The Rise and Fall of the Know-Nothing Party

It sounds funny but at one time there was literally a political party that referred to themselves as the "Know-Nothing Party" aka the "Order of the Star-Spangled Banner." They burned hot, they burned bright, they burned out. Their platform was essentially to oppose anything that wasn't white: Immigrants, Catholics, and Jews. This wasn't a new thing, since Germans, for whom English was not their primary language, and the Irish, who spoke accented English and were under suspicion of following not the rules and laws of the United States but instead the Pope and the Vatican. This was the height of mid-19th century "Nativism" - the idea that Native-born Americans (but most assuredly not Native Americans) were superior to literally everyone else. 

They had secret societies whose sole platform was to oppose immigration to the United States. Anti-Catholic sentiment ran rampant. In the early 1830s posters around Boston exclaimed that "All Catholics and all persons who favor the Catholic Church are...vile imposters, liars, villains, and cowardly cutthroats." Samuel Morse, yes, the telegraph guy, wrote a bunch of articles in the New York Observer (he later published these articles in a book) just blowing that dog whistle that the Vatican was sending Catholics to the United States in order to undermine the government. He was popular enough to get nominated - but whooped - in the 1836 New York City mayoral election. 

In August 1834, a group of anti-Catholics in Charlestown (just outside of Boston) - believing that nuns were being held against their will after which priests strangled the babies - stormed an Ursuline convent, chased out the eight nuns and 47 students, and proceeded to ransack it. John Buzzell, a brickmaker from New Hampshire:

The first thing that was done, after getting in, was to throw the pianos, of which nine were found, out of the windows. The mob crowded in such numbers that it was with great difficulty that I got upstairs to the chapel, which was located on the second floor. When I finally succeeded in forcing my way into the chapel I found a fire about the size of a bushel-basket blazing merrily in the middle of the floor. It was made of paper, old books, and such other inflammable stuff as they could lay their hands on, and soon spread in all directions. When the main building was enveloped in flames we went for the cook-house and ice-house, which were separate buildings, and set them on fire. 

Buzzell went on to explain that he broke into the mausoleum, you know, to see if there were any dead girls whose deaths the priests were covering up. He said, and the aforementioned quote is from 53 years (not a typo) after the event, that he was sure there was a young nun named Mary St. John who was in the mausoleum that had not been dead for very long. Mary St. John, however, had testified against Buzzell in court - twice - so obviously he was extremely wrong. 

It didn't stop people from believing the rumors, and it certainly didn't stop people from trying to profit off of them, either. In 1835, Rebecca Reed published "Six Months In A Convent," in which she claimed there was a plot to kidnap her and send her to the aforementioned Montreal convent. The following year Maria Monk published "Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun's Life in a Convent Exposed," a sensational - and completely fabricated - account of her life in a Montreal convent in which a neighboring monastery's priests forced nuns into sex slavery. The book was promoted and likely written by William K. Hoyte and other nativists in New York. Hoyte was the super anti-Catholic head of the Canadian Benevolent Society who was sleeping with Monk. Published by the nativist James Harper in January 1836, it sold over 26,000 copies by July and over 300,000 copies by the time of the Civil War. Harper, the "Harper" in "Harper-Collins Publishing," was elected mayor of New York City in 1844. 

1844 was also the year that anti-Irish sentiments exploded in Philadelphia. In May and July anti-Irish mobs attacked the homes of Irish-Americans, as well as Catholic churches. Zachary M. Schrag, a professor at George Mason, wrote that the riots "stand out for their duration, itself a product of nativist determination to use xenophobia for political gain." Philadelphia mandated singing Protestant songs and reading from the King James Bible in schools. A Catholic school director in Kensington, a northeast suburb of Philadelphia, floated in February 1844 suspending Bible reading in schools until the school board could come to a consensus regarding religion in schools for both Protestant and Catholic students. That went over about as well as you can imagine. Tensions simmered until they boiled over in May, when a teenaged nativist was shot and killed. A second person, who was just watching, died that day as well. Two days later nativists had burned a Catholic seminary and two Catholic churches. The rioting died down a couple of days later only after the U.S. Army and Navy had been sent in. Riots exploded again in July resulting in the deaths of at least 16 people. 

This was the birth of the Know-Nothing Party, who peaked in 1856. That said in 1835 (the year after the Ursuline Riot) New York State's Native American Democratic Association, with support from the Whigs, who were anti-Andrew Jackson Democrats, gained 40% of the vote in the fall elections and, with that, momentum. By the 1840s the country's first true third-party had grown, with chapters in pretty much every major coastal city that had, like, immigrants and whatnot.

