The first targets of the nation’s shifting political mood in the 1850s were working-class immigrants, especially those from Ireland. Although foreshadowed by the public debates of the 1840s, a full-blown nativist movement surfaced only during the following decade, precipitated by an extraordinary surge in immigration after 1845. Between that year and 1854, nearly three million foreigners arrived, equal to roughly 15 percent of the population in 1845; in 1854 alone, the flow reached a record high of 427,833, a figure that would not be surpassed until the 1870s. Most of these immigrants came from Ireland or Germany, with the Irish, in particular, remaining in the cities of the Northeast: by the mid-1850s, more than one fifth of all residents of Boston and New York were Irish-born.4
The immigrants who came to the United States during this period (and most other periods) were of two types. Some—to deploy categories developed by historian Dirk Hoerder—were “settlers” who typically intended to farm and buy land: usually farmers or artisans in their country of origin, they often brought enough capital with them to purchase a small amount of land or start a business. The second group consisted of “workers” who lacked capital or easily marketable skills and took jobs in manufacturing, transportation, and construction. The distinction between these two streams of immigrants was a significant one throughout American history, in part because natives tended to respond more positively to the more middle-class settlers than to workers.5
Indeed, in the 1850s, foreign-born settlers were not only welcomed to the United States but often encouraged to participate in politics. As noted in Chapter 2, laws permitting declarant noncitizens to vote after a limited residence period were passed in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Indiana, Oregon, Kansas, and Washington territory between 1848 and 1859. All of these states were predominantly agricultural, thinly populated, and hoping to encourage settlement: their immigrant populations, actual and prospective, consisted primarily of farmers. One delegate to the Indiana Constitutional Convention of 1850 supported the enfranchisement of noncitizens with the observation that most immigrants to the state were “upright, honorable, and industrious” Germans: “wherever they settle, though it were a desert . . . they soon make it blossom like a rose.” Although there were always dissenters, state constitutional conventions commonly adopted alien suffrage laws by large and decisive majorities.6
Workers, however, were a different story. They were generally poor; they crowded into densely populated, often squalid urban neighborhoods; they were commonly depicted as rowdy rather than “upright, honorable, and industrious”; and most were Irish Catholic. Although their labor was welcome and there was substantial sympathy for the desperate poverty that had impelled them to emigrate, their religion, ethnicity, and class converged to cast doubt on their desirability as members of the polity. The upsurge of anti-immigrant sentiment in the 1850s, although often stated in more general terms, was rooted in antipathy to the unmistakably working-class Irish. Notably, the one state that abolished declarant suffrage during this period was Illinois, where a substantial Irish population had already appeared in Chicago.7
Those who objected to immigrant participation in politics cited several reasons. Some natives regarded recently arrived immigrants, even citizens, as insufficiently tutored in American values and the workings of American democracy; others feared that Catholics were controlled by the Pope and would seek to undermine Protestant society. Charges that immigrants corrupted elections by voting illegally and selling their votes were commonplace, as were stories of politically motivated mass naturalizations in the days before elections. (Bulk naturalizations shortly before elections certainly did occur, although it is not clear that they were illegal; the more general charges of corruption, according to recent historical research, were greatly exaggerated.) Whig and then Republican objections were strengthened by the tendency of many immigrants to drink alcohol and vote Democratic, while abolitionists came to regard immigrants as a proslavery voting bloc that would help to keep the planter aristocracy in power in the South.8
As noted earlier, such sentiments were translated into a variety of proposals in the 1840s, most of which were not passed by constitutional conventions or state legislatures. 9 Political nativism moved to the foreground of the political stage, however, when the Know-Nothings burst onto the scene in 1853-1854. Originally a secret organization called the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, the Know-Nothings went public in 1853, organized a new political party, the American Party, and for a few years captured the spotlight of American politics. The Know-Nothings dominated political life in the Northeast, parts of the Midwest, and even southern states with sizable immigrant populations, such as Louisiana and Maryland. Their sobriquet arose from the order’s instructions to members to refuse to tell nonmembers anything about the order.10
