphia riots gave Nativism a set back. The popular verdict blamed the anti-Cath- olics. General Cadwalader, who had commanded the soldiers during the riots, some years afterwards stated in a public letter that the Nativists came to be generally known as the "the church burners," in the epithet parlance of the day.* *Scisco, "Political Nativism in New York," page 47, says: "The Philadelphia riotS', nevertheless, lost much sympathj' to 42 XATIVE AMERICANISM. In New York, Bishop Hughes, ad- monished by these events, took legal advice as to whether compensation could be obtained for property destroy- ed by rioters. Being advised in the negative, he said: "Then the law in- tends that citizens should defend their own property." He issued an fextra edition of The Freeman's Journal, calling on Catholics to defend their churches with their lives. The Native- Amei-icans, who had called a public meeting, revoked their call in view of thie action. Bishop O'Gorman ("His- tory Catholic Church," p. 375) tells us that a large Irish society in New York, with divisions in every district, re- solved that, in case a single Catholic church were destroyed, to fire buildings in all quarters and involve the city in a great conflagration. Though the field of its action was mostly confined to local politics, the Native-American movement had some results in the broader arena (1830-45). "\i\liile most of the foreign-born vote was Democratic, the Whigs were not the cause of Nativism, and their occur- rence was deeply regretted." 43 NATIVE AMERICANISM. without a share of it. Bishop Hughes, for instance, tells us that his first vote was cast for Henry Clay. In the cam- paign of 1840, the Democratic leaders of New York corralled almost the sol- id naturalized vote by representing thai Harrison was opposed to the "adopted citizen." This provoked Whig resent- ment. "Do we not hear of the organ- ization of a party against the Catho- lics ?" wrote Seward to a friend in 1840. Some of the "Whig leaders, like Clay, Scott and Fillmore, undoubtedly sym- pathized with the principles of the Xa- tive-American party. In 1844 Clay wrote to a friend: "There is a general tendency among the Whigs to unfurl the banner of the Xative-Americau party" (Von Hoist II., 524). Scott in The National Intelligencer (December, 1844), advocated the practical exclu- sion of all foreign-bom persons from the suffrage.! Later he claimed that the iLexican war had removed the cata- ract from liis eyes. (Yon Hoist, lY., tBro-vSTison in his Quarterly Re\aew for January, 1845, refers disparagingly to a speech by Webster at Faneuil hall, in which he thinks that this man of "trans- cendant abilities" pandered to the Xati- vist feeling. 44 XATIVE AMEBICANIS2I. 158). New York was a pivotal state in the Presidential election held in Novem- ber, 1844. Polk polled just 5,106 more votes in New York than Clay, and this gave him New York's thirty-six elec- toral votes, and the Presidency. Mil- lard Fillmore, in a letter to Clay, at- tributed the loss of New York to Catholic defection from the "Whigs, oc- casioned by the affiliation of Native- Americanism with that party. Anti- Masonry had deprived Clay of the Presidential nomination in 1840, and between Native-Americanism and the Liberal party he lost the election in 1844. But the resentment of the natu- ralized voters was not all due, proper- ly, to the "Whigs. The aid of a fair percentage of the Democratic party al- ways went to the proscriptive ticket. In the fall election of 1844 this Demo- cratic contingent, while voting general- ly for the Polk electors, in Philadelphia and New York enabled the Native- Americans to elect their local tickets. In April, 1845, the Nativist move- ment claimed 48,000 members in New York State (of whom 18,000 were in New York city), 42,000 in Pennsyl- 45 NATIVE AMERICANISM^ vania, 14,000 in Massachusetts and 6,000 scattered in other states. (Kochester American, April 26, 1845). A convention of the Native-Americans convened at Philadelphia July 4, 1845, with 141 delegates present, represent- ing fourteen states. It adopted a na- tional platform and an address to the people. A second national convention met May 4, 1847, at Pittsburg, with eleven states represented. At its sec- ond session at Philadelphia, Septem- ber 10, 1847, it recommended Zachary Taylor for President. Six Native-American Congi-es;s- men, (four from New York and two from Pennsylvania) were elected to the Twenty-ninth Congress (1845). But one Native- American Congi-essman appear- ed in the Thirtieth Congress and ucnie in the Thirty-first. The Mexican war had come and gone (1846-8). A great event had set new currents afloat. Native-Americnnism began to disappear. Both parties were again courting the naturalized citizen whom the Irish famine was sending to our shores in vaster numbers. Candi- dates were found purging themselves from the suspicion of affiliation with 46 NATIVE AMERICANISM. Nativism. Even Scott, the Whig can- didate for President in 1852, said peccavi. In the lull which followed the prostration of the Whigs a new form of the old movement was, how- ever, starting into vigorous growth. This was Know-Nothingism. 47 The Know-Nothing Party. ORIGIN AXD GROWTH. THE Know-Xothing order was the outgrowth, in form and member- ship, of a number of nativist secret so- cieties, which came into being during the years 1845-9. In Pennsylvania, the order of United American Mechan- ics, which restricted its membership to native-born Americans, had considera- ble strength. The order of Sons of America, organized aboiit the year 1845, at Philadelphia, also acquired a large following, and even extended its branches to New York. Pennsylvania gave birth also to the American Prot- 49 THE ENOW-NOTHING PARTY. estant Association, a secret benevolent society composed of Protestant Irish. This association also extended to New York. In 1853 it had several thousand members. The Order of United Americans was established in New York about the year 1845, and it soon became the strongest of the nativistifl. societies. At the beginning of 1847, it had about 2,000 members, and in 1848 it had ex- tended to Boston and organized itself at points in New Jersey and Pennsylva- nia. Though ostensibly a social and beneficial society, it now began to be active in promoting, in a secret way, certain political measures^ and New York politicians were not slow to de- tect its influence. Meanwhile, in the spring of 1850, Charles B. Allen had organzied the order of "the Star Span- gled Banner," sometimes known as the order of "the Sons of the Sires," its purpose not being specifically social and benevolent, like the other nativist secret societies, but more definitely designed to influence, by concerted action, local elections. Early in 1852, this new secrtit society 50 THE ENOW-NOTHING PARTY. received a large increase of member- ship, drawn mostly from the Order of United Americans. It at once began to take a hand in politics. And this was the beginning of the Know-Noth- ing oi'der.'^ Bolh the Order of United Americans ai.'! •"''-' Knovz-Nothing order, otherwise kno^vTi as the order of the Star Span- gled Banner, then began a career of rapid expansion. In 1856, the Order of *So far as primary sources of history are concerned, we have very little to aid us in tracing the course of the Know-Noth- ing movement. If even the records of so late a movement as the American Protec- tive Association have been burned (as its founder, H. F. Bowers, informs me), what can we expect as to the records of a secret movement of fifty years ago? Scisco (Po- litcal Nativism in New York, p. 255), says: "The great Know-Nothing order has left hardly a trace of itself in the way of rec- ords." The records of the Know-Nothing grand council, after passing from one grand secretary- to another, have disap- peared. The private papers of James W. Barker, for many years the Know-Nothing leader, and of Erastus Brooks, a later leader, cannot be found, or are unavail- able. Some of the records of the order of the United Americans were burned. Contemporaneous manuals and defenses of the American party, like the volumes of Whitney, Carroll and Lee, seem to con- ceal more than they reveal. 51 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. United Americans had extended to six- teen states, and it had on its rolls sev- eral hundred thousand members. The order of the Star Spangled Banner, or the Know-Nothing order proper, had, meanwhile, far out-stripped the Order of United Americans. The name of Thomas K. Whitney is associated with the growth of the Order of United Americans. He was its grand sachem for the state of New York in the year 1846, and again in 1853. He was also the author of a book in defense of the Know-Nothing movement. The more active political element of the Order of United Americans began to flock into the order of the Star Span- gled Banner during the year 1853. The new order began to be active in seeking to control party caucusses and party conventions. Then, after the old parties made the nominations, the order of the Star Spangled Banner proceeded to elect its ticket from the Democratic and the Whig tickets. November 10, 1853, The New York Tribune referred to the new secret influ- ence in politics, which had been exert- ing itself for some months, as "the Know-Nothing order." The New York 52 TEE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. press explained, as the reason for the name, the fact that members of the order, when questioned, professed to "know nothing" about it.* By the fall of 1853, the Know-Noth- ing order had organized branches in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut and Massachusetts, and had extended as far west as Ohio. While Charles B. Allen was the founder, James W. Barker was the man most conspicuous in the up-build- ing of the Know-Nothing order, es- pecially in New York; and up to 1856 he was its official head in that state. Barker had been a dry goods merchant in New York in the years prior to 1851. He threw himself into the new nativist movement with all the zeal and energy that he possessed. We are told that ♦Lee in his "History of the American Par- ty," page 200 says: "Whether the Ameri- can Associations are reallj- secret associa- tions or not Is a question concerning which the writer pretends to know nothing." The new movement itself accepted in a certain way the "Know-Nothing" appellation. Thus we find one of its publications en- titled "The Know-Nothing Calendar and True American Almanac for 1856," edited by W. S. Tisdale, Esq.; and also "The Wide-Awake Gift and Know-Xothing Tok- en for (1855)," by 'One of 'Em.' " 53 TEE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. in 1859 he left New York and again embarked in the dry goods business in the city of Pittsburg. The Know-Nothing order was not a mutual aid or beneficial society, but its primary aim was political. It had the usual pass-words, grips and ritual of a secret society. There were three de- grees with appropriate obligations and advantages. Those inducted into the first degree do not appear to have been informed as to the name of the order. They were brought into "the august presence of Sam." Their oath recited, among oth- er things, "that you will not vote or give your influence for any man for any ofiice in the gift of the people, un- less he be an American-born citizen, in favor of Americans ruling America, nor if he be a Koman Catholic." Mem- bers of the first degree were not eligi- ble for ofiice in the order, nor on its po- litical tickets. Members of the second degree took an oath, one of the obliga- tions of which recited "that if it may be done legally, you will, when elected or appointed to any official station con- ferring on you the power to do so, 64 THE ENOW-NOTHING PARTY. remove all foreigners, aliens or Ro- man Catholics from office or place, and that you will, in no case, appoint such to any office or place in your gift; you do also promise and swear that this and all other obligations which you have previously taken in this order, shall ever be kept, through life, sacred and inviolate." These extracts are from the ritual said to be revised by the national coun- cil held in Cincinnati on November 15, 1854. There were earlier publica- tions of the oaths varying in their texts, but quite similar in their gen- eral antagonism to naturalized citizens and Catholics* The third degree, as revised by the national council November, 1854, was the so-called "Union degree," pledging members to support the ties which bind together the states of the union and to oppose all men and measures adverse *The constitution and ritual of the Amer- ican party are publiElied in full in N. W. Cluskey's "Political Text Book and En- cyclopedia" (1858) pp. 55-68. Also in Coop- er's "American Politics" (1882) p. 57. Scis- co's account of the Know-Nothing de- grees and ritual is drawn largely from the newspapers of the daj\ 55 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. to the union, and to vote for third or union degree members of the order in preference to all other candidates for political office. The basis of the EJaow-jSTothing or- ganization was the ward or district council. In the large cities there was a superior council made up of delegates from the ward covmcils. The "grand council" was the state council made up of three delegates from each council of the order within the state. The na- tional council, which was the supreme authority in the order, was made up of delegates from various states in which the order existed on ' a basis proportionate to the state membership. The Know-Nothing order sought to keep from outsiders not only the iden- tity of its membership, but even the fact of its existence. Its notices of meeting, or calls for concert of action were bits of paper cut in different shapes or varying in color for different puiTDOses. The leading circumstances and in- fluences which contributed to the growth of the Know-Nothing move- ment may be briefly indicated as fol- 66 THE KXOW-XOTHIXG PARTY. lows: (1) Undoubtedly, the nativist sen- timent, about which the whole move- ment swung, not only gave the party its form, but in a large degree was the cohesive influence which held together the principal element of its member- ship. (2) The movement was launched after the overwhelming Whig defeat of 1852. That election seemed to many the end of all hope for the Whig par- ty; the time for it and its friends to quit the political field. There ensued also a lessening of the ties of allegiance to party among the northern Demo- crats, due to the subserv^iency of Pierce's administration to the slavocra- cy. The thousands of voters cast adrift, so to speak, from their party affiliations, were easily attracted by the standards of the new movement. Had the Republican party been launched as early as 1853 or 1854, its sails might have been filled with the new breeze, but as it was not there, the Know-Xoth- ing movement had the chance of the hour all to itself. (3) The attractiofi of the secret so- ciety and the mystery of the movement 57 TEE KXOW-XOTHIXG PARTY. undoubtedly won to the Know-Nothing party