The Return of the Know Nothings

Immigration and Liberalism Once Again Mark the Battle Lines

In recent weeks, comments by the Trump supporter and the wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk, about legal immigration and the H1B visa program brought into light a fundamental cleavage within the MAGA coalition. To be more precise, it occasioned an important debate that has been one of the most enduring and significant questions within American conservatism for some time–what does it mean to be a nation and a people, and thus, what is it to be a citizen of a constitutional republic against a resident alien? 

With decades of country club and Wall Street Republicanism that has bred a liberal sensibility towards immigration, many on the American Right remain unable to grasp the fundamental challenge presented by mass immigration, legal or otherwise, in an era in which native-born American citizens are increasingly left behind by their own government, leaders, and elites. Relatedly, there is a cadre of voices on the Right who echo the contemporary left in treating all attempts to significantly reduce immigration and protect the nation and its citizens to be a form of reflexive racism and xenophobia. More specifically, they rely upon the pejorative that anti-immigration conservatives are not really conservative because they are acting like the new “Know Nothing” party. 

As with the modern Right’s treatment of the Left’s seventy-year smear of Senator Joseph McCarthy, an American hero who gave his life to the righteous cause of anti-Communism, this charge reveals a deep misunderstanding and ignorance of American history and a reflection of a progressive historical narrative which has always rejected the legitimacy of genuine conservative movements. 

Generally, what Americans know about the “Know Nothing” party, if anything, is that it was a party that briefly existed in the antebellum Civil War period and, as depicted in the 2002 film “Gangs of New York,” it was led by “Nativists” who hated immigrants, especially Catholics from Ireland. As historian Robert Remini summarizes it, after a dramatic population shift in the early 1850s in which half a million immigrants from mainly Germany and Ireland were arriving, the American or Know-Nothing Party, arose due to a “nativist surge” creating an “anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and anti-slavery party” called “know nothing” because “they wished to hide their obvious prejudices.” 

First, it was not even the first “American” party–only a few years earlier, the Pennsylvanian Lewis Levin had successfully established his Native American Movement and won a seat in Congress. In February 1847, Levin proposed that a bill in the House to “regulate the carrying of passengers in merchant vessels” be amended to make it a “bill to accommodate the paupers and criminals of Europe in their migration to the United States” since: 

“Astringent checks, and stringent only, such as are advocated by the native Americans, can save the country. The evil will continue to increase until the native American vote shall be equal to the foreign vote, and then the question will be settled. Of these thousands of emigrants who annually flood our shores, how few are qualified to assume the functions of a republican voter, or discharge the duties of an American citizen in any of the political relations of life…but, for the sake of humanity, for the sake of your country, for the sake of your children, do not endow them with the attributes of sovereignty–do not rally to the poll this living mass of moral putrescence and pitiable ignorance. Shall such men, sir, compete with free Americans in the exercise of the right of suffrage?” 

As Joel Silbey, one of the most outstanding historians of the politics of the antebellum and Civil War period, puts it, the success of Levin’s movement and its hostility to pro-immigration Democrats “reawakened many Whigs’ negative attitudes towards outsiders and [they] worked with Levin and his supporters on health of [Zachary] Taylor’s candidacy. At the time, liberal Democratic papers, like the Pittsburgh Post, claimed that the Whig Party had “gone over to Levin and the Natives” whose great object was to “disfranchise every man who has fled from oppression in Europe, to seek a home in this ‘land of the free’” and sought to “take from [foreigners] and their friends the dearest rights known to a freeman.” Nativist parties had emerged at the local level in the 1830s, but there had been no national organization until the Know-Nothings, which first emerged from the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner in New York City in 1849. 

The party did achieve some initial success. In the fall elections of 1854, the Know-Nothings won 43 seats in the House, with the newly created Republican Party winning 108 and the Democrats 83. Senator Stephen Douglas insisted that the Know-Nothings, not the Republicans, had won the election because the anti-Nebraska movement had become “a crucible into which they [Know Nothings] poured Abolitionism, Maine liquor-lawism, and what there was left of Northern Whiggism, and then the Protestant feeling against the Catholic, and the native feeling against the foreigner.” After an intense fight over the speakership for the 34th Congress, with Know-Nothings holding the balance of power, on the 133rd ballot, Nathaniel P. Banks, a former Free-Soiler turned Know-Nothing out of Massachusetts, won by a 103-100 vote over South Carolina’s William Aiken. Douglas’s comments were a reminder that it was not just immigration but the wide appeal of the Know-Nothings to abolitionists and especially the temperance movement, as support for “Maine Liquor Laws” became one of the chief reasons that the Whig Party fell apart. Discontent with the existing party system, resentment of foreign influence from former 1848ers, and anti-slavery made for broad appeal, but the party quickly fell apart in June 1855 after southern delegates successfully passed a resolution indirectly endorsing the Kansas-Nebraska Act at the national council meeting of the party. Fifty Northern delegates walked out, and while Millard Fillmore was the party’s presidential candidate, it was the Republican John C. Fremont who captured eleven states and 1.3 million votes to James Buchanan’s 1.8 million in the fall election. 