By 1854, the Know-Nothings had a million members, as well as lodges in all northern states. Their platforms and programs, which varied from state to state, contained a strange and shifting mix of ingredients. On the one hand, the Know-Nothings expressed disdain for the existing party system, opposed the extension of slavery, and endorsed a host of genuinely progressive reforms, including strengthened lien laws for mechanics, property rights for married women, and an expansion of nonsectarian public schools. At the same time, they gave voice to unvarnished ethnic and religious bigotry, denouncing and caricaturing immigrants in general, and Catholics in particular. To join the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, one had to be a native-born, white male adult, with no personal or familial connection to Catholicism.11
Although the Know-Nothings’ nativism was partially grounded in disapproval of the social behavior of immigrants (e.g., their alleged intemperance and proclivity to crime), its core was political: they feared that immigrants, especially Catholics, wielded too much electoral power and would use it to subvert American values and institutions. To combat this threat, they proposed that federal laws be changed to require a twenty-one-year (rather than five-year) waiting period prior to naturalization—or even permanent denial of citizenship to the foreign-born. The Know-Nothings also advocated significant changes in state voting laws, including registration systems, literacy tests, and in the absence of a change in naturalization laws, a twenty-one- or fourteen-year postnaturalization residence period before a foreign-born male could vote. Recognizing that the nation benefited from the labor of immigrants, the Know-Nothings never endorsed a suspension of immigration. What they sought instead was to restrict the political rights of immigrants until they had been “nationalized” through prolonged immersion in the American way of life.12
The Know-Nothings stunned the nation’s political elite by scoring huge electoral successes between 1854 and 1856. They won gubernatorial elections in nine states and controlled legislative branches in at least a half dozen; their vote was particularly strong in states and cities with sizable immigrant populations, including Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Michigan, and parts of Ohio, as well as cities such as Baltimore, New Orleans, and Pittsburgh. Supported by a fairly broad cross section of society, including many merchants, manufacturers, professionals, and native-born workers who saw immigrants as competitors for jobs, the Know-Nothings were victorious enough to kill off the faltering Whig party and briefly emerge as the primary alternative to the immigrant-friendly Democrats.13
In the wake of these successes, state legislatures and constitutional conventions in much of the North seriously considered imposing restrictions on immigrants who sought to vote. Know-Nothings, backed by some Whigs and later Republicans, sponsored legislation to repeal alien suffrage provisions, institute registration systems and literacy tests (from which taxpayers in certain cases would be exempted), require lengthy residence periods for the foreign-born, and prevent immigrants from voting for years after they were naturalized. Such laws were necessary, declared one Know-Nothing editor, because “Romanism” was “a Political as well as Religious system,” and the “Irish rabble” in particular were herded to the poll
s by their priests. Most of these efforts, which had a partisan as well as nativist thrust, failed. In some states, the Democrats were strong enough to defeat restrictive legislation; in others, Whigs and Republicans helped to block the Know-Nothing program because they found it ideologically objectionable and feared losing the electoral support of German immigrants. Notably, states such as New Jersey and Indiana, with large German as well as Irish populations, rebuffed the nativist program. The Know-Nothings also were unable to alter federal naturalization laws.14
Yet the nativist movement did have some striking successes. In New York, in 1859, a coalition of Know-Nothings and Republicans passed a registry law designed to “purify” the ballot box; this purification was deemed necessary only in New York City and New York County. A handful of states, including four in New England, accepted a Know-Nothing proposal to prohibit state judges from naturalizing immigrants: federal judges were preferred, because they were believed to be less inclined to tolerate politically driven mass naturalizations. Oregon, in 1857, dealt with its threatening immigrants, who were Chinese rather than Irish, by limiting the franchise to whites. The impulse even had success in those (generally urban) pockets of the South that had attracted immigrants: in 1860, for example, secessionist Georgia disfranchised propertyless whites, largely in response to the rapid growth of an Irish working-class population in Augusta and Savannah.15
