The Know-Nothing Party

It began as a secret fraternal society in New York, the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, founded around 1849. Members took oaths to vote only for native-born Protestants and, when asked about the organization, were instructed to say that they knew nothing. Newspapers turned the phrase into a name. Their target was the wave of Irish and German immigrants, most of them Catholic, who arrived in the late 1840s and early 1850s and were remaking the cities of the North.

The Know-Nothings blamed the newcomers for crime, poverty, drunkenness, and the corruption of urban political machines, and they warned that Catholics owed their first allegiance to the pope. They called for a waiting period of twenty-one years before an immigrant could become a citizen and for keeping Catholics out of public office. Their timing was perfect. The Whig Party was collapsing over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and voters were looking for somewhere else to go.

In the elections of 1854 the movement, now calling itself the American Party, won the governorship and nearly every seat in the Massachusetts legislature and carried races across the North and the border states. By 1855 it held dozens of seats in Congress. Its rise brought violence, including the Bloody Monday riot in Louisville in August 1855, when nativist mobs attacked German and Irish neighborhoods and at least twenty-two people were killed.

Slavery tore the party apart as it had torn the Whigs. Northern members walked out of the 1856 convention when it refused to oppose slavery's expansion, and many joined the new Republican Party. Former president Millard Fillmore ran as the American candidate that year and won more than a fifth of the popular vote but carried only Maryland. By 1860 the party was gone. Its ideas were not, and historians trace a line from the Know-Nothings through later waves of nativism.