But where did the Know-Nothing Party get its name? Due to their origins with secret societies, if anyone was to ask them their platform, they were to respond "I know nothing." It was known that they did favor a 21-year residency requirement before citizenship could be considered, limiting alcohol sales (because, sure, the Irish and Germans were the only ethnic groups getting lit up in the United States), Bible readings in schools, and only allowing Protestants to teach school. As Lorraine Boissoneault wrote in the Smithsonian Magazine (linked above), "They were the first party to leverage economic concerns over immigration as a major part of their platform." Ahh, the long-mentioned "economic anxiety" that has plagued America for generations. Boissoneault explained that the Know-Nothings followed the typical pattern of nativist motivation: Nationalism, religious discrimination, and ethnic divisions stoked by politicians to appeal to the working class. 

Two individuals in particular drove the Know-Nothing Party: A silversmith named Thomas Whitney and prizefighter/butcher William Poole. Whitney wrote the defining work of the Know-Nothing Party: "A Defence of the American Policy, As Opposed to the Encroachments of Foreign Influence, and Especially to the Interference of the Papacy in the Political Interests in the Affairs of the United States." As Whitney owned a printing press, he became the main publisher of Know-Nothing propaganda. And you most likely remember Poole as one of the main influences for Daniel Day-Lewis' character "Bill the Butcher" in Martin Scorsese's "Gangs of New York."

This came at a time when German and Irish immigration to the United States was exploding due to economic/political turmoil and a potato famine, respectively. 2.9 million people emigrated to the United States from 1845-1854, coinciding with the rise of the Know-Nothings. Over half of New York City was made up of foreign-born people. 70% of New York City's charity efforts involved Irish immigrants to the city. This simply couldn't stand. Whitney wrote that all people were "entitled to such privileges, social and political, as they are capable of employing and enjoying rationally." Essentially, as Boissoneault says, "only those with the proper qualifications deserved full rights."

The Know-Nothings picked up followers from the declining Whigs and enjoyed political success throughout the 1840s, they really gained steam ahead of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, in which slavery in those territories. By 1855 the governor of Massachusetts and all but two members of the Massachusetts state legislature were Know-Nothings, as well as 40 members of the New York state legislature, eight governors, 43 members of the House of Representatives, and five Senators. William Poole would die in 1855 after getting into a saloon fight with Irish boxer John Morrison and his men, one of whom shot Poole in the chest. Poole stuck around for almost two weeks before succumbing to his injuries. His last words were, "Goodbye boys, I die a true American." The Know-Nothings had themselves a martyr.

1856 was an election year, and the Know-Nothings aka the American Party were excited. But, like many other political groups at the time, they were splintered on the issue of slavery. There were enough abolitionists who still opposed immigration that their 1856 convention to nominate former president Millard Fillmore (with Andrew Jackson Donelson as his running mate) ended when the anti-slavery Know-Nothings left the convention. Fillmore and Donelson remained on the ballot. 

The election came and with it one major final flashpoint, in Baltimore. It makes sense that Baltimore, or Maryland, would be the epicenter of the anti-Catholic sentiment, given that Maryland was originally founded as a safe haven for Catholics in the Colonies. Martin Ford wrote in Humanities that "election rallies were massive provocations, mixing theatrical spectacle with guerrilla warfare, Fourth of July pageantry with thuggery." Knowing that violence was likely, Maryland governor Thomas W. Ligon met with Baltimore Mayor Thomas Swann (a Know-Nothing man) to ensure that Swann would call off his gangs and allow everyone eligible to vote without fear of intimidation. Swann, in fact, did not do that. 

On Election Day 1856, Baltimore had just 45 police officers for a population of almost 175,000 (up from 80,000 in 1830 thanks, in large part, to Irish and German immigration). The city, known as "Mobtown" thanks to the presence of political gangs, engaged in heavy-handed tactics to ensure their candidate was elected. One gang, the Blood Tubs, was so named due to their penchant for dumping tubs of fresh-from-the-slaughterhouse blood on voters who did not vote for their candidate. Other gangs kidnapped immigrants who didn't speak English off the street and take them to vote for their guy. New York's Empire Club came to Baltimore in 1856 to campaign for Democratic candidates, they were trapped in a house by the local Know-Nothings which led to a firefight using "small cannon and firearms." Not far away the Plug Uglies and the Rip Raps - both Know-Nothing gangs - engaged in a two-hour long volley of shots with a Democratic group that killed two. It's hard to get the exact figures, but one estimate had it at 30 dead and 350 injured.