thousands of Americans who had no special devotion to its more fanati- cal purpose. (4) Its growth in the south and its absorption there of the Whig party, were altogether matters of political cal- culation. The southern "WTiigs thought that the sweep which the new party had won (1854-5) in the middle and Xew England states, promised a vic- tory at the aprroaching presidential election in 1856. The southern Whigs thought they were getting on the load- ed wagon. Except in Baltimore, Louis- ville and Xew Orleans, there was, south of Mason and Dixon's line, little chance for collision with foreign-born citizens, as few of them had settled there. Southern politicians, however, might reason themselves opposed to foreign immigration, inasmuch as coniining itself almost entirely to the north, it swelled the congressional representa- tion of the northern states. (6) Another element drawn into the EJnow-jSTothing party, especially the latter years of its existence, consisted of those who preferred to evade the sla- very question, the "dough-faces," so- 58 TEE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. called, in the political parlance of tha times, — those who relied upon the con- stitution and who proclaimed their de- votion to the union, vainly supposing that by taking such a stand they could postpone the irrepressible conflict on the slavery issue. The American par- ty, virtually straddled the slavery ques- tion : and this attitude undoubtedly at- tracted to its ranks thousands of those who wished to take middle ground. In its last years, so far as it existed as a power in the politics of the country, it was not a middle state party, but a bor- der state party. r9 n. HIGH TIDE (1854-5). IN his history of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power (chap- ter 32), Henry Wilson, who had himself joined the Know-Nothing order, says: "In the year 1863, a se- cret order was organized by a few men in New York city. Its professed pur- pose was to check foreign influence, purify the ballot box and rebuke the ef- fort to exclude the Bible from the pub- lic schools." Scisco, a more careful historian, at least in the matter of dates, (Political Nativism, p 97), re- ports : "By May 1, 1853, there existed in New York state fifty-four scattered bodies, most of which were located in New York city or in the counties lying adjacent, where Nativistic sentiment had been fostered by the O. U. A. and 60 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. other Nativistic societies. The spring elections of 1854 gave opportunities for the rural bodies to use their power, but nowhere does their presence seem to have attracted notice except in New York and Westchester counties."* But local elections in the early months of 1854, in several adjoining states showed that the order was not ♦Whitney, in his "Defence of the Ameri- can Policy," (p. 284), says that state coun- cils of the order of the United Americans were organized in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Connecticut, Massachmsetts, Pennsylvania and Ohio during the months April to December, 1853; in Washington. D. C, New Hampshire, Indiana, Rhode Island and Maine during the months January to April, 1854; in Illinois, Michigan. Iowa and Wisconsin from May to September, 1854. State councils were organized in the fol- lowing southern states chiefly during the latter part of 1854: Alabama. Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky. Missouri, Tennessee, "Virginia, Delaware. Mississippi, Texas. Florida, Arkansas and Louisiana. In the fall of 1854 state councils were organized in California and Oregon. A state council was formed in Minnesota in May, 1855, and about the same time in New Mexico, Kansas and Nebraska. Thus, (says Whitney) , in about three years from the organization cf the first counf'I th' or- der was organized in every state and terri- tory in the Union, "numbering In its mem- bership at least one and one half million legal voters." 61 TEE EXO}y-XOTniXG PARTY. only widely diffused, but so numerical- ly strong, as to indicate that it had been organized for some time in these localities. There is some authority for the statement that was introduced in Baltimore in December, 1852. Salem (in January), Worcester and several other Massachusetts towns were car- ried by its silent influence in the spring election of 1854. At Philadelphia, it surprised the Democrats, (May, 1854), by electing the Whig candidate for May- or, Conrad, by eight thousand plurality. Mayor Conrad proceeded openly to affili- ate with the American party. About the same time Washing-ton went under the Know-Xothing yoke and Baltimore followed. In 1853-4 the Know-Nothing par- ty acted largely upon the following formally adopted policy: "Rule Nine: Whenever it shall be deemed necessary for the order to aid in the choice of men for public office through the suffrages of the people, it chall be the duty of each executive com- mittee to call together the members of the Order in their district prior to the usual primary elections or nominations, and determine upon suitable candidates 62 THE EXO^Y-XOTHING PARTY. of each party or either, as they may de- termine. It will be the duty of the members to assemble at the times and places of holding the primary meetings of such party or parties, and there use their influence in obtaining the nom- ination of the candidates they have se- lected. If the nominations are secured and ratified our cause will triumph, whichever party may be successful. Should the members of the Order nom- inate or select candidates already in the field, nominated by on© party only, it will be the duty of every brother to sustain that selection independent of any party consideration." (Scisco Pol- itical Nativism, p 80.) In the congressional elections of 1851 — at which time the new power in poli- tics became the sensation of the hour — this rule was quite generally followed. The Know-Xothings — throughout the north — supported Whig, Eepublicans and anti-Xebraska Democratic candi- dates for congress, who were privately pledged to so-called "American ideas.'' When the congress thus elected met for its first session in December, 1855, there were over a hundred congressmen from the north classified as Eepublicans; 63 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. they voted for the Republican candi- date for speaker, N. P. Banks, but Hor- ace Greeley, (writing at the time to Charles A. Dana,) said: ''The majority of the Banks men are now members of Know-jSTothing councils, and some twenty or thirty of them actually believe in the swindle. Half the Massachusetts delegation, two-thirds that of Ohio, and nearly all that of Pennsylvania are Know-Noth- ings this day. We shall get them grad- ually detached." (Quoted in Rhodes History of the United States, Vol. II. p. 111.) The manner in which the new power in politics set the tongue of the nation wagging over its entry into the arena was not through the silent influence it exerted in selecting congressmen, but by the showing it made with candidates of its own for governor in New York and Massa- chusetts. Its candidate for governor in New York (in the fall of 1854), was a man little known, and no open cam- paign work was done in his behalf, nor did any influential paper support him. Its candidate for governor in Massa- chusetts was a broken down Whig poli- 64 TEE EXOW-XOTHIXG PARTY. tician, whose appearance in the cam- paign was referred to by one of the leading Boston dailies as a joke. To the surprise of everybody, it poll- ed 122,000 votes for its candidate for governor of New York. Seymour, the Democratic candidate, had 156,495 votes, and Clarke, the "Whig candidate, who was elected, had 156,804. In ilas- sachusetts, Henry J. Gardner, the Know-Nothing candidate was elected governor by 50,000 majority, and the Know-Nothings elected both houses of the Legislature almost to a man. Del- aware was also carried by the E[iiow- Nothings. These victories greatly accelerated the numerical growth of the order in the north and caused it to spread like wild fire through the south. By March, 1855, J. W. Barker, the head of the order in New York, re- ported that there were nine hundred and sixty councils of the American par- ty in his state alone. Its prospects were such that its success in the com- ing presidential election was seriously canvassed. The Worcester Evening Journal claimed that it would sweep the north and carry there more than 65 THE EXOW-XOTHIXG PARTY. enough electoral votes to secure the presidency. The New York Herald about the same time, (cited by Hamble- ton, History of the Political Campaign of Virginia in 1855, page 251), editor- ially declared that the American party would triumph in the coming presi- dential election if it could divest it- self of its abolitionist handicap. The Herald estimated the Know- Nothing votes at 1,375,000. Henry Wil- son thinks they numbered not less than 1,250,000. Viewing this episode in American politics, thirty years after, Bryce, the English historian (American Common- wealths II. p. 291), is moved to say: "They [The Americans] are a changeful people. The Native Ameri- can, or so-called Know-Nothing par- ty, had, in two years from its founda- tion, become a tremendous force rising, and seeming likely for a time to carry its own presidential candidate. In three years more it was dead without a hope of revival." But shrewd American political lead- ers, even while Know-Nothingism was at its high tide had forecasted its early ■ disruption. Greeley's famous dictum: 66 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. "It [Know-Nothingism] would seem as devoid of the elements of persistence as an anti-cholera or anti-potato rot party" was written long prior to 1856. Though the mortal hurts that the Know-Nothing movement received had been dealt in May and June, 1855, it still appeared to be ascendant in the fall elections of that year. It carried Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Khode Island and Connecticut, electing- the governors and legislatures in all these states and it elected the minor state of- ficers voted for in the New York state election. It also elected its candidates for governor in Kentucky and Califor- nia. It carried the legislature in Mary- land and elected some minor candidates on the ticket which it put up in Texas. In Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Mississippi and Texas it was beaten only by a close vote. The Dem- ocrats retained these states by majori- ties ranging from 2,000 to 10,000. Meanwhile there occurred the signal defeat of the Know-Nothing ticket iu the Virginia state election of May, 1855 and the split over the slavery issue in the Philadelphia convention of the 67 TEE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. American party in June, 1855. These two events, together with the rise of the Republican party, presaged the rapid decline of the Know-Nothing move- ment. Virginia was a debatable state — usually Democratic, but always so on a narrow margin. The state elections of 1855 were to deter- mine whether the American par- ty in absorbing the Whig party had strengthened or weakened the opposi- tion to the Democratic party in the south. It was a very bitter struggle. The Democratic candidate for Gover- nor, Henry A. Wise, made a vigorous denunciation of Know-Nothingism the feature of his campaign. He went from one end of the state to the other, deliv- ering fifty speeches during the canvass. It was one of the record campaigns of the time. The attention of the whole country was drawn to this election. Great sums of money were wagered up- on the result. Wise was elected by 10,- 000 majority. Commenting on the Virginia elec- tion, the iSTew York Tribune of May 29, 1855, said that it "had rung the knell" of Know-Nothingism in the 68 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. South. It was reasoned that as a vote getter, the new party could not do much better in the slave states than the old Whig party had done. Following this reverse came the split in the National Council of the Know- Nothing party which met at Philadel- phia on June 5, 1855. The slavery is- sue had to be met in some way and a committee on resolutions had the sub- ject up for three days discussion. Fin- ally the majority of the committee rec- ommended that Congress ought not to prohibit slavery in any territory and that it had no power to exclude any state from coming into the Union, be- cause the state constitution recognized slavery. Delegates from thirteen free states brought in a minority report and another three days discussion followed, Henry Wilson leading the anti-slavery forces; but the Southern view triumph- ed by a vote of 80 to 59.* Thereupon the delegates from Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachu- setts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Ohio, *B. B. Bartlett, of Kentucky, superseded J. W. Barker of New York, a» President of the order, although Barker, who wa^' a candidate for re-election, trimmed to the southern view of the slavery issue. 69 TB^ KXOW-WOTHJme PAMTF. -lii^y.'fi. MidogBB, miBois, Iqwa and -r* ifce OBaDnaBiiaBL i3Bned. an ^ ni. DIST^EBAyCEA^^:) ACEI3I0^'T. o ,XE of the i:i:ema: troubles of the Catholic Ch-ireh in the U-itei States during the year 5ub=e3-ient to 1520, was the "trustee'" system, where- by the lay trustees of many of the con- gregations assumed to a le^ or greater extent the authority to accept or re- ject the priests sent to minister over the congregation by the bishop, and to regulate the affairs of the parish in a manner that sometimes bron^t them into collision with the epia»pal au- thority. Out of this conflict grew two incidents which gave the Know-Xoth- ing moTement a decided impetus. The Pope sent Archbishop Bedini as papal nuncio to Brazil in 1853, and because of some troubles with church trustees in Buffalo and Philadelphia, Msgr. Bedini was requested by the 71 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. Pope to visit the United States on his way and endeavor to adjust these dif- ficulties. He called on President Pierce at Washington bearing a let- ter, the intent of which was to give him standing as one of the diplomatic corps. At that time the United States had a minister accredited to the Pope, as temporal ruler of the Papal states, and there could be no objection, in in- ternational law, to the Pope accredit- ing a diplomatic representatives of his own to the United States. However, objection was interposed by the Amer- ican state department to the reception of Msgr. Bedini as a diplomatic agent on the ground that he was not a lay- man. There was then in the United States an ex-monk (a Barnabite) from Italy named Gavazzi, delivering about the country such lectures as a typical "ex- priest" is in the habit of presenting to the credulous American Protestant. Gavazzi had assailed Bedini, calling attention to his conduct as papal gov- ernor of Bologna during the troublous times of 1848, and his severity towards the revolutionists. The American press was inclined to assist the anti-Bedini 72 TEE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. feeling aroused by Gavazzi; and un- friendly crowds awaited the papal nuncio's coming in various cities. At Cincinnati, especially, there was a threatening demonstration, a howling mob of two thousand people moving upon the house of the archbishop. The militia were called out, and except for this and the prompt action of local au- thorities, incendiarism and murder would have resulted, for there were leaders desirous of making an exam- ple out of the incident b;- hanging Msgr. Bedini. In some places, as in Baltimore, where he was hanged in effigy, he was obliged to conceal his presence. He left the country with- out settling the disputes in question. The other incident was a discussion between Senator Brooks of the New York Legislature and Bishop Hughes (who signed himself "►J^John, bishop of the province of New York") . Brooks made some extravagant asser- tions as to the value of Catholic church property, incident to the discussion of a bill pending in the legislature, v.diich sought to regulate the tenure thereof. The measure advocated by Senator Brooks was passed. 