When the Republican Party was in its formative stage, it had a little problem. It took most of its members from the disintegrating Whig Party, and most of the rest from northern anti-slavery Democrats. But it needed a bigger piece of the pie if it wanted to have a shot at winning the presidency. That meant that they needed to win over members of the Know-Nothing Party (officially known as the American Party). This unsavory group of people were totally unglued by immigration from Ireland and southern Europe because they were Catholic, and also because they were low-skilled and often non-conversant in English. You might call them the 19th-Century version of the Tea Party. Ironically, however, at least in the North, they were not any more likely to approve of slavery than the average citizen. It was possible to win them over to the cause of preventing the expansion of slavery, or even abolition. After all, slave labor is an even worse competitor than immigrant labor because it is cheaper.
The great early leaders of the Republican Party, like William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Abraham Lincoln, didn’t share the anti-Catholic sentiments of the Know-Nothings, but they needed their support both for the new party and for their strength within it. When Salmon Chase ran successfully for Governor of Ohio in 1855, he didn’t support any part of the Know-Nothing program, but he made sure that Know-Nothings were on the GOP ballot for most of the statewide offices.
In any case, the Republican Party has morphed in many ways since the Civil War. It now resembles nothing more than the Democratic Party of the 1850’s, while the Democratic Party is more like a hybrid of the Whigs and the northern Democrats of that time. But the Know-Nothings have stayed in the GOP to this day. They are kind of the Original Sin of the Republican Party.
Abraham Lincoln:
Pretty sure they read that in Ken Burns’ Civil War doc.
AS much as I think it would have benefited everyone to let the South secede and fail, you have to love Lincoln’s ability to get to the crux of a matter.
The Republican Party’s original sin was when certain railroad owners realized that aligning with a popular force based in the Midwest could ease their applications under federal land grant acts by acting to unblock state opposition. Abraham Lincoln spent the 1850s arguing cases for the railroads and against state claims under the Swamp Act, which had become a state land boondoggle. Of course the land grants to railroads were boondoggles too. Welcome to US politics.
Scott Reynolds Nelson, A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America’s Financial Disasters has an excellent discussion of how this history unfolded in the midst of roughly twenty-year cycles of financial panic.
Wow, I didn’t know California had a Know Nothing governor. Just think of the irony. All these recent immigrants to California calling themselves native born, and calling the Spanish speaking Catholics who were born there foreigners.
Well, it isn’t too hard to imagine what kind of assholes would think that way, is it? They really were the ancestors of the Tea Party.
Maybe the Kochs et al. read a little history before creating the tea party
That stuff about the Vigilante Committee was interesting.
For all the Black Legend stuff, where are the places where there are the most indigenous populations surviving and where they have the most power (still less than they should in some places)? Where the Iberian kings exercised authority.
An anti-Catholic Know Nothing mob attacked St. Patrick’s Church in Lowell. The parish defense committee was warned the attack was coming, and they fought off the attack. The head of the parish committee threw the head of the Know-Nothings in the canal.
I was worse in Watertown, where a No-Knowing mob burned down a convent. They they they were liberating the poor, abused children who were being taught by the nuns.