Despite the sudden rise and fall of the Know Nothing or American Party, they should not be easily dismissed as the product of the latent xenophobia and racism of past bigots. Much of the dissolved Know Nothings fell into the new Republican Party. The success of the Know Nothings reached the South as well. Raymond, Mississippi newspaper editor George W. Harper wrote in 1855 of the “political excitement, asperity and bitterness, run higher at this time in Hinds county, than, possibly at any former period….During the last twelve years, certainly, we have witnessed nothing like it.” Part of the enthusiasm in the region, as explained by scholar Christopher Olsen, was the “antipartyism” in Mississippi, and the Know-Nothings were crusaders against the floundering two-party system of the time. 

The Know-Nothings arose with the fall of the Whig Party, but as historian Eric Foner notes, the Whig-Republican view that “the state should have broad powers to regulate the economic life of the nation” was connected to the reform movements of the period such as temperance and anti-slavery, which sought to “use state power to attack moral evils” by appealing to the Protestant tradition of “moral stewardship.” Republicans found nativist ideas appealing, Foner says, because “political nativism gave expression to the widespread concern among native-born citizens about the increasing political participation and power of foreigners” and these feelings, which the Whigs shared in prior years, stemmed from the fact that immigrants were “generally absorbed into the urban political machines of the Democratic party.” Put together, Know-Nothings were not simply anti-Catholic, but filled with ani-slavery and pro-temperance Americans who resented that German and Irish immigrants tended to oppose the anti-slavery movement and vote against temperance legislation. Notably, part of the struggle for the Know-Nothing movement was precisely that liberals within the emerging Republican party and among former Whigs, Free Soilers, and Democrats, felt that nativism clashed with free labor ideology and the sense that immigration was necessary to cultivate the millions of open acres since economic development was so vital in the liberal free labor outlook. Still, as the great historian David Potter put it, “the affinities of nativism and antislavery are striking, even apart from the fact that both drew their strength from the same religious and social constituencies” based on a “high dramatized fear of a powerful force which sought by conspiratorial means to subvert the values of the republic.” 

Yet, the Know Nothings were not the first American party to so strongly demand immigration restriction and a wariness about foreign influence. They could look to the Federalist Party of the 1790s for a model of conservative governance in the early republic, and no better moment is worth studying than the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. In one of the more misunderstood moments in American history, Federalist leaders pushed for the necessary immigration and speech restrictions to ensure that America did not fall prey to the corrupting influence of French Jacobinism. 

In the comprehensive Oxford history of the 1790s, Stanley Elkins and Eric McCitrick’s The Age of Federalism, they note that regarding resident aliens and domestic criticism of the government. The most ardent Federalists preferred a “single catch-all measure, as sweeping and summary as could be, enabling the Executive with a minimum of nicety to deal swiftly with the widest variety of menaces, from aliens of every sort as well as native citizens, and suspected plots as well as seditious utterances.” Rather than a single, sweeping measure, opposition from both Jeffersonian Republicans led by Albert Gallatin–a Swiss citizen–and some Federalists led to three measures. The first, the Alien Enemies Act of July 6, is the only measure that remains on the books. It allowed, in the event of war or invasion, the President to designate as alien enemies “any citizens or subjects of the hostile nation residing in the United States whose presence he regarded as dangerous, and to make regulations for their apprehension, restraint, or removal as the case might require.” The procedures to be used in federal and state courts, along with enforcement officers, were specifically defined by the law, but the law was not used at the time since war was never declared against France. 

The Alien Act of June 25, 1798, was applicable in peacetime as well as wartime and applied not just to aliens of an enemy nation but any aliens who were non-naturalized persons of foreign birth whom the President declared to be “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States” and the act did not require a hearing or any particularized designation from the President. If any such persons failed to depart from the United States in the time designated by presidential order, they could be imprisoned for up to three years and permanently barred from citizenship. The original Senate bill went further, under a desire to deport as many aliens as possible, particularly those thought to be more naturally pro-French and who would harm the national character. Originally, there was also proposed a large system of registration, surveillance, and individual permits for persons to remain, which would have required proof of prior good behavior and would have restricted the holder to remain in a particular locality. It even would have punished anyone who might “harbour, entertain, or conceal any alien” without giving written notice to a federal judge and any alien who returned after expulsion could have been sentenced to life imprisonment. Those provisions were struck in part due to Alexander Hamilton’s concerns. 