73 THE KXOW-XOTHIXa PARTY. It provided that no title to real property could be conveyable or de- scendible by an ecclesiastic to his suc- cessor in office (Laws of 1855, Chapter 230). The intent of the measure, doubtless, was to compel Catholic bish- ops to divest themselves of the title to church property, and to vest the same in civil corporations. Because of so many difficulties with lay trustees, this plan was obnoxious to them. Sub- sequently, in the history of the Cath- olic Church, a policy in favor of plac- ing all church property under protec- tion of legal incorporation was, how- ever, adopted. In the Third Plenary council of Baltimore this change was urged by the bishops. In 1863, a spe- cial act for the incorporation of Cath- olic church property was placed upon the Xew York statutes (ch. 45, Laws of 1S63). At present, uncer the laws of several of the states. Catholic bishops are either authorized to act as corpor- ations sole, for the purpose of hold- ing real estate, or the Xew York sys- tem for the incorporation of the local churches with the bishop, the vicar- general, the pastor and two laymen as the board of directors, is followed. THE EXOW-XOTEIXG PARTY. The riotous events which signalized the visit of Archbishop Bedini contin- ued during the ensuing year, largely excited by anti-Popery street preach- ers. The "Angel Gabriel," an ec- centric Scotch anti-Popery speaker, was at work in New England in 1851, and numerous anti-Catholic distur- bances resulted. A Know-Xothing mob made an attack upon the Irish quarter in Chelsea. In June, 1854, the Cath- olic chapel at Coburg was burned. In the early part of July, the Dorchester Catholic chapel was blown up by the Know-Nothings. A little Catholic church at Bath, in Maine, was burned to the ground. A mob paraded the streets of Manchester, N. H., tore the American flag from the priest's house and wrecked the interior of the Cath- olic church. At Ellsworth, Me., Fath- er Bapst, the Catholic priest, was tak- en from his dwelling and tarred and feathered. These events excited Catholic ap- prehension in all parts of the country, and the business of guarding the Catholic churches from incendiarism and mob violence became a serious pur- pose with them. At Providence, E. I., 75 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. in the same year, a Know-Nothing mob, led by a notorious criminal, attacked the Convent of Mercy, but the damage was slight, as the Catholics rallied for the protection of the institution. Au- gust 7 and 8, St. Louis was the scene of a riot precipitated by the Know- Nothings, which resulted in ten deaths and the destruction of a number of houses of Catholics. The election riots at Baltimore, and "Bloody Mon- day" at Louisville will be elsewhere noted. At Washington a Know-Noth- ing mob forced its way into a shed near the Washington monument and captured a block of marble, taken from the temple of Concord at Rome, which had been sent by the Pope as a tribute to be used in the monument then being erected to Washington. This papal gift was thrown into the Potomac. One of the earliest outcroppings of Know-Nothingism in New York trans- pired over the case of a street preach- er named Daniel Parsons, who had been indulging in bitter anti-Popery speeches on Sundays about the wharves and docks. The authorities placed him under arrest. Immediately there was 76 TEE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. a movement of protest from the Know- Nothings. A great meeting was called in the City Hall park. Thousands were present, and James W. Barker, the Know-Nothing leader, presided. Par- sons was released and went on with his work. On the first Sunday of June, 1854, an anti-Catholic preacher was escorted through Brooklyn by a Know-Nothing mob of 5,000. This no-Popery demon- stration collided with an Irish mob, and a free fight ensued. On the fol- lowing Sunday the disturbance was re- newed. During the spring of 1854, a yotmg man named Patten, organized in New York a nativist secret society for younger men. They were known as the Order of the American Star, and some- times as The Wide-Awakes, from their rallying cry. This organization at- tended to all street disturbances on be- half of the order. Their white felt "wide-awake" hats were recognized as the insignia of their belligerant pur- pose. In Massachusetts, one of the first acts of the Know-Nothing governor, Gardner, in 1855, was to disband all 77 TEE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. militia companies in which foreigners predominated. These included six Irish-American companies, the Colum- bus, Webster and Shields National guards of Boston, Jackson guards of Lowell, Union guards of Lawrence and Jackson guards of Worcester. All through the years 1853 and 1854 the anti-Catholic propaganda was fed by a remarkable crop of sensational sermons, pamphlets and novels, and the republication of numerous works )f evangelical bigotry dating from the epoch of Catholic emancipation (1829 \ In many places throughout the north the children of Irish parentage attend- ing the common schools, were subjected during these years to various kinds of petty persecution. On the school grounds they were hooted as "Paddies," text-books were utilized to disparage their religion, but the most usual form of annoyance had reference to Bible reading. Numerovis cases of this kind went into the courts; that of Donohue vs. Richards, which transpired at Ells- worth, Me., in 1854, where a Catholic pupil was subjected to corporal punish- ment for declining to read the Protes- tant scriptures, being the most notable. 78 TEE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. It is to the credit of our courts that the narrow-minded position of the \ Maine Supreme bench in this case did not receive the approval, subsequently, of any court of final resort. Later in the fifties, a hundred Catholic children of the Elliot school in Boston were ex- pelled because they refused in a body to participate in Protestant prayers and Bible reading. In 1859, Principal Cooke of one of the Boston school?, severely punished Thomas J. Whall, a Catholic pupil, who had declined to re- cite the Ten Commandments according to the King James version. The case went into one of the local courts, but without redress to the plaintiff. In 1853 and 1854 the Know-Nothings used secret machinery to interfere with and disturb the political meetings of their opponents of other parties. George W. Julian tells us : "If a meet- ing was called to oppose and denounce its schemes, it was drowned in the Know-Nothing flood which, at the ap- pointed time, completely overwhelmed the helpless minority. This happened in my own county and town, where thousands of men, including many of my own Free Soil brethren, assembled 79 THE KN OAT-NOTHING PARTY. as an organized mob to suppress the freedom of speech, and succeeded by brute force in taking possession of every building in which their oppo- nents could meet, and silencing them by savage yells." (Jvdian's "Political Eecollections," 142.) Charles Eeemlin, a prominent for- eign-born Republican of Ohio, in his "Eeview of American Politics" (page 214), says that "in Know-Nothing times there was a tacit exception from anti-foreign objuration in favor of Scotch and English Protestants.* * The foreign-bom Presbyterians were in fact, a sort of back-stair members of Ejiow-Nothing lodges." After 1848, there came to the United States among the increasing German immigration, a large number of men imbued with the revolutionary spirit of the time. This German element was bitterly hostile to church influence ; and also inclined to believe that the Amer- ican system of government could be reformed. The German Social Demo- cratic association of Richmond out- lined a program of reforms, and the Free Germans of Louisville adopted a similar platform calling for the aboli- 80 TRE KNOW-yOTHIXG PARTY. tion of the presidency and the Senate, the abrogation of Sunday laws, of oaths taken upon the Bible, etc. In Maryland, Kentucky and Tennessee these German programs were widely used to excite Know-Nothing hostility to inrmigration. The German element also v.-as more adverse to the institu- tion of slavery than were the other foreign elements. Most o- the Ger- man papers of the country sLowed a tendency to support the new Eepubli- can party. The keen politicians of the south perceived this. "While in the north the crusade was carried on main- ly against the Irish," says Von Hoist (VI. 188), "the south was chiefly con- cerned in insuring the harmlessness of the wicked Germans." Mobbing of German newspapers and Turner halls in some of the cities in the border states were incidents noted in the news- papers towards the eve of the civil war. 81 IV. DEMOCEATIC AND REPUB- LICAN ATTITUDES. ■jV/rANY anti-Nebraska Democrats i.VX went into Know-Nothing lodges m 1854. The secret movement un- doubtedly promised to shape Demo- cratic nominations as well as Whig and Republican li^minations in that year. Congressman Carruthers (Dem.) of Missouri, admitted (Feb. 28, 1856), in a letter to his constituents that he had joined the order: "I went twice (and but twice), into their [the Know Nothing] councils. I 'saw Sam.' It took two visits to see him all over. I made them. I saw enough and determined never to look on his face again." N. P. Banks stated in the House that he secured his first election (in 82 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. 1852) to Congress through a combina- tion of Democrats and Know-Nothings. Cutts says that Douglas told him: "The [Know Xothing] party struck ter- ror everywhere among the Democrats, and threatened to gain absolute pos- ession of the government. I tried to get the Democrats in caucus to de- nounce it, biit they refused, and were afraid. General Cass said to me that I had enough to contend with, and could not carry on my shoulders this new element. I was the first Democrat to make a speech against it. I did so at Independence hall, Philadelphia," [July 4, 1854]. (A Brief Treatise up- .on Constitutional and Party Questions . . " * * as I received it orally from * " * St. A. Douglas p. 121.) Douglas and Wise leading the way, other Democratic politicians joined in the denunciation of Know Nothingism, and purged the party of the taint. In April, 1855, at Murpheesboro, Tenn., Gov. Andrew Johnson, (Dem)., deliver- ed a strong speech against it, and in May, 1855, Alexander Stephens of Georgia published a letter denouncing it. The Democratic members of Con- 83 THE EXOW-XOTHING PARTY. gress, v.-liich convened December, 1855, unlike their predecessors in the pre- vious Congress, loiew where they ought to stand on the Know-Nothing issue. Fresh from the mandate of the people, they took occasion, in their first party caucus, to declare themselves against Know-Xothingism. The Democratic platform upon which Buchanan was elected Presi- dent in 1858, v>'as unequivocal in this matter. It recited: "That the liberal principles sanction- ed in the Constitution which makes ours the land of liberty and the asylum of the oppressed of every nation have been cardinal principles of the Demo- cratic faith; and every attempt to abridge the privilege of becoming citi- zens and owning soil among us ought to be resented." And : "Hence a political crusade in the nineteenth century and in the United States of America against Catholics and foi-eign born, is neither justified by the past history nor future prospects of the country, nor in unison with thy spirit of toleration and enlightened freedom which peculiarly distinguishes the American system of popular gov- 84 TEE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. eriiment." The formation of the "Repviblican" party was first suggested at a meeting of anti-slavery men convened March, 1854, at Ripon, Wisconsin, and this was followed in July, 1854, by Republi- can movements in Michigan and Ver- mont. But the Republican movement did not at once take hold throughout the country. The old Whig party re- fused to disband in New York and Massachusetts, and the Know Nothings placed all obstacles possible in the way of the new party. The demand of the northern anti-slavery sentiment for a political organization gradually found expression, however, after the middle of 1854, — in some states, as in Indiana where it chose the title "People's par- ty"^ — imder differing names and aus- pices, but with a general similarity of aims and purposes everywhere. The earnest anti-slavery men who founded the Republican party were generally outspoken antagonists of Know Nothingism; not entirely, of course, because they disliked its intol- erance, but because they revolted at its truce with the slavocracy. Wade, Giddings and Julian were among those 85 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. vrho early denounced the Know Noth- ings. In a speech in the Senate on the Homestead bill, William H. Sew- ard took occasion (February, 1855) to remark : "It is sufficient for me to say that, in my judgment, everything is un- American which makes a distinction, of whatever kind, in this country, be- t'n'een the native born Araerican and him whose lot is directed to be cast here by an overruling Providence, and who renounces his allegiance to a for- eign land and swears fealty to the coun- try which adopts him." And Henry Ward Beecher wrote in The Independent (January, 18, 1855: "By yearo of persistent la- bor, the conscience and honor of multi- tudes of the north had been aroused. They began to see and value the real principles fundamental to American in- stitutions. Under the shallow pretense that Know Nothing lodges would, by and by, become the champions of liber- ty, as now they are of the Protestant faith, thousands have been inveigled in- to these catacorabs of freedom. One might as well study optics in the pyramids of Egypt, or the subterranean 86 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. tombs of Rome, as liberty in secret con- claves controlled by hoary knaves versed in political intrigue, who can hardly enough