Ligon wrote a report to the Maryland State Legislature in which he said that, "Party animosity ran riot throughout the city; the most desperate encounters took place, in which hundreds of infuriated partisans were engaged; arms of all kinds were employed; and bloodshed, wounds, and death, stained the record of the day...I retired from the scene, convinced that all this might have been prevented, and not without a painful sense of duty unfulfilled," also mentioning that Swann had abdicated his responsibility to ensure a free and fair election. Swann and the Know-Nothings would make further gains in 1858 before fading out.

Despite getting over 800,000 votes (about 21.5%) the Fillmore/Donelson ticket would go on to finish the 1856 election in a distant third place, with just eight electoral votes out of a possible 296. All eight electoral votes came from the state of Maryland. The dismal showing would mark the official end of the American/Know-Nothing Party. Ultimately, what with the growing threat of Civil War, America decided that slavery was a much more pressing issue than immigration. The Know-Nothings faded out just as quickly as they rose to prominence. The pro-slavery members of the party joined forces with the Democrats while the anti-slavery faction joined the emerging Republican party, and please do remember that the two parties switched platforms over the course of the next 100-ish years. 

The nativist streak has been both in the background and in the forefront of American politics ever since. In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act which...did exactly what it sounds like. Thirty years later Congress debated whether or not Italians were "full-blooded Caucasians" and whether or not immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were "biologically and culturally less intelligent" than their white counterparts. Just remember these events as you're watching the news terrified of a migrant horde streaming towards the border - they've been trying this for generations. 

Two Days in Washington: August 1814

Perhaps you heard that there was a little break-in at the US Capitol Building (for the love, "capital" is the city, it's the "Capitol Building") this week that has caused a slight kerfuffle around the, well, the world. We're not talking about that today, because this web site tends not to deal with the current century. Today we're talking about the last time that such a direct assault on the seat of American government. 

Do not get me wrong: I know that the attacks on Oklahoma City, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11, among others were far more devastating than what happened on Wednesday at the Capitol, but those attacks were not directly on the buildings that house the American government (though it appears the White House was a possible target of Flight 93). However, let's talk about Washington in 1814. 

The War of 1812...it wasn't going so well for the Americans.

[As a quick aside, the purpose of this here blog is to do deep-dives on the rhyming couplets of history, but by no means a comprehensive re-telling. Ideally, something you read here catches your fancy and you go read further about it. I'm a history teacher. I get, like, eight hours of class time to teach World War II. But maybe you read something here that you want to go further into, and that's where you hit up your library or whichever way do some investigating on your own.]

Having been a country for about 30 years, the United States was ready for some respect, and they weren't really getting it from Great Britain. That's what's important (to me) to remember about the War of 1812: respect, and the United States feeling like they deserved it. How was the US being disrespected? 

Great Britain was trying to deal with Napoleon. They needed sailors. And so they "impressed them," and not in, like, an "Anyway, here's 'Wonderwall'" sense of impressing them. Impressment was a thing that Great Britain did between 1793 and 1812 in which the British Navy would board merchant vessels and essentially force/kidnap sailors to serve the Crown, mainly to beef up their efforts to defeat Napoleon. Lest we think the British improper for this practice, they did say that they could only kidnap a sailor for five years, and then they couldn't do it again. So there's that. The British impressed over 15,000 American sailors in the aforementioned timespan. 

The British were also violating maritime laws bargained by the Treaty of Paris (1783) and further clarified by Jay's Treaty (1794). They were also encouraging Native Americans to fight back against the United States (and one can easily see why the Native Americans would do so). All of these ingredients combined together were seen by some members of Congress as the equivalent of taking their own hands and slapping their own face with them and saying, "Stop hitting yourself, innit?"

Who were these Congressmen? They were known as the War Hawks, and this is where I feel as though we should instead look at the War of 1812 like a massive duel between the United States and Great Britain. The War Hawks were led by men like Kentucky's Henry Clay, South Carolina's John C. Calhoun, and Tennessee's Solomon Felix Grundy. Well, if you're a Southern/Western gentleman and feel as though you have been disrespected and/or your honor has been attacked, what do you do? You challenge them to a duel, a duel that the War Hawks referred to as the "second war for independence." It's worth mentioning that this was bitterly opposed by the Federalist set of Congress, who valued trade with Great Britain. It's interesting to me that while it was New England who advocated for the Revolution over the hems/haws of the Southern colonies, it was the Southerners (and now-Westerners) who were agitating for Round Two over the objections of New England. 

