America Aflame (16 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Religious bigotry and ethnic exclusion were slender reeds upon which to build a political movement in mid-nineteenth-century America, even when packaged as a crusade for electoral virtue and efficiency amid the chaos of modern urban life. For a brief time, however, as one major political party imploded and the slavery issue seemed to fade into the background, the nativists ascended.

Carl and Margarethe Schurz moved westward, following the bands of German immigrants who set up shops, farms, and other enterprises in dozens of midwestern villages and cities. Milwaukee had become a center of German culture, and there the Schurzes decided to put down their bags, purchasing a farm in nearby Watertown. In 1853, American political life was, to put it mildly, in a state of transition. The multitude of voices and shifting alliances in the wake of the Whigs' disintegration (and internal divisions within the Democratic Party) dizzied the young immigrant. In his letters back to Germany he remarked that democracy was a wonderful if untidy process. As a revolutionary who failed to bring democratic government and unity to his native Germany, Schurz reveled in the open political system of his adopted land. He became a fervent nationalist in the process, opposing any threat to a national unity that he deemed essential for preserving democratic government.

Equally impressive to Schurz was the seemingly limitless economic opportunity west of the Appalachians. No old families, political hierarchies, or military establishments to hold a man down. Or a woman, for that matter, as he wrote to his friends. The freedom of movement and the opportunities to engage their minds and talents women enjoyed were in stark contrast to what they had in Europe.

Many in the German community knew Schurz's name through his revolutionary exploits, and those exploits became embellished over time. It was unlikely that he would settle down to life as an obscure Wisconsin farmer. Besides, as much as he immersed himself in American life, his heart ached for revolutionary Germany. Encouraged by the empathy for European revolutionary ideals, he traveled to Washington, D.C., to gauge the support of the Pierce administration for his German cause. Like most first-time visitors, Schurz found Washington disappointing, “rather dismal,” he said. Equally disappointing were Schurz's meetings with various administration officials. He left with a positive impression of only one man, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, whose dignity and erudition won Schurz's admiration, though he remained noncommittal on aid to the German nationalists. The energy of the administration seemed scattered in harebrained schemes and pointless aggression, with intrigue to dislodge Cuba from Spain and tacit support for ill-advised private ventures into Central America. As to why this state of affairs existed, Schurz, despite his favorable view of Davis, believed that slaveholders had captured the Democratic Party. Freedom frightened them. There would be no assistance for his German friends.
20

Instead, Schurz immersed himself in local politics. If he could not save Germany, he would help Watertown. He became the town's commissioner for improvements, organized an insurance company, and studied law. Like any local booster, he touted Watertown to investors far and wide. No less than three railroad lines were under construction, he boasted. There he probably would have stayed were it not for Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas, who not only rousted out Schurz from his life as a small-town entrepreneur and farmer but also stirred Abraham Lincoln from his lucrative law practice in Springfield. These career changes, it should be noted, were not what Senator Douglas had in mind when he submitted a railroad bill to the Senate in January 1854.