express their surprise and delight to see honest men going into a wide-spread system of secret caucuses. Honest men in such places have the peculiar advantage that flies have in a spider's web — the privilege of losing their legs, of buzzing without flying, and being eaten up at leisure by big-bellied spiders." Greeley in The New York Tribune, and Dr. Bailey in The National Era, were strongly anti-Know-Nothing. All the extreme atjol'itionists and their organ. The Liberator, were adverse on principle to the proscriptive movement. The first state convention of the Re- publican party in Illinois, (Blooming- ton, March, 1856), inserted in its plat- form a resolution denouncing the Know Nothings. Abraham Lincoln was pres- ent as a delegate. When the anti-slav- ery men of Nev/ York (in the latter part of 1855), finally came together to laimch the Republican party, the plat- form reported by Horace Greeley and adopted by the convention, strongly condemned the methods and the doc- 87 / THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. trines of the Know Nothings. February 22, 1856, a national conven- tion of the Republicans met at Pitts- burg, and when Charles Reemlin and other speakers vigorously denounced Know Nothingism as a mischievous side issue, they were loudly applaiided. At the subsequent national convention of the Republican party in June at Philadelphia, the platform upon which Fremont was nominated declared * * "believing that the spirit of our insti- tions as well as the institutions of our country guarantees liberty of consci- ence and equality of rights among citi- zens we oppose all prescriptive legisla- tion affecting their security." This view was substantially reiter- ated in the platform of the Chicago na- tional convention of the Republican party in 1860, section 14, reciting that "the Republican party is opposed to any changes in our naturalization laws" and favors "protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized." Former Know Nothings sat in these conventions and heard the principles of their recent affiliation denounced, but they made no objection. Either 88 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. their eyes had been opened, or the evil training of surreptitious politics de- prived them of the courage of their convictions. The Republican party absorbed thousands of those who left the Know Nothing lodges and its politi- cians tempered their methods in the years 1857-9, in such wise as to catch the fragments of the disrupting Ameri- can party. Chas. A. Dana, for instance, wrote Sept. 1, 1859: "The Americans hold the balance of power in both [N. J. and N. Y.] Their party is in the act of final dis- solution. Shall we let the fragments fall into with the arms of the Loco- focos." (Pike p. 444). There was an effective warning, how- ever, against truckling in this process to any Know-Nothing policy. Thus Lincoln, in 1859, wrote a public letter against "the waning fallacy of Know- Nothingism," (see Nicholay and Hay's Biographj^ II., 181), with special ref- erence to the Know-Nothing naturali- zation idea. Horace Greeley ("Recollections" p. 290), expresses this opinion, which as 89 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. a forecast, undoubtedly governed the mauagevs of the Republican party aft- er 1856: "The fact that almost every Know jSTothing was at heart a Whig or a Democrat, a champion or an opponent of slavery and felt a stronger, deeper interest in other issues than in those which affiliated him with the 'Order', rendered its disruption and abandon- ment not a question of years, but of months." It is not the less true or creditable, however, that the initial expressions of the Republican party and of its lead- ers were unequivocally against the Know-Nothing movement. 90 V. KNOW-NOTHINGISM AND ITS ISSUES. THE national convention of the American party at Philadelphia, in June, 1855, made the following state- ment of the distinctive principles of Know-Nothingism : "A radical revision and modification of the laws regulating immigration, and tlie settlement of immigrants, of- fering the honest immigrant, who from love of liberty or hatred of oppression, seeks an asylum in the United States, a friendly reception and protection, but unqualifiedly condemning the transmission to our shores or felons and paupers. "The essential modfication of the naturalization laws. The repeal by the legislatures of the respective states of 91 y THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. all state laws allowing foreigners not naturalized, to vote. The repeal, with- out retrospective operation, of all acts of Congress making grants of land to unnaturalized foreigners, and allowing them to vote in the territories. "Eesistance to the aggressive policy and corrupting tendencies of the Ro- man Catholic Church in our country; by the advancement to all political stations, executive, legislative, judicial or diplomatic — of those only who do not hold civil allegiance, directly or in- directly, to any foreign power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, and who are Americans by birth, education and training, thus fulfilling the maxim, 'Americans only shall govern America.' "And inasmuch as Christianity, by the constitutions of nearly all the states; by the decisions of most emi- nent judicial authorities, and by the consent of the people of America, is considered an element of our political system, and the Holy Bible is at once the sovirce of Christianity and the de- pository and fountain of all civil and religious freedom, we oppose every at- tempt to exclude it from the schools thus established in the states." 92 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. The platform of the American par- ty in 1856, upon which Fillmore was nominated, covered the ground of the preceding platform as follows : "Americans must rule America, and to this end native-born citizens should be selected for all state and municipal offices, or government employment, in preference to all others. "No person should be selected for political station (whether of native or foreign birth), who recognizes any al- legiance or obligation of any descrip- tion to any foreign prince, potentate or power, or who refuses to recognize the federal and state constitutions (each within its sphere), as paramount to all other laAVS as issues of political ac- tion. "A change in the laws of naturaliza- tion, making a continued residence of twenty-one years, of all not hereinbe- fore provided for, an indispensable re- quisite for citizenship hereafter, and excluding all paupers and persons con- victed of crime, from landing upon our shores, but no interference with the vested rights of foreigners." On the slavery issue, the sincere men in the '50's — the men who knew what 93 THE KNOW-NOTHING PABTY. they wanted and who were earnest about it — were the Republicans of the north, who opposed the further exten- sion of slavery, no matter what the consequences; and on the other side, the Democrats of the south, who wanted the sectional equilibrium maintained, slavery extended equally with the spread of freedom, a new slave state for every new free state, and if this could not be, the south would secede. Between these parties stood many who temporized, or compromised, or trinnned ; and the EJnow-Nothings were conspicuously of this class. They took the position that their issues, — natural- ization, immigration and papal aggres- sion were the important and vital is- sues, — and that the slavery issue must, for the sake of the union and section- al harmony, be left where legislation up to the year 1855 found it. But as northern opinion continued to turn against the political dominance of the south, provoked by the demands which the slavocray made, and exacted from the Democratic party (embodied in such events as the Kansas-Xebraska bill, the Fugitive Slave law and the Dred Scott decision), a large element 94 THE KXOW-XOTHIXG PARTY. of the northern I\jiov7-Nothings, wheth- er from policy or conviction, found that they could no longer straddle the slavery issue. Numbers of these went into the Eepublican party ; numbers of them adhered to the American party under protest as to its position on the slavery issue. At the national convention of the Kjiow-Nothing order at Philadel- phia in June, 1855, there were two re- ports on the slavery question from the committee on resolutions. The major- ity.consistingof fourteen members from the southern states and the representa- tives from New York and Minnesota, declared that Congress ought not to prohibit slaveiy in the District of Co- lumbia or in any territory, that it had no power to exclude any state from ad- mission to the union because that state, by its constitution, allowed sla- very. The minority, consisting of th? representatives from thirteen free states, proposed that the Missouri com- promise should be re-enacted, and that no part of the Kansas-Nebraska terri- tory should come into the union as a slave state. After a protracted debate, the majority report, as has been noted, 95 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. v\'as adopted (80 to 59). The minority protested, but the northern wing of the party nevertheless, continvied to act with the southern wing. Their anti- slavery sentiment was a matter of pol- icy rather than of conviction. This was illustrated at the subsequent na- tional gathering of the party at Phil- adelphia in February, 1856, v.hen the platform being under consid- eration, Mr. Sheets of Indiana, pleaded for a more ambiguovis statement on the slavery issue for the sake of the northern Know-Nothings ; "he was willing to accept the Washing- ton platform ; for if there was anything in it, it was so covered up Avith verbiage that a president would be elected before the people found out what it was all about (tumultuous laughter)."* Southern opinion, both Democratic and Whig, in so far as it was concerned about the slavery question, regarded the Know-Nothing movement complacent- ly, as a diversion in political tactics, and as such calculated to impede the *In the course oi debate. Parson Brown- low of Tennessee, declared he could "take five men of his delegation and lick the Ohio delegation out of the hall." 96 TEE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. growth of the anti-slavery sentiment in the north. Julian's view on the mat- ter is, of course, far-fetched, but it in- dicates correctly the practical advan- tage the southerner might look for: "Its [the American party's] birth, simultaneously with the repeal of the Missouri compromise, was not an ac- cident, as any one could see who had studied the tactics of the slave-holders. It was a well-timed scheme to divide the people of the free states upon trifles and side issues, while the south re- mained a unit in defense of its great interest. It was the cunning attempt to balk and divert the indignation aroused by the repeal of the Missouri restriction, which else would spend its force upon the aggression of slavery; for by thus kindling the Protestant jealousy of our people against the Pope, and enlisting them in a crusade against the foreigner, the south could all the more successfully push forward its schemes." (Political Recol- lections. 1840 to 1872, p. 141.) Southern opinion rather welcomed a northern movement to shvit out Euro- pean inunigration. Immigration had largely increased the preponderance of 97 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. the north in the popular branch of Congress, and given that section its y army of western settlers now peopling the territories for freedom. Governor Smith of Virginia said in a speech, reported in The New York Tribune, March 14, 1855: "The origin of the Know-Nothings^ is a struggle for bread — a frightful and angry question at the north. At the south it is a politi- cal question of high importance. The north has fifty-five more representatives than the south already. The natural increase of the south is one-third great- er than that of the north, because there are greater checks on population there ; but the artificial element of foreignism brings 500,000 who settle annually in ^/^ the free states, with instincts against slavery, making fifty representatives in ten years to swell the opposition to the south. To stop this enormous dis- proportion, what is our i)olicy? What is the frightful prospect before us'i The effect of Know-Nothingism is to turn back the tide of immigration, and our highest duty to the south is to dis- y/ courage immigration. I deprecate it as a great calamity." A slaveholder of the period put the 98 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. matter in this way : "The mistake with us has been that it was not made fel- ony to bring in an Irishman when it was made piracy to bring in an Afri- can." (Draper's American Conflict, I,, 446.) 99 ff VI. SOLVENT INFLUENCES AND DISCUSSION. AFTER 1854 the Know-Nothing ■^^- movement was subjected to the sol- vent influences of public opinion. The press of the country sought to drag it into the open. Its extension in- to the south was accompanied by a loss of secrecy. The American party there adopted the open methods of the Whig party which it absorbed. "It does the south no small honor," says Von Hoist, (V. p. 191), "that there the party had to agree to give up its secrecy and its oaths as it had al- ready been forced there to make conces- sions in regard to the Catholics." Col J. W. Forney, in an address on "Eeligious Intolerance and Political Proscription" delivered at Lancaster, 100 TEE KNO}Y-XOTHIXG PARTY. Pa., 24tli Sept. 1855, p. 22, tells us : "To such extent has public indigna- tion been excited against the profane and familiar resort to extra judicial oaths, and the invariable appeal to force and fraud at the ballot-boxes, that in portions of the Union it [the American party] has deliberately dis- carded alike its secrecy and its obliga- tions. This has been the case in Ala- bama, Georgia, Louisiana and South Carolina." The secrecy of the order was practi- cally done for throughout the whole country after the American party launched itself in national politics. When in June, 1855, the Know-Noth- ing national convention assembled at Philadelphia, its sessions were fully re- ported in the New York papers whose representatives were present at the gathering. State councils of the Know- Nothing order there were empowered to dispense with the secret character of the m.ovement. The platform declared: '•'That each state council shall have authority to amend their several con- stitutions so as to abolish the several degrees, and institute a pledge of hon- or instead of other obligations for fel- 101 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. lowship and admission into the party. A free and open discussion of all the political principles embraced in our platform." This option was speedily availed of. The Massachusetts Know-Nothings, for instance, on August 7, 1855, abolished secrecy, including the oatlis. (Life of Bowles, 140). One consequence of the loss of secre- cy and the turning on of the light of piiblic discussion was the attempted disavowal and abatement of the intoler- ant program of the order and the des- uetude of its obligations against the Catholics and foreigners. This happen- ed quite generally in the south and more particularly in the states of Lou- isiana and Missouri; but also in Cali- fornia. L. M. Kennett of Missouri, himself a Know-Nothing congressman said of the party in his state : "All secrecy is there discarded and religious tests ignored." (Cluskey, The Political Test book p, 299). Congressman Barry of Missis- sippi, speaking December, 1854, in the House of Representatives said: "In Louisiana Catholics are allowed to join the order because that denomination is 102 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. too numerous there to be assailed open- ly." Congressman Eustis of Louisiana, elected as a Know-Nothing, delivered a speech Jan. 6, 1856, in the House of Representatives in which he entirely repudiated the anti-Catholic policy of his party and passed to a eulogy of Catholic citizenship.