Anyhow, despite not having much in the way of a standing army (thanks to the Anti-Federalists, led by Thomas Jefferson, who saw a standing military as the greatest threat to a government) the Americans were feeling their oats and were all, "Yeah, let's go take Canada. How hard can THAT be? Look at it. It's so Canadian!"* The United States tried to invade Canada and it went...extremely poorly. Every single attempt was repelled. As it turned out, much to the surprise of the Americans, a lot of former colonists went to Canada to stay under British rule, and weren't terribly interested in being Americans.

*paraphrasing

Now we get to the point of the post. The British were able to turn their attention to the United States in 1814, once Napoleon abdicated the throne. It starts with the Chesapeake Campaign, which was a diversionary invasion to take American attention away from Canada. On August 19, 1814 the British landed on Maryland's Patuxent River and Secretary of War John Armstrong, who wasn't exactly the best at his job in this country's history, didn't think the British would attack Washington because it simply wasn't of all that much strategic, military, or economic importance, especially what with the much more "valuable" Baltimore just, I mean, *right there*. Still, military leadership thought Baltimore was the target. Armstrong:

They would not come with such a fleet without meaning to strike somewhere. But they certainly will not come [to Washington]! What the devil will they do here? No! No! Baltimore is the place, Sir. That is of so much more consequence.

Little did he know that the British were all, "Why not both!?" It was pretty clear when five days later, on August 24, the British arrived at Bladensburg, Maryland, about seven miles northeast of the White House. The British wanted to take out the symbolic importance of Washington, D.C. As the British crossed the Anacostia River, the militia quickly set up three lines of defense. Madison borrowed some pistols and rode out to watch the battle, but not before almost riding directly into the hands of the British. While the Americans outnumbered the British, the British were superior in tactics and, you know, general military expertise. "Commanded" by Brigadier General William H. Winder, the first line of defense quickly retreated into the second, gumming up the strategic works and causing confusion within the American ranks. Winder would actually be court-martialed for his "leadership" at Bladensburg and, though he was acquitted, Winder was demoted. 

The third line of defense was led by Commodore Joshua Barney. Barney looked at the War of 1812 like it was a reputation rehabilitation mission. He joined the cause for American independence at the age of 16. In 1794 the United States revived its military to deal with threats from Great Britain, France, and [squints] Algeria and appointed six new commanders for the new frigates commissioned by the government. Barney placed fourth out of six, appealed to be third, was denied, and then turned down the commission and went and fought for France. This would prove to be disastrous to Barney when the United States and France kinda-sorta got into a war in the late 1790s and the press started to refer to Barney in the same breath as Benedict Arnold, which is decidedly what one is not looking for. When the War of 1812 broke out, Barney quickly saw it as his opportunity to save his reputation.

Barney's third line held up more admirably than Winder's first two, delaying the British long enough to allow President James Madison to tell First Lady Dolley Madison to save as many possessions as she could before fleeing. Barney got shot in the thigh and was captured by the British, who released him on the spot in honor of his bravery. British Rear Admiral George Cockburn said of Barney and his men, "They have given us the only fighting we have had." With Barney wounded, the British broke through towards Washington. Madison was unimpressed by his fleeing defense, reportedly saying, "I could never have believed that so great a difference existed between regular troops and a militia force, if I had not witnessed the scenes of this day."

With no defenses available, the Commandant of the Washington Navy Yard Thomas Tingey, set fire to the Navy Yard's vessels and supplies rather than let them fall into British hands. Senior administration officials fled into the countryside. James Madison and his Secretary of State James Monroe were nearly captured, and spent the night of August 26 at the home of Caleb and Henrietta Bentley in Brookeville, Maryland, giving Brookeville the eternal nickname of "U.S. Capital For A Day."

Meanwhile, the British had free rein in the nation's capital which...wasn't that impressive of a city. Washington hadn't even been the capital of the United States for 25 years at this point. A British soldier wrote of the city:

It possesses no leading features, by catching which I might hope to convey to a person who has not seen it, something like an accurate notion of the whole. It...is, I believe, still in its infancy, few of the streets being finished, and many containing not more than three or four houses, at wide intervals from each other...Like other infant towns, Washington is but little ornamented with fine buildings; except the Senate-house, I really know of none worthy to be noticed.

Sending a message to the apparently-one nice building in the city was appropriate to the British, who set fire to everything they could. While the Capitol dome hadn't yet been built, the original chamber of the House of Representatives was thought to be "the most beautiful room in America," according to the historian emeritus for the Architect of the Capitol. It was fireproof, except - and this is a pretty massive "except" - the ceiling, which was wooden. Catch the roof - with 100 skylights - on fire, and it'll collapse and destroy everything, which is, of course, what happened. William Allen:

The heat was intense. The glass in the skylights melted, became molten, and fell down in large chunks.