Most important, the Know-Nothings and their allies succeeded in changing the substance of suffrage law in two industrial states with large Irish working-class populations, Massachusetts and Connecticut. Their success was most pronounced in Massachusetts, where the Know-Nothings elected a governor and won control of the legislature in 1854, retaining considerable power throughout the decade. Most Know-Nothing support came from the eastern half of the state, which had rapidly industrialized and become home to hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants. In 1857, Massachusetts passed a law requiring prospective voters to demonstrate their ability to read the Constitution and to write their own names: such laws, according to the Know-Nothings, would keep the “ignorant, imbruted Irish” from the polls. (Connecticut had passed similar legislation in 1855.) This law had a class as well as anti-immigrant edge, but its class effects were softened by a grandfather clause that exempted all citizens over sixty or who previously had voted. The Know-Nothing legislature also approved a postnaturalization waiting period of fourteen years, which failed to become law only because the complex mechanics of constitutional change required that any amendment be approved by a two-thirds majority in two successive legislatures. Two years later, however, the newly ascendant Republicans joined with the Know-Nothings to pass a compromise amendment, ratified by a large popular majority, imposing a two-year waiting period before naturalized citizens could vote. Massachusetts and Maine also passed laws requiring immigrants to present their naturalization papers to local officials three months before elections.16
After the mid-1850s, the Know-Nothings quickly disappeared from view, as nativism was eclipsed by sectional politics and the Republican Party gained the support of many former Know-Nothing backers. Although the Republicans succeeded in part by embracing some of the nativist agenda, they quickly turned their attention to other issues and were increasingly sensitive to the political risks they ran, particularly in the Midwest, by associating themselves too closely with anti-immigrant politics. As Edward L. Pierce, a Republican from Chicago, wrote in a letter published in Boston:at the very moment that the character of foreign immigrants is vastly improving, when we are receiving those from Germany and Switzerland, who come with understanding in their heads, instincts of freedom in their hearts and money in their pockets, we should be . . . cautious lest . . . we do not also shut out a great good and . . . convert our natural friends into unnatural enemies.
Abraham Lincoln, in response to a letter from German Americans about the Massachusetts two-year amendment, declared that:I am against its adoption in Illinois, or in any other place, where I have a right to oppose it. Understanding the spirit of our institutions to aim at the elevation of men, I am opposed to whatever tends to degrade them. I have some little notoriety for commiserating with the oppressed condition of the negro; and I should be strangely inconsistent if I could favor any project for curtailing the existing rights of white men, even though born in different lands, and speaking different languages from myself.
During the Civil War, Radical Republicans, prompted both by egalitarian principles and electoral pragmatism, led a successful campaign to repeal the two-year amendment in Massachusetts. Literacy tests remained in force, however, both in the Bay State and in Connecticut, an enduring reminder of the nation’s first major skirmish in what would become a prolonged struggle to restrict the political rights of foreign-born men who were flooding into the cities and workplaces of an increasingly industrial society.17
Race, War, and Reconstruction
The Civil War refocused the national debate about suffrage. Most obviously, four years of armed conflict, as well as the challenge of reconstructing the nation after the war, brought the question of black voting rights to the foreground of national politics. As important, the process of wrestling with the issue of black enfranchisement raised critical questions, largely ignored since the writing of the Constitution, about the role of the federal government in determining the breadth of the franchise. Although political leaders eventually drew back, they veered remarkably close to a profound transformation of the principles shaping the size and composition of the nation’s electorate.