* In Illinois the Know-jSTothing order split into two factions, "the Sams" in- sisting upon an anti-Catholic program and "the Jonathans" proposing not to antagonize Catholics who owed no civil allegiance as distinguished from spirit- ual allegiance to the Pope. The Jonathans triumphed. But even in the south, in the course of political discussion, when the Ameri- can party was forced to defend its in- tolerant program, its advocates borrow- ed the narrow and inflaraatory argu- ments of their northern brethren; though they preferred to avoid this line of discussion and many of them suc- ceeded in doing so. *Two sets of delegates appeared from Louisiana at the Philadelphia Know-Noth- ing convention in 1856. And among the members of one it was ascertained that there were Catholics. 103 THE KNO W-NOTHING PARTY. There were, too, numerous splits in the order, growing out of personal jeal- ousies and contests for power. When the Grand Council of New York, in October 1854, put up a candi- date for governor it was claimed that this was done without consulting the subordinate councils. The Grand Coun- cil then complained that its candidates v/ere defeated at the polls because a large number of Kno-A'-Nothings had not voted for them. An attempt was made to discipline the bolters and this widened the breach. The Brooklyn Council objected to such coercion by resolutions which described the action of the Grand Council as "equalled only by the Holy Inquisition of Spain," Allen, the father of the order, was impelled to organize a seceding move- ment; and the "Know-Somethings," the "North Americans," the "Mountain Sweets" and other designations, which are found in the newspapers after 1854, indicate the progress of such disin- tegration. While the Nativist and anti-Catholic movement was inevitable and would have occurred even if the Irish and Catholic element had been on their best 104 TEE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. behavior and had given no provocation whatever, it is interesting to note is- how far the Catholics held themselves blameable. Dr. Brownson, the emi- nent Catholic publicist of that day, in his Quarterly Keview (Works, vol. 10, page 317), said of the Irish element; "The great majority of them are quiet, modest and peaceful and loyal citizens adorning religion by their faith and piety and enriching the country by their successful trade or their produc- tive industry. But it cannot be denied that hanging loosely on to their skirts is a miserable rabble unlike anything which the country has ever known of native growth — a noisy, drinking and brawling rabble, who have after all a great deal of influence with their coun- trymen, who are usually taken to rep- resent the whole Irish Catholic body, and who actually do compromise it to an extent much greater than good Cath- olics, attentive to their own business, conxmonly suspect or can easily be made to believe." As for the proper policy for Catholics to pursue in the matter. Dr. Brownson wrote as follows. (Quoted in the Life of O. A. Brownson, Vol, 2, Page 539) : 105 THE KNOW-XOTHIXG PARTY. "We Catholics are in a small min- ority and tlie sentiment of the country- is strongly anti-Catholic. Every meas- ure that we oppose as hostile to us, the country will favor and adopt and every measure we support as favorable to our interests, it will reject. I am sorry that it is so, but so it is; and I think that in regard to matters which depend on popular votes, and in which we are interested as Catholics, the more quiet we keep the better it will be for us." This advice was not followed by Dr. Brownson's co-religionists. They ev- eryAvhere met their "dark lantern" an- tagonist openly and with vigor. They fought it through their press and they fought it through the political party to which most of them belonged; for undoubtedly it was due to the large Catholic and Irish element in the Dem- ocratic party that Douglas and other Democratic leaders purged their party of the Know-Nothing elem^ent and made it not neutral, but openly hostile to the Know-^Nothing policy. No matter how good the behavior of the Catholic and Irish element might have been, the old charge of the evan- gelical church party in England and 106 THE KXOVf-XOTHIXG PARTY. America that the citizenship of the Catholic is a uiatter of divided allegi- ance would have formed the main charge of the Know-Xothing move- ment. The Catholics denied the charge. Brownson wrote: "In acknowledging the equal rights of all religions the American system acknowledges that the state has no au- thority in spirituals and therefore in religious matters has no claim to the obedience or allegiance of any of its subjects or citizens. Hence as the Pope has only authority over Catholics in the spiritual order, no obedience he can exact of them, or which they owe him, can ever conflict with any obedi- ence which the state with us even claims as its due." (Brownson's Works Vol. 18. page 345.) But he also trenched upon what, in this country at least, will always be a purely academic issue: whether in case of conflict between the temporal and spiritual order, which must yields "The temporal of course" answered Brownson. This branch of the discvis- sion was quite a needless one to enter on, especially too as it subjected Dr. Brownson and his co-religionists to a 107 THE EXOW-XOTHIXG PARTY. great deal of misrepresentation and Brownson personally, to the attack of most of the Catholic and Irish-Ameri- can papers of the country, which re- garded him as an extremist in his view of this matter. John Mitchell, then editing the Irish Citizen of New York, assailed Brownson as follows: "This I say has been your work Doc- tor Orestes; hence has come whatever of bitterness and ferocity that is to be found in the Native- American party; this outrageous caricature of Catholici- ty, held up to America by you (after you had tired of all the other religions) has been the principal spring, and is the only excuse for the furious anti- Irish spirit which is now raging." Not only Brownson's Quarterly Re- view, but other Catholic papers were widely misquoted in Know-Nothing publications; and in this discussion their language was garbled and not a few sheer fabrications were set afloat. It is to be noted that so respectable a historian as Von Hoist in the fifth volume of his Constitutional History, taking quotations from Brownson's Eeview, second hand as he finds them in Know-Nothing publications, is mis- 108 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. led as to the Catholic attitude in the discussions referred to. An alleged quo- tation from a St. Louis publication called The Shepherd of the Valley, which has done service in anti-Catholic literature for nearly half a century and the garbled nature of which has been frequently exposed, is accepted by Yen Hoist in his array of evidence as to Catholic opinion. But these misquotations of Catholic authorities were merely incidents in the discussion. They were not neces- sary to bolster up the time honored Anglo-Saxon and Evangelical aspersion of the integrity Catholic citizenship, an aspersion as old as the age of Queen Elizabeth and responsible for the perse- cuting statutes of her time; an aspersion too, which though diminishing in force from generation to generation is, never- theless, liable to recur in years to come and during- future flurries of intoler- 109 YII. THE CAM-PAIGX OF 1856. /"^jST Washin^on's birthday, Feb. 22, ^^ 1856, the American party met at Philadelphia to nominate a presi- dential ticket. The selection of a can- didate for president was easily made. Fillmore led with 71 votes on the first ballot, a scattering opposition giving George Law 27 votes, Garret Davis 13, R. F. Stockton 8, Judge McLean 7, Sam Houston 6, John Bell 5, Kenneth Raynor 2, Erastus Brooks 2, John ^L Clayton of Delaware 1 and L. D. Campbell of Ohio 1. A. J. Donnelson of Tennessee was nominated for vice- president. The American ticket was endorsed- a few months later, by a na- tional convention of the old line Whigs at Baltimore. The Republican party assembled in Philadelphia in June, and nominated 110 THE EXOW-XOTHIXG PARTY. John C. Fremont for president. On the informal ballot, 359 votes were cast for Fremont and 196 for McLean. Around the candidacy of McLean, then a judge of the supreme court of the United States, there gathered some- thing of interest in the history of Know-Xothingism. He had been a cabinet officer under Monroe and John Quincy Adams, and he was appointed to the supreme bench by Andrew Jack- son. The secession of a number of northern delegates from the American convention atPhiladelphia in February, had entered into the calculation of the Republicans who sought to attach those delegates to their cause. It was gen- erally understood that the anti-slavery Americans favored McLean. The Ger- man element of the country, then large- ly affiliating with the Republican party, took alarm. A great majority of their papers, of which there were then a hun- dred in the country, clamored for Fre- mont, probably through fear of Mc- Lean's supposed nativist tendencies. Delegates from the doubtful states, and many conservative Republicans, were inclined to favor McLean as the more available candidate. They thought 111 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. that he would make a better run against Buchanan in Pennsylvania, which was then a pivotal state. On that account Stevens, Lincoln, Wash- burn and many others, advised his nom- ination. Fremont's nomination, on the formal ballot was, however, al- most unanimous. The Know-Nothings, who seceded from the Philadelphia American con- vention, ultimately endorsed Fremont, though they first nominated Banks, who declined. Fremont's nomination, hov>'ever, was not acceptable to a cer- tain other element of the "North Amer- icans." They further seceded and nom- inated Stockton of New Jersey for president. In the ensuing campaign the noise and hurrah throughout the north were decidedly with the Republicans. They gave the country a livelier season of electioneering than any it had seen since 1840 ; indeed, old politicians seem to agree that '56 was even more rous- ing than the Tippecanoe and Tyler cam- paign. It was increasingly apparent that the American party had no chance of victory. In Pennsylvania, which was then an October pivotal state, the 112 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. Kepublican and Know-Nothing mana- gers came together to patch up a plan to wrest that state from Buchanan by arranging a union state ticket. The plan failed. Pennsylvania was carried in October by the Democrats against the combined votes of the other parties ;. and again for the national ticket in November. Bvichanan received 174 electoral votes, to 114 for Fremont and 8 for Fillmore. This campaign ended the American party as a national or- ganization. The distribution of the popular vote received by Fillmore, the candidate of the American party, was as follows: FREE STATES, i SLAVE STATES. Maine 3,335 Virginia 60.310 New Hampshire .422 No. Carolina. ..36,886 Vermont 545 So. Carolina Massachusetts. 19,626 Georgia 42,228 Connecticut .. ..1,675 Alabama 28,552 Rhode Island.... 2,615 Florida 4.833 Mississippi 24,195 28,218 ! Louisiana 20,709 Nev/ York .. ..124,604 Texas 15,639 *New Jersey... 24,115 Arkansas 10,787 ♦Pennsylvania. 82,175 ; Missouri 48,524 Tennessee 66,178 230,894 Kentucky 67,416 Ohio 28,126 Delaware 6,175 Michigan 1,660 Maryland 47,460 'Indiana 22,386 ♦Illinois 37,444 I Total 479,882 Wisconsin 579 Iowa 9,180 ♦California 36,165 135,540 Total 394,652 The free states (5) marked with a 113 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. star, and all the slave states except Maryland, were carried by Buchanan, giving him 174 electoral votes. Fre- mont carried 11 of the 16 free states, giving him 114 electoral votes, and Fill- more carried Maryland alone, giving him 8 electoral votes. The American party cut but little figure in this elec- tion in the I\ew England states and in the northwest. In Illinois it cast about sixteen per cent, of the total vote, and in Ohio and Indiana less than eight per cent. In California it cast one-third of the total vote, and in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, less than one-fourth. The north cast less than one-seventh of its total vote for the KxLow-Nothing presidential ticket, and the south about three-sev- enths of its total vote : the north some- thing less than fifteen per cent, and the south something over forty per cent. More than haK, or 480,000 of the 874,- 000 votes given Fillmore, came from that portion of the United States south of Mason and Dixon's line, and but 394,652 from the free states. The popular vote of the free states was thus divided as between the candi- dates: Of a total of 2,961,009 north- 114 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. orn voters, 1,340,070 voted for Fremont, the Republican candidate, 1,22(3,287 voted for Buchanan, the Democratic candidate, and 394,652 voted for Fill- more, the American candidate. In the total southern vote of 1,092,995, 611,- 879 voted for Buchanan, 479,882 for Fillmore and only 1,094 voted for Fre- mont. The Know-Nothing vote in the south, however, is not so sigiiificant as bear- ing upon the question of religious and nativist intolerance as the vote in the north. It did not signify much be- yond the gathering of the Whig oppo- sition under a new banner, but held to- gether by the same Whig principles, associations and leaders. In the north, however, the Know-Nothing vote of 1856, wherever it appeared, usually sig- nified a much larger degree of existing religiovis and racial prejudice. The vote of New England showed that this state of feeling had been swept away almost entirely by the deeper in- terest felt in the slavery issue, but the old nativist root feeling in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania still per- sisted, and possibly held a fifth of the voters of those states in willing bond- 115 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. age; and to some extent the same intol- erant feeling was influential in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, where, perhaps from five to ten per cent of the voters still thought the Pope a more vital is- sue than slavery. The "VMiig vote of the south in 1852 had been 367,000. The American par- ty of 1856, with 480,000 votes in the south, virtually absorbed the strength and natural increase of the Whigs. It came closest to carrying the old-time Whig states of Kentucky, Tennessee and Louisiana, which, since 1836, had generally gone for the Whig presiden- tial candidate. Maryland, which Fill- more carried, was also naturally "a Whig state. It had given its electoral vote to the Whig candidate for presi- dent at every election since 1836, that of 1852 alone excepted. 