A 24-year old Senate clerk named Lewis Machen, assisted by Tobias Simpson, a Black messenger, commandeered a wagon and began loading Senate records onto the wagon as the fire raged in the Capitol building. Machen and Simpson didn't save all of the records, but they did save a large number of important ones. Unfortunately for the Capitol Building, the wooden floors and the remaining records and books served simply as kindling, especially the Senate side of the building. Machen and Simpson, after a hilariously arduous journey that included a wagon wheel flying off and the wagon itself just turning over resulting in hours of gathering the spewed papers, delivered the papers they were able to save to Madison at Brookeville.

He wasn't the only one thinking of preserving the past in the face of an uncertain future: Senior State Department clerk Stephen Pleasonton put the original Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, Constitution, and George Washington's correspondence in some linen bags and personally escorted them 35 miles to the northwest, to Leesburg, Virginia.

The British moved on to the Presidential Mansion (it wasn't known as the White House until 1901) and set fire to it, but not before eating the dinner that had been prepared for Madison and 40 other people - which is just massively disrespectful. The British burned the Library of Congress and pretty much every government building they could find, including the State Department, Treasury Department, and War Department. You could see the glow of the fire from Baltimore, 40-ish miles away.

The British mostly left the few private residences in the city alone. While the British had a (mostly) no-looting policy, one British soldier took Madison's traveling medicine chest. This chest passed to a British soldier, which descended through his family until it was returned to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939.

The following morning, with the fires still burning in Washington, the British searched the city for other stuff to burn. They found an ammunition store but, after a little accident with some gunpowder barrels that resulted in the death of 30 British soldiers, decided to bounce, fires still raging behind them. And then? A miracle. A massive thunderstorm complete with a tornado hit Washington in early afternoon of August 25. The National Weather Service said that the strong tornado struck northwest Washington and downtown and did "major structural damage to the residential section of the city," noting that more British soldiers were killed by flying debris than by American guns. The aforementioned British soldier, Robert Glieg, wrote:

Of the prodigious force of the wind it is impossible for you to form any conception. Roofs of houses were torn off by it, and whisked into the air like sheets of paper, while the rain which accompanied it resembled the rushing of a mighty cataract rather than the dropping of a shower...[it was] the most appalling effect I had ever, or probably shall ever witness.

Two British cannons were picked up and spun around in the most intense part of the afternoon. The roof of the General Post Office was ripped off. Houses were wrenched off of their foundations, and trees were uprooted all of the city. Thirty Americans were killed in the storm, which lasted for over two hours, dropping such an immense amount of rain that it put the fires out. However, it also created enough confusion to allow the British to slink off towards Baltimore. 

When Washingtonians woke up the next morning they found the city smoldering, houses destroyed by the storm, the army was nowhere to be found, no one knew where President Madison or his cabinet was, and the Union Jack flew over the capital. That's a rough day.

Madison wrote on September 1, 1814 complaining that the British operations in Washington were Extremely Bullcrap, given that peace talks had already been offered by the British when they sacked Washington:

Whereas, these proceedings and declared purposes, which exhibit a deliberate disregard of the principles of humanity, and the rules of civilized warfare, and which must give to the existing war a character of extended devastation and barbarism, at the very moment of negociacions [sic] for peace, invited by the enemy himself, leave no prospect of safety to any thing within the reach of his predatory and incendiary operations, but in a manly and universal determination to chastise and expel the invader.

It took three years to rebuild the Presidential Mansion, an undertaking led by the Irish-American James Hoban. We don't know all that much about Hoban's life as his papers were destroyed, ironically, in a fire in the 1880s. James Monroe was able to live there beginning in 1817. Thomas Jefferson sold his  book collection to the government to restock the Library of Congress.

James Madison's Congress met on September 19, 1814 at Blodgett's Hotel, at Eighth Street and E Street NW, which also housed the Patent Office. An impressively-quick-thinking superintendent said the building contained patent models from inventors, which qualified the building as private property. This was good enough for the British, who left the building alone. Congress would meet there until they adjourned in March 1815 and approved Madison borrowing money to rebuild the damaged buildings on their existing sites. 

There was only one (non-storm) casualty of the British assault on Washington: John Lewis, George Washington's grand-nephew. Lewis and his brother had been impressed into the service of the Royal Navy and had only just been released, so he was ready to kick some heads. Lewis saw a group of British soldiers, hopped on his horse with his sword drawn and, after shouting "a volley of epithets" at the British began to attempt to remove some British heads from their respective bodies when he was shot and killed. 

So, yeah. This week in American history was pretty wild.