At the outset of the war, only five states, all in New England, permitted blacks to vote on the same basis as whites; a sixth, New York, enfranchised African Americans who met a property requirement. Not surprisingly, the Civil War unleashed new pressures to abolish racial discrimination. The abolition of slavery turned four million men and women into free citizens who had a new claim on political rights; African Americans were loyal supporters of the Union cause and the Republican Party; they also had fought and died to preserve the Union, in considerable numbers. Indeed, by 1865, the traditional argument that men who bore arms ought to wield the ballot was applicable to more than 180,000 blacks. As General William Tecumseh Sherman himself noted, “when the fight is over, the hand that drops the musket cannot be denied the ballot.”18
Freedmen themselves, as well as northern blacks, asked for—and sometimes demanded—the right to vote: hardly had the war ended when freedmen throughout the South began to write petitions, hold meetings, and parade through the streets to press for an end to racial barriers to voting. In Wilmington, North Carolina, freedmen organized an Equal Rights League, demanding that blacks be granted “all the social and political rights” that whites possessed. In 1865, the highly politicized black community of New Orleans put together a widely participated-in mock election to demonstrate the strength of their resolve; in Maryland, blacks held conventions and marches to further their demands. Former soldiers, ministers, free blacks, and artisans all played prominent roles in this political activity, joined by thousands of others who insisted that suffrage was their right and their due. To African Americans, enfranchisement not only constituted a means of self-protection but was a critical symbol and expression of their standing in American society.19
Many northern whites agreed. Between 1864 and 1868, the more militant and egalitarian Radical wing of the Republican Party included an increasing number of men who embraced “impartial” or “universal” suffrage; intellectuals and ministers, as well as politicians, offered forceful and eloquent pleas for the egalitarian cause. As early as 1865, for example, New York’s influential Protestant minister Henry Ward Beecher offered a multipronged argument for universal suffrage. “The broad and radical democratic doctrine of the natural rights of men,” Beecher declared, “shall be applied to all men, without regard to race, or color, or condition.” Suffrage “is not a privilege or a prerogative, but a right. Every man has a right to have a voice in the laws, the magistracies, and the policies
that take care of him. That is an inherent right; it is not a privilege conferred.” Beecher added a Christian layer to the argument by asserting that natural rights were God given, that “the negro” should vote “because he came from God, and goes to God again.” Yet Beecher, like other advocates of black suffrage, went beyond the issue of rights. Even if one rejected the claim that suffrage was a right, he maintained, blacks had “earned” the franchise through their “heroic military service” and their “unswerving fidelity to the Union.” Beecher also offered a cautionary argument that only rarely had been heard in antebellum debates about enfranchising the lower classes. Responding to those who insisted that it would be dangerous to enfranchise “ignorant” blacks, he maintained:it is far more dangerous to have a large under-class of ignorant and disfranchised men who are neither stimulated, educated, nor ennobled by the exercise of the vote . . . to have an ignorant class voting is dangerous, whether white or black; but to have an ignorant class and not have them voting, is a great deal more dangerous . . . the remedy for the unquestionable dangers of having ignorant voters lies in educating them by all the means in our power, and not in excluding them from their rights. . . . Nothing so much prepares men for intelligent suffrage as the exercise of the right of suffrage.20
Most white Americans, however, did not share such views. In the South, the prospect of black enfranchisement not only violated two centuries of structured and deeply rooted racism but also threatened the postwar white goal of regaining political, social, and economic control over the black population. More surprising was the ongoing hostility to African-American suffrage in the North: the racist beliefs common in the 1840s remained widespread after the Civil War, and fear of black migration to the North was intensified by emancipation. As a result, the cause of impartial suffrage suffered a damaging string of electoral defeats: between 1863 and 1870, proposals to enfranchise blacks were defeated in more than fifteen northern states and territories. Most of these decisions came in public referenda, and the vote rarely was close. Indeed, prior to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, only Iowa and Minnesota, in 1868, adopted impartial suffrage, and the Minnesota vote was facilitated by wording that masked the subject of the referendum. Although most northern Republicans supported black suffrage, Democrats adamantly were opposed, and they generally were joined by enough Republicans to guarantee popular or legislative defeat of any reforms. Notably, this partisan alignment contrasted sharply with the lineup on immigrant voting in the 1850s.21
The Right to Vote Page 14