116 VIII. KIS^OW-XOTHINGISM IX COX- GKESS. A LTHOFGH the thirty-third con- -^~*- gress, elected at the time of the presidential election in 1852, and convening for its first ses- sion in December, 1853, and for its second session in December, 1854, was overwhelmingly Democratic (Dem- ocrats, 159; Whigs, 71; Free Soilers, 4), there was not wanting a suspicion that a number of its members, many of them Whigs, but some Democrats, had been inducted into the Know-Noth- ing order, or were under obligations to the new movement for support at the polls. In February, 1855, Congress- man Witte of Pennsylvania, introduced a resolution in the House condemn- ing secret political societies and their 117 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. prescript h-e purposes; and he moved a suspension of the rules so that the reso- lution could be discussed; at the same time, declaring that the vote on the sus- pension of the rules would be regarded as a test vote. The House refused to suspend the rules, — ayes 103, noes 78 — the necessary two-thirds vote in the af- firmative not being obtained. Had all the Dv mocrats voted for the suspension of the rules, that motion might havti; easily carried. Those Democrats who voted in the negative explained their course by stating that a prolonged dis- cussion upon the resolution would in- terfere with the transaction of a mass of business which had been accumulat- ing in the committeees of the House. The thirty- fourth congress, elected at the fall elections of 1854, was divided, in so far as a classification was possi- ble, as follows : In the Senate, 42 Dem- ocrats, 15 Republicans and 5 Know- Xothings. In the House, 83 Demo- crats, 108 Republicans (TO of whom were members of Know-Nothing coun- cils), and 43 out-and-out Know-Noth- ings. The Know-Nothings held the balance of power. There then ensued a prolonged contest for the speakership, 118 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. one of the most remarkable episodes of the kind in our congressional annals. Both Democrats and Republicans seem to have bid for the American vote. Men of Know-Nothing affiliation were prominent among the candidates. On the first ballot Humphrey Marshall of Louisville, Ky., one of the Know-Xoth- ing leaders of the border states, received 30 out of the 225 votes cast. N. P. Banks of Massachusetts, first a Dem- ocrat, then a Know-Xothing, but now a Eepublican, received 21 votes. H. M. Fuller, leader of the conservative Know-Nothings, received IT votes. L. D. Campbell of Ohio, anti-slavery Know-Nothing, 53 votes. After two months of continuous balloting, N. P. Banks, the Republican candidate, was finally elected speaker by a plurality vote. At the presidential election of 1856, the Know-iSTothings met with reverses. Tlie thirty-fifth congress, which wa.= then elected, began its session in Dec- ember, 1857, and was constituted as follows: In the Senate 39 Democrats, 20 Republicans and 5 Know-Nothings; in the house 131 Democrats, 92 Repub- licans and 14 Ivnow-Nothings. Oit 119 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. (Dem.) was elected speaker. He was unequivocably against the Know-Noth- ings. The thirty-sixth congress, elected in the fall of 1858, met for its first session in December, 1859, and was constituted as fol- lows : In the Senate, 38 Democrats, 26 Republicans and 2 Know-Nothings ; in the House, 101 Democrats, 113 Ee- publicans (four of whom were Know- Nothings), and 23 Know-Nothings (openly classed as such). By this time the Know-Nothing party, especial- ly so far as it appeared in Congress, was a border-state party. Its two sen- ators were from the states of Kentucky and Maryland. Of its twenty-three congressmen, five came from Kentucky, seven from Tennessee, three from Ma- ryland, four from North Carolina, two from Georgia and one each from Louis- iana and Virginia. Pennington (Rep.) was chosen speaker, receiving 117 votes to 85 for his Democratic opponent. As the American party was never anything but a mere minority or third party, in Congress, it naturally had lit- tle influence upon national legislation. "Huinphrej' Marshall, a Kentucky 120 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. Know-Nothing-, said that he found no American party in Washington; that the engrossing subject was the negro." (Ehodes History of the United States -II., 117). "Know-Nothingism," says Von Hoist (V., 129), "disappeared without having accomplished the least thing against immigrants, adopted citizens or Cath- 121 IX. LAST YEARS. \ FTER 1856, the disintegration of ■^^*- the Know-Nothing order was rapid. It had carried Maryland and Rhode Island in the state election of 1856, and in these states and in Kentucky and Tennessee it continued to retain some political power; but the question in practical politics with respect to it was : "Where will the fragments fall?" In New York the Democrats were able to pick up some strength by absorbing a portion of the Know-Nothing ele- ment. Vv'e find, for instance, Erastus Brooks becoming, in the course of years, a Democrat in good standing, so that in 1868 he went as a delegate to the convention of the Democratic par- ty which put Seymour in nomination for the presidency. Millard Fillmore, in 1864, openly supported McClellan 122 THE KXOV/-XOTHIXCt PARTY. for the presidency. In Ohio, some years later, we find Campbell, one of the leaders of the Know-Nothing party in that state, enrolled with the Demo- cratic party. The larger element of the party in the northern states drifted in- to the anti-slavery movement repre- sented by the Republican party. In the speakership contest of 1859- 60, the border-state Americans held 'the balance of power. The Democrats, at one period of the contest, sought to win the speakership by combining upon Smith, an American congressman from North Carolina. He received 112 votes January 27, 1860, — within three votes of an election. When Pennington, the Republican candidate, was finally elect- ed speaker, February 1, 1860, he re- ceived 117 votes, am.ong them the votes of two Americans, Briggs of New York and Henry Y/inter Davis of Maryland. Another episode of interest in the absorption of the Know-Nothing fol- lowing: occurred in the Chicago Repub- lican convention of 1860. Two-thirds of the delegates to that convention are said to have favored the nomination of William H. Seward. Several influ- ences com.bined in depriving Seward of 123 TEE KNOVi-NOTHINO PARTY. what was almost within his grasp. The feeling that he might prove too radi- cal a candidate to be available, and the criticism to which he was exposed in his own state on various grounds had their bearing; but in the view of many historians the question of his availa- bility as presidential candidate in Pennsylvania and Indiana also figured. In these states the Republican party was depending for its success upon the complete absorption of the Know-ISToth- ing following, and Seward's outspoken denunciation of the Know-Nothing movement, and his entire career, since 1840, as towards the nativist movement, were considered factors that would count against him. As a consequence, the Republican candidates for gover- nor in those states influenced their del- egations against Seward. The Constitutional Union party, which nominated Bell and Everett as candi- dates in 1860, was made up chiefly of the jetsam and flotsam of the American party not yet absorbed by the other parties. Bell was a member of the Ajnerican party, and Everett had sup- ported Filhnore in 1856. The Consti- tutional Union movement was organ- 124 f TEE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. ized by such border and southern state Americans as Crittenden of Kentucky and Houston of Texas. Filhnore's to- tal vote in 1866 was 874,000; Bell's in 1860, 646,000; but while Bell main- tained Fillmore's stren^h in the slave states, where he received 516,000 as compared with Fillmore's 480,000 in 1856, in the free states Bell received only 130,000 as compared with Fill- more's 394,000 in 1856. 186 X. LOCAL SKETCHES. T T remains to make special mention ^ of Know-Nothing activity in cer- tain localities where it worked itself out more fully and typically as an in- fluence in city and state polities. The career of the Know-Nothing party in Maryland is noteworthy by reason of the fact that this was the only state carried by the American party in the presidential election of 1858; that Know-Nothingism persisted here as a political force longer than in any other locality, the Know-Noth- ings holding the reins of government in Baltimore from the fall of 1854 to the fall of 1860 ; and also for the elec- tion riots and disorders which Know- Nothingism perpetrated in Baltimore. Twice, (in 1855 and in 1857), the 126 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. Know-Nothiiigs carried the state Leg- islature. In the latter year they elected a candidate for governor by reason of a large fraudulent vote cast in Baltimore. The picturesque, and at the same time the repulsive, feature of the reign of Know-Nothingism in Baltimore was the roughing of elections. In October, 1854, the Know-Nothing candidate was elected mayor of Baltimore by a ma- jority of two thousand. In 1856 Thom- as Swann, a former president of the Baltimore & Ohio railroad, was the Know-Nothing candidate for mayor of Baltimore, and he was elected by a majority of fifteen himdred. After this the Know-Nothings ruled Balti- more and Maryland with a high hand. They carried Baltimore for their can- didate for governor in 1857 by over nine thousand majority, and at the municipal election of 1858 they re- elected Swann mayor by a majority of 19,154 out of a total vote of 24,003. They again carried the city in the fi4\ of 1859 by a majority of 12^000 for their state ticket. The Legislature chosen this year was Democratic, and' the growing, but heretofore impotent 127 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. popular disapproval of the way the elections were run in Baltimore, now succeeded in enacting a practical rem- edy. The control of the Baltimore po- lice was taken out of the hands of the local officials and vested in a commis- sion designated by the Legislature. Under the improved police system, dis- order at the polls was prevented, and a fair election made possible, and so in the mvmicipal election of 1860, the Know-Nothings were overwhelmingly defeated. The reform party elected its candidate for mayor by over 8,- 000 majority. Thus, after six years of riotous control, the Know-Nothings were driven forever from the citadel of their power.* Disorders at local elections were frequent in New York and Phil- adelphia, as well as in Balitmore, in the years 1840 to 1860. Baltimore and its Know-Nothings, however, car- ried such excesses to the limit. Among the Know-Nothing clubs of the city *For a full an interesting account of the Baltimore American party, see L. F. Schneckebleir's "History of the Know-Noth- ing Party in Maryland" (Johns Hopkins University Studies, series 17, No. 4-5.) 128 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. which figured in these disorders, were the Tigers, the Black Snakes, the Eip Eaps, the Blood Tubs and more especially the Plug Uglies. There were clubs on the Democratic side such as the Bloody Eii?hts, the Bloats an 1 the Buttenders, no less euphonious in name and disorderly in conduct; but after 1856 the Democrats virtually laid down, leaving the Know-Nothings the monopoly of disorder and ruffianism. In the municipal election of October, 1856, the Plug Uglies flocked down to- wards the Eighth ward to attack the Democratic partisans, and in a riot, lasting several hours, four men were killed and over fifty wounded. In the following month, at the presidential election, this rioting was renewed, the Know-Nothing clubs wheeling a cannon through the streets; ten men were kill- ed and over 250 wounded. In the elec- tions of the succeeding years, the only ward in which the Democrats could vote without danger was the Eighth ward, where the Irish element was strong. In most other wards only Know-Nothings, who gave the proper signal, could get to the polls, all other citizens being pushed aside or intim- 129 THE KXOW-NOTHING PARTY. idated. In some instances, bodies of voters to the number of a hundred or more were cooped up in cellars until the election was over. The governor of Maryland sought, in 1857, to induce the Know-Nothing mayor of Baltimore to take effective steps against election disorder, but his efforts were in vain. In the following years the shoe maker's awl became a favorite Know-Nothing weapon of intimidation. Plug Ugly clubs paraded the streets carrying transparencies showing the figure of a man running, with another, in pursuit eticking an av/1 into him. An interesting episode in the his- tory of the state of Massachusetts was its famous Know- Nothing Legislature, which convened in the first week of the year 1855. The upper house was sol- idly Know- Nothing. The lower house was also Know-Nothing, with the ex- ception of one Democrat, one Whig and one Free Soiler. One of the opposi- tion papers suggested as a text for the customary election sermon to be preach- ed before this Legislature, "For we are but of yesterday and know nothing." (Job 8, 9). In this Legislature there 130 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. were about half as many farmers as the average in previous state Legislatures, but there were four times as many cler- gymen. Twenty-four ministers sat in the upper and lower houses. The most notable event of the ses- sion was the appointment of a commit- tee to inspect the nunneries, the so- called "smelling conunittee." This committee, which was under the lead of one Hiss, a "Grand Worthy Instruc- tor" of a Know-Nothing council, be- came a junketing affair, and carried along with it a number of invited guests. Its members lived at the best hotels and drank expensive wines at the cost of the state. The hotel ex- penses of a notorious woman were in- cluded among its many vouchers. A writer in The Boston Advertiser of that period thus describes the com- mittees' visit to a convent: "The gentlemen — we presume we must call members of the Legislature by this name — roamed over the whole house from attic to cellar. No part of the house was enough protected by re- spect for the common coiirtesies of civ- ilized life to be spared the examination. The ladies' dresses hanging in their 131 THE