Immigration and the Know-Nothings

Between the late 1840s and mid-1850s, over a million Irish immigrants fled the potato famine and landed mostly in Boston and New York, arriving poor, Catholic, and desperate for any work. At the same time, large numbers of Germans, some fleeing failed 1848 revolutions, came through New York and settled further inland in cities like Cincinnati and St. Louis. Protestant-born Americans saw these newcomers as competitors for jobs and feared Catholic immigrants would take political orders from Rome rather than vote as independent citizens. That fear had a long history, but in the 1850s it found a new outlet.

The outlet existed because the Whig Party was dying. Whigs had held northern and southern wings together on economic issues, but the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 reopened the slavery question so violently that the party split apart and never recovered. With one of the two major parties gone, voters who cared about immigration had nowhere obvious to go. The American Party, nicknamed the Know-Nothings because members denied knowing anything about its secret rituals, rushed into that opening. It ran on closing political office to immigrants and Catholics, and briefly won governorships, mayoralties, and dozens of congressional seats across the country.

The Know-Nothings did not last. Slavery, not immigration, was the fight that would not go away, and by the late 1850s most of their voters and politicians had moved into the new Republican Party, which absorbed former Whigs, Free-Soilers, and nativists alike. The party's collapse shows how completely the Whig vacuum, not any single issue, shaped the political realignment leading into 1860.