KyO]y-XOTHING PARTY. wardrobes were tossed over. The par- ty invaded the chapel and showed their respect — as Protestants, we presume — for the One God whom all Christians worship, by talking loudly with their hats on; while the ladies shrank in terror at the desecration of a spot which they hallowed." Under pressure of public clamor, the Legislature began to investigate its in- vestigating committee, and three suc- cessive committees were necessary for the task. Hiss was finally expelled from the House by the votes, so he claimed, of men who had enjoyed the hospitality of the committee. The following lines were written by some satirist of the time: "One after one the honored Bay-leaves fade. And ancient glories wither in the shade; The Solon's of the state, at duty's call, Have hissed a loving member from the hall. Take courage, Joseph, in thy great ado; The world has hissed the Legislature, too." Further investigations followed, bringing to light a series of petty steal- ings. George W. Haines, in his inter- esting sketch of this KJaow-Nothing Legislature (The American Historical Asscn. vol. 8, part 1, page 187) 132 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. states that the notion was widespread among its members that cheating the government was only a venial offense. It was, says Congdon (Kecollections of a Journalist, 146), "the most illy- as- sorted legislative body that ever met in this country." The only distinctively nativist meas- ure passed by the Legislature was a proposed amendment to the constitu- tion restricting office-holding to native- born Americans, and requiring twenty- one years residence for naturalization. The proposed amendment, however, was never submitted to popular vote, nor did it receive the endorsement of the succeeding Legislature. Another meas- ure, in which we have the prototype of such legislation as the Bennett law of Wisconsin and the Edward's law of Illinois (A. D. 1890), was introduced by one Johnson, who claimed that he sought a seat in the Legislature for that express purpose. This measure pro- posed to extend public supervision over all private schools, to the end that the state should see that its requirements in the matter of education were met by the course of study and text-books, and, presumably, the teachers employed in 133 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. sueli private and church schools. John- son's measure, however, was not press- ed by his colleagues. Nevv' York city, though the cradle of nativisra, and the headquarters of the controlling Know-lSTothing clique, was not captured, politically, by the Amer- ican party, although strenuous efforts were put forth in that direction. In the local election of 1854, James W. Barker appeared as the Ivnow-JSTothing candidate for mayor. The factions of the Democratic party imited on Fer- nando Wood as their candidate, and the Whigs nominated John J. Her- riek. Both Wood and Herrick were at that time members of the Know-Noth- ing party. Wood was elected by a narrow plurality: the Know-Nothings claimed that Barker had been counted out. He received 18,547 votes. Wood was re-elected mayor at the city elec- tion in the fall of 1856 over the Know- Nothing candidate, Isaac O. Barker, a cousin of James W. Barker. Wood's plurality was about 9,000. In the local elections subsequent to 1856, the Know- Nothings did not depend on their own strength, but sought combinations. 134 THE KXOW-NOTEIXG PARTY. Their vote dwindled from 8,500 in 1857, to a little over 4,000 in 1859. After 1856 the Republican party had become the real competitor against the Demo- cracy in Xew York city, and the Know- Nothing party sank to a position of a third party. By the beginning of 1800 it had disappeared from Xew York city as a party organization. In the municipal election of May, 1854, Conrad, the Whig candidate, was elected mayor of Philadelphia, receiv- ing about 29,506 votes to 21,100 cast for Vaux, Democrat. The election was won by the Know-Xothing councils quietly determining to support the can- didacy of Conrad. Subsequently, May- or-elect Conrad took the position that all policemen should be of American birth, thus indicating that he was in sympathy with the Know-Xothing movement, although not elected as the nominee of that party. In the election of the following year the Know-Xoth- ing party was successful in electing its caudidat^is to all minor city offices voted upon ; but in the municipal elections of May, 1856, the Democrats returned to power in Philadelphia, electing their 135 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. candidate, Vaiix, for mayor, by sever- al thousand majority. In 1858, and again in 1860, the candidates of the opposing parties, adopting the name of "the People's party," triumphed over the Democrats in Philadelphia's muni- cipal elections. The nativist sentiment was always strong in the city of Boston. Thomas Aspinwall Davis, nominated by the na- tive American party, was mayor of Bos- ton in 1845, but the wave of Nativism soon subsided. The following year the Whigs regained political control of Boston. In 1854 the Native-American or Know-Nothing party elected Dr. Jerome Crownshield Smith mayor of Boston. He showed himself extremely fertile in making suggestions. In Win- sor's History of Boston, (III. page 259) we read the "he (Smith) was never tak- en quite seriously as a chief magis- trate." In the municipal election of December, 1855, the nominee of the Citizen's movement was elected over the Know-Nothing candidate by 2,000 ma- jority. Boston was satisfied with one year of Know-Nothing rule. In Louisville, Ky., the Know-Noth- 136 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. ing movement was signalized in August 1855, by an election riot, the occasion being referred to as "Bloody Monday" in the annals of that city. Shaler in his History of Kentucky, (page 219), tells us that the disorder was occasioned by "roughs of the Native-American party attacking the Catholic people." Twenty-two persons were killed, two- thirds of whom were residents of the Irish qiiarter, and sixteen houses burn- ed. In this election, which was for state officers, Moorhead, Know-Nothing candidate for Governor of Kentucky was elected, receiving 68,816 votes to 65,413 for Clarke the Democratic can- didate. "In Alabama, the new party made some effort before 1855, and in the lo- cal conflict at Mobile, the Catholic property near that city was burned by American partisans" (Du Bose. Life of Yancey, p. 291) . The Democratic mayor of Mobile, Jones M, Withers, affiliated in 1854 with the American party; but subsequently threw it over and ran again as a Democrat for mayor of Mo- bile and was re-elected. The Know-Nothing movement ap- peared in a less pronounced form in 137 THE EXOW-XOTHIXG PARTY. many other cities besides New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Louisville. It was manifest in the local politics of Cincinnati. In Detroit in the municipal elections of 1855 a Know-Xothing candidate for mayor re- ceived 2,000 votes to 2,700 for the Dem- ocratic candidate and in San Francisco the Kaow-Xothings in the fall elections of 1855 polled 1,500 votes out of a total of 12,000. 138 XI. PERSONNEL. HENRY WILSON tells us (ch. 32, Rise and Fall of the Slave Power), that hundreds of those who joined the Know-Nothing movement eared little fur its avowed principles, but were ea- ger to possess and use its machinery. "I did not dream," says George W. Julian (Political Recollections p. 143), "that in less than two years the men composing this mob would be found denying their membership in this se- cret order, or confessing it with shame." Edward Everett Hale says, "it was distinctly a Philistine movement, so far as its leaders went." As for the rank and file, they were not anywhere the better element of the native-born population. A writer in The NeAV England Magazine (n. s. Vol. 15, p. 139 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. 82), made a careful study of the roster of niembership at Worcester, Mass., in 3854. He finds that a large percen- tage, in signing the rolls, misspelled the names of the streets iipon which they lived; that there were few profes- sional men among them, and that where they were tax-payers, they aver- aged far below the per <;apita of the community at large. Thousands went into the new move- ment unthinkingly, but for the novel- ty of the thing, and without under- standing its character. The case of Ulysses S. Grant is an illustration. He tells us in his "Memoirs" (Vol. 1, p. 169) : "Most of my neighbors had kno^vn me as an officer in the army with Whig proclivities. They had been on the same side, and on the death of their party many had become Know-Nothings or members of the American party. There was a lodg-. near me [he then resided on a farm in the vicinity of St. Louis], and I was invited. to join it. I accepted the in- vitation; was initiated and attended a meeting just one week later; and never went to another afterwards. * * But all secret oath-bound societies are 140 THE ENOW-NOTHING PARTY. dangerous to any nation. ^- * No political society can, or ought, to ex- ist where one of its corner stones is opposition to freedom of thought, or the right of worshiping God 'accord- ing to the dictates of one's own con- science.' " Subsequently, Grant voted (1856) for James Buchanan, the Dem- ocratic candidate for president. Undoubtedly, thousands of the south- ern Wliigs went into the new American party as unconsciously, so to speak, as did Ulysses S. Grant in 1854. It would probably be incorrect to impute bigotry to many of those public men from the south, once rei^resenting the Wiiig- party, but subsequently absorbed, and going with the mass of their consti- tuents, into the Know-Xothing ranks. John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, John Bell of Tennessee, both members of the United States Senate, were classed with the American party. Crittenden had been for forty years in public life, a member of the cabinet and rich in the honors of the Whig party. Bell, spoken of as "the generous Bell," had also served in the cabinet of a Whig president. These two union-loving men found themselves stranded as po- 141 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. litical orphans in the last years of tho American party, with whose more pro- scriptive principles it is fair, as well as charitable, to assume they had no real sympathy. Senator Adams of Mis- sissippi was another Know-Nothing United States senator. Anthony Kennedy of Maryland, was elected United States senator by the Know-Nothing Legislature of that state. Sam Houston, hero of the no- table struggle of the Texas republic against Mexico, and who was United States senator from Texas from 1853- 59, was affiliated with the American party, and undoubtedly leaned towards some of its principles. In 1854 he was questioned by Senator Mallory, on the floor of the Senate, as to whether he approved of the Know-Nothing doc- trine that Roman Catholics should be ineligible for office. He replied that he would not vote for such a law, and could not approve of it. Houston re- ceived a few votes for president in tho Democratic national convention of 1852, in the Know-Nothing convention of 1856 and in the Union Constitu- tional convention of 1860. He sup- ported Fillmore in 1856. Fillmore'3 142 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. associate on the presidential ticket in 1856 was Donnelson of Tennessee, a nephew of Andrew Jackson, Donnel- son had joined the Know-Nothing or- der with other Whig politicians of his state in 1853. Henry Winter Davis of Baltimore was member of Congress, first as a WTiig in 1854 and subsequently as a Know-Xothing in 1856-58. Here he was the orator of the new party in all controversies ("the Rupert of de- bate")- He was undoubtedly smirched with some of the bigotry, and expressed not a few of the rabid sentiments of the movement. This may have been due to his habit of epigram as well as to his desire to please the Know-Nothing clubs of Baltimore. His Know-Noth- ing constituents censured him for helping to elect Pennington speaker of the House in 1860. He was agaiii in Congress diiring the civil war as a Kepublican. Among other "southern Americans," as they came to be called, were Kenneth Kaynor of North Carolina, a strong unionist advocate; he, it was, who for- nuilated the third, or union degree, of the order; Garrett Davis of Kentucky, Humphrey Marshall of Louisville, the 143 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. ]-itter the acknowledged leader of the border-state Know-Nothings, ex-Con- gi'essman Botts of Richmond, who was mentioned for the presidential nomina- tion in 1856, Call of Florida, Zollicoffer of Tennessee, and Bartlett of Kentuc- ky, who sought the vice-presidential nomination in 1856. In the presidential campaign of 1856, the I^ow-Nothings taunted the Re- publicans with the charge that Fre- mont was a Catholic, and the Republi- cans retorted that Fillmore, the Know- Nothing candidate, was not a Know- Xothing; but although he had begun political life as an anti-Mason, Fill- more, in his lust for the presidency, had consented to be made a third de- gTee Know-Nothing at Buffalo in 1855. His public expressions were, however, free from religious intolerance. Eras- tus Brooks, whom the Knovi-Nothings nominated as governor of New York in 1856, but who failed of election, was prominent in the public eye on ac- count of his discussion with Bishop Hu.ghes over Catholic Church prop- erty and its tenure. Henry Gardner, elected governor of Massachusetts by the American party 111 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. in 1854, and again in 1855, H. M. Fuller, leader of the conservative Know-Nothings of Pennsylvania, L. D. Campbell of Ohio, leader of the anti- slavery Know-Nothings, Governor Johnson of Pennsylvania, were other public men identified with the Know- Nothing movement. N. P, Banks, who succeeded Gardner as governor of Massachusetts, was elected to Congress in 1852, as he afterwards admitted, by a union of the Democrats and Know- Nothings. "In the spring or summer of 1854, Gen. Banks asked me whether I intended to join the Know-Nothings. I said no ; that I had left politics, and that I intended to practice law. He said in reply: 'I am in politics and I must go on.'" (Boutwell's Sixty Years in Public Affairs, I., 238.) Banks was chosen speaker of the House after a prolonged contest, in February, 1856, Thereafter he affili- ated with the Republicans. He be- came a general in the civil war, and returned to Congress after its close, serving in the lower house from 1865- 74, and again in 1888. Henry Wilson, afterwards vice-pres- ident of the United States from 1872- 145 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. 76, after being black-balled by one Know-Nothing lodge, succeeded in ob- taining admission to another. The Know-Nothing Legislature of Massa- chusetts elected him United States sen- ator in 1855. He led the bolt of the free state delegates from the Know- Nothing convention at Philadelphia in the same year. After that he cast his lot with the Republican party. He is said to have regretted his early con- nection with the Know-Nothing move- ment. Congdon (Recollections of a Journalist, 146), says: "Wlien he was running for the vice-presidency, and Catholic votes were desirable, if he did not himself deny the fact [that he had joined the Know-Nothings], he suffer- ed others to deny it." Another picturesque figure in this movement was George Law of New York city. Law was the son of a north of Ireland immigrant. He began life as a hod carrier, just as Wilson be- gan life as a day laborer. By the year 1850, however, Law was a wealthy con- tractor, and a liberal patron of the nativist movement. His ambition was to be the presidential candidate of the American party in 1856, and he had 146 TEE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. the support of a number of journals and a large personal following, per- haps held together by his financial largesses. In the presidential conven- tion of 1856, however, Law received but twenty-seven votes out of a total of over two hundred; after which we hear little more of him. He died in 1881. Richard W. Thompson of Indiana, who was afterwards secretary of the navy in the cabinet of President Hayes, was a Know-Nothing in 1856. Greorge W. Julian, in his Political Recollec- tions (p. 155), referring to the cam- paign of 1856, says: "Eichard W. Tnompson, then the professed cham- pion of Fillmore, but in reality the stipendiary of the Democrats, de- nounced the Republicans as abolition- ists." Thompson was evidently a Know-Nothing from conviction, judg- ing by his "Footprints of the Jesuits," and other publications which came from his pen during the period 1872- 95. Four Know-Nothing governors were prominent in the Philadelphia conven- tion of the party, Jime, 1855 : Gov- ernors Gardner of Massachusetts, Fletcher of Vermont, Johnson of Penn- 147 THE KNOV/-NOTHING PARTY. sylvania and Brown of Tennessee. Wliitney (Defence of the American Party, p. 303), says: "The question has often been asked: 'Why cannot an American paper be sustained?' The answer is plain. Every attempt to establish one, until recently, has been made odious through the Romish and partisan presses of the country." Americans feared to sub- scribe for such a paper, "lest they should share in the general obloquy, or suffer in their business and private re- lations." "An advertisement in them was- regarded as a dangerous experi- ment." But the Know-Nothing movement was not without a number of weekly esponents and at Worcester, Mass., it established a daily organ. At Louis- ville, the brilliant George D. Prentiss lent his pen to the proscriptive move- ment; and his paper was held largely responsible for the murders and incen- diarism of Bloody Monday in that city. 148 M XII. AFTERWARDS. OST of those who continued to adhere to the American party during- the latter years of its activity, voted, in 1860, for Bell and Everett, candidates of the Union party for pres- ident and vice-president. Bell had been a senator from Tennessee (1853-9) outspoken in favoring the nativist restrictions upon naturalization. The personal following of Erastus Brooks in the state of New York, made up largely of the more consistent Know- Nothings, were especially pronounced for the Bell and Everett ticket. This was the end of the American party, however, as an organized influ- ence. The Order of United Americans, which had grown and declined with the growth and decline of the Know- Nothing movement, maintained a fee- 149 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. ble existence up to 1866, although ac- cording to its last grand sachem, Charles E. Gildersleeve, the active membership in New York city in Jan- uary, 1863, was " so small, it could have met in one room." There were attempts to reorganize the movement after the close of the war. The old head of the Know-Nothing movement, James W. Barker, launched a new or- ganization, called the Order of Amer- ican Shield, which afterwards took the name of the Order of the American Union. It aimed to become a politi- cal influence, and established branches in sixteen states. But its life was fee- ble, and by the year 1880 it had every- where died oiit. Some of the veteran members of the Know-Nothing society organized a social club in New York city in 187Y, reviving for their club name the old title of "Washington Chapter, O. U. A." The various hereditary patriotic so- cieties, the organization of which was suggested by the recurrence of the cen- tennial anniversary of Revolutionary events, appear to be entirely free from the nativist and anti-Catholic bias. 150 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. Among these orders are the Sons of the American Revolution, organized in 1875, the Daughters of the Ameri- can Revolution, organized in 1892, the Sons of the War of 1812, the Sons of the Colonial Wars, the Colonial Dames, etc. The "United Order of American Mechanics," organized in 1845, and having today a membership, variously reported as from 40,C0 to 60,000; the "Junior Order of American Mechan- ics," organized in 1853, and establish- ed in over thirty states, at present with a membership of about 100,000, and the "Patriotic Order of Sons of America," established in 1847, with a membership of about 50,000, are sur- vivals of the nativist movement. Their membership is restricted to native-born Americans, and they adopt several of the old Know-Nothing planks in their platforms. They are probably every- where anti-Catholic in their political activity. The bulk of the membership of these organizations is found in the middle states. The Knights of Malta, established in 1889, with a membership which has varied up to 25,000, is a ben- eficial organization, with general pur- 151 TEE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. poses similar to those of tlie Junior Order of United American Mechanics, but more distinctly Protestant in its constitution. Another organization, pronouncedly anti-Catholic in its activity, is the "National League for the Protection of American Institutions," organized in New York in 1889, with John Jay as president, and Rev. James M. King as secretary. Its objects were to es- tablish "constitutional and legislative safeguards for the American public school system," and to prevent the ap- propriation of public funds to secta- rian or denominational institutions. It outlined a proposed "sixteerlh amendment" to the constitution of the United States along these lines; and it secured the endorsement of a num- ber of the leading American denomi- nations for its proposition, but the idea failed to receive the required approval of Congress. The National League made itself conspicuously active in se- curing the confirmation by the Senate of Governor Morgan and Rev. Dr. Dorchester, whom President Harrison had nominated at the head of the In- dian bureau. This was done with the 152 THE KNOW 'NOTHING PARTY. express understanding that these ap- pointees would discourage further ap- propriations to the Catholic Indian schools. In New York it opposed the freedom of worship bill, and although the measure was finally enacted, the League succeeded in blocking its pas- sage for a number of years. This meas- ure extended the benefits of the con- stitution, respecting freedom of con- science, to the inmates of the state re- formatory and penal institutions. The league also opposed the building of the Catholic chapel at West Point. The chapel was subsequently built by an enabling act of Congress. In its efforts to amend several of the state constitutions in the direction of pro- hibiting the appropriation of public funds to sectarian institutions, Rev. James M. King, in his work, "Facing the Twentieth Century," (page 530) tells us that the National League met defeat in the state of Maine through the efforts of the Protestant institutions, which feared that a judi- cial interpretation of the word "sec- tarian," would cut off certain appro- priations of public funds, which they were accustomed to receive. 153 TEE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. There were many episodes, between the close of the civil war and the rise of the "new Know-Nothingism," sym- bolized in the A. P. A., which bore a re- lation to the Know-Nothing movement of the past, and which evidenced the persistence of the sentiment upon which that movement was builded." The Culturkampf, in Germany, after the close of the Franco-Prussian war (1872-6), had its echoes in the recru- descence of anti-papal sentiment in the United States. There were not wanting many pulpit divines, even some public men, like Richard W. Thompson, afterwards secretary of the navy under President Hayes, who be- lieved that the Culturkampf should be adapted to conditions here, and vig- orously pushed. *A riot involving' sectarian antipathies oc- curred at New York, July 12, 1871. It grew out of an attack made upon the Orangemen, who on July 12, 1S70, celebrated the anniver- sary of the battle of the Boyne. They ad- vertised their intention of organizing a no- table parade July 12, 1871 On the other hand the Hibernian element threatened to pre- vent this parade. The protection of the 'State and city authorities was sought against this Irish menace. When the day came, 100 Orangemen paraded the streets guarded by five militia regiments. Near the 154 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. In the '70's, the Catholic parochial school movement of the United States received a definite and more systematic organization. The latent Kaow-iSroth- ing spirit caught eagerly, as a signal for aggressive discussion, at some par- agraphs in a Des Moines speech of President Grant, wherein he urged the necessity of keeping church and state absolutely separate, and preventing the division of the school fund. The pen- cil of the cartoonist, Thomas Nast, in these years, was devoted in Harper's Weekly to embittering public sentiment against the Catholic Church on the school question. In the presidential election of 1876, we find the following notice taken at this issue in the platforms of the Re- publican and Democratic parties : Sec- tion 7 of the Eepublican platform rec- ognizes "the public school system of the several states as the bulwark of the comer of Eighth avenue and Twenty-fourth street, an Irish tenement district, the pa- rade was assailed with stones and some shots were fired. The militia met this at- tack by a volley which killed fifty-one of the assailants and bystanders; three of the militia men were killed. Public opinion in New York sustained the authorities in their action. 155 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. American republic." The platform further recommends an amendment to the constitution prohibiting the appro- priation of [ublic funds to sectarian schools or institutions. The Democrat- ic platform refers to "the false issue with which they [the Republican party] would enkindle sectarian strife with respect to the public schools," which should be maintained "without preju- dice to any class, sect or creed." The Republican platform of 1880 substan- tially reiterates the plank of 1876. The Democratic platform of 1880 re- cites that common schools have been fostered and protected by that party. In the presidential election of 1880, most of the New York papers. Demo- cratic as well as Republican, condemn- ed the nomination by the Democrats of William R. Grace as mayor of New York. It was the first time that a Catholic had been nominated for that office, and the school question, and pa- pal allegiance, and the impolicy of weighing down the Democratic Na- tional ticket with such a handicap, were vigorously dilated upon. Grace was elected, but he ran many thousands be- hind the vote New York city gave 156 THE ENOW-NOTHING PARTY. General Hancock, the Democratic can- didate for president. In the last days of the campaign of 1884, James G. Blaine, the Eepublican candidate for president, was given a reception by nearly a thousand Protestant ministers, at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York. Their spokesman. Rev. Dr. Burchard, in a fervent address, alluded to the Dem- ocratic party as one whose antecedents were "Bum, Romanism and Rebellion." Blaine saw the impolicy of the remark at the time, and his managers sought to have all note of it suppressed in tha newspapers. Democratic politicians got hold of it, and worked it with such good effect, in recalling the drift of "the Irish vote" to the Republican standard, that in the close state of Xew York it made a difference of a few thousand votes against Blaine. These votes, nevertheless, deprived him of the electoral vote of New York, and, as a consequence, lost him the presi- dency. A Boston school issue in 18S6, fur- nishes a striking evidence of the eas- ily inflammable anti-Catholic senti- ment of that community. It arose over a very small matter — a foot-note 157 / THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. in Swinton's General Ilistory, then in use in the Boston public schools. This foot-note referred to "the sale of in- dulgences" by the Catholic Church, as a cause of the Protestant reformation. Members of the Boston school board who were Catholics, succeeded in con- vincing the publishers that their book should be gotten out without this foot- note. Immediately, there was a bitter public controversy on the subject of indulgences, and the question came up in the election of the retiring school board with such effect that a board satisfactory to the ultra-Protestant view of this historical matter was elected. Afterwards Professor George Adams, of the department of history of Yale university, in a text-book of European History (p. 302), took a view of the question (undoubtedly clariiied by this discussion), which in- dicated a conviction that the Catho- lics of Boston were rather justified in their contention. An "American party" showed itself, briefly, in the state politics of Cali- fornia in 1886. Frank Pixley, pub- lisher of The Argonaut, a weekly liter- ary journal, anti-Catholic in its views, 158 THE KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. but of much literary merit, seems to have led tliis movement. It endorsed Swift, the Republican candidate for governor, but he repudiated its en- dorsement with an open and manly as- sertion of the doctrines of the consti- tution. The Democratic candidate, Bartlett, was elected governor by a few hundred plurality. The Ameri- can party mouthpiece asserted that, if Swift had kept silent, he would have won. The American party disappeared from the politics of California in the ensuing year. 159 RETURN CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT TO— ^^ 202 Main Library LOAN PERIOD 1 HOME USE 2 3 4 5 6 ALL BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS Renewals and Recharges may be made 4 days prior to the due date. Books may be Renewed by calling 642-3405 DUE AS STAMPED BELOW >-^0 4'.3D ■I RECCIRC DEC 1 4 1997 FORM NO. DD6 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY BERKELEY, CA 94720 U.C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES CDElS0D7fl5 ■ I i mmrngmmmm^mm