The Federalist-controlled House originally proposed an omnibus Alien and Sedition Act, which was comprehensive, as it covered not just defamation but even threats to defame were made punishable. However, the Senate preempted the House and put forth a measure, led by Senator James Lloyd of Maryland, which covered both treason and sedition. Elkins and McCitrick describe the Lloyd proposal as “exceedingly drastic” and claim that Lloyd was “as warthful a spirit in the Senate as was John Allen in the House.” Their judgment of Lloyd stems from the inclusion in his bill of punishment for treason in peacetime or, more specifically, that in peacetime, a nation could have an “enemy” it was not at war with–in this case, France–and that giving aid and comfort and adhering to such an enemy should be punishable by death. One wonders whether they judged the Rosenbergs to be innocent. 

Ultimately, the Senate, with some prodding from Alexander Hamilton, struck out the entire section relating to treason and any reference to France–Lloyd’s draft bill had included punishment for expressions “tending to justify the French government”–and the Senate’s version mostly hewed to the common-law tradition of seditious libel. The House further refined the bill, requiring that malicious intent be proven, that evidence of the truth for allegedly libelous utterances or speech be admitted as a defense under the precedent of Zenger v. People of New York, removing criticism of federal judges from the scope of the law and leaving only criticism of Congress and the President, and adding an amendment that juries could determine both fact and law, allowing them to return general verdicts of guilty or not guilty. 

Harrison Gray Otis, a Federalist from Massachusetts, was an adamant supporter of the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Federalists maintained an effort in the late 1790s up to 1815 to try and exclude the foreign-born from federal office and voting, and in 1798, the Naturalization Act extended the period of residence necessary for aliens to become naturalized from five to nineteen years, and the Alien Act gave the President power to expel suspected foreigners by executive order. As Gordon Wood puts it in Empire of Liberty, the Federalists feared not just war with France but a civil war, and Otis embedded this fear even though he was “far from the most extreme of the Federalists,” saying that the “French nation have organized bands of aliens as well as their own citizens, in other countries, to bring about their nefarious purposes…By these means they have overrun all the republics in the world but our own…And may we not expect the same means to be employed against this country?” 

The Federalists, thus, were convinced that they had to act to suppress what they understood to be genuine domestic Jacobin influence given the increasing number of foreign immigrants and, as Wood puts it, “scurriolous behavior of the Republican press.” In a June 1798 speech, Otis pleaded with his colleagues that, “In my humble opinion, there is greater danger from this source [Aliens] than from any other. I believe that it has been owing to this cause that all the Republics in Europe have been laid prostrate in the dust…[the European Republics] boasted of their patriotism and courage, they talked loudly of defense and of resisting the invader….Yet when the hour of trial arrived, it appeared that secret corruptions and foreign influence had completed their work; upon the slightest shock, those Republics crumbled into fragments, and the good and the honest citizens were left to stare with stupid wonder, at the ease with which foreign agents and domestic traitors vaulted into place and power.”

Otis biographer Samuel Eliot Morrison cannot help but compare the Federal fear of French agents and influence, some of whom were stirring up sedition along the frontier, to the xenophobia exhibited in the “old Popish Plot in England and the Red scares of 1920 and 1950 in America….several would-be Joe McCarthys came forward with tales of horrid plots. President Adams, for instance, was informed anonymously that the Frenchmen in Philadelphia were planning on 9 May 1798 a day of national fast, to destroy Philadelphia by fire, and massacre the inhabitants.” Morrison’s feverish reference to the supposed “Red Scare” of McCarthyism serves as a powerful reminder of how timeless this debate remains. Morrison died decades before the Soviet archives were open, but even in his lifetime, as William F. Buckley Jr. memorably testified regularly in his columns, McCarthy’s cases against the likes of Owen Lattimoore were hardly base conspiracies but well-grounded prosecutions of Soviet spies, aids, and sympathizers who had indeed deeply infiltrated and harmed American security. 

Otis gave a powerful defense of the Sedition Act in the Senate, noting that “every independent government has a right to preserve and defend itself against injuries and outrages which endanger its existence; for, unless it has this power, it is unworthy of the name of a free government, and must either fall, or be subordinate to some other protection.” He noted that Congress had already passed laws to punish crimes against the United States not listed in the Constitution, including perjury and bribery, and argued that the Sedition Act would not limit the freedom of the press but punish licentiousness. Otis followed Blackstone’s definition of freedom of the press as freedom from prior restraint rather than freedom from prosecution for libel–citizens could print and say what they wished but were subject to the consequences of injury to the public safety and other citizens. 

Otis refused to relinquish his constitutional position decades later. When a member of the Senate in 1818, the question of indemnification for Matthew Lyon, who had been prosecuted under the Sedition Act of 1798, Otis–the only member of either chamber to have voted for the law–said:

“With respect to the constitutional question, I am content to declare that my mind has always reposed upon a single consideration, detached from all others, as sufficient to uphold the Act. All governments must possess an inherent right to punish all acts, which being morally wrong, tend directly to endanger their existence or safety. This power would be implied in the Constitution, even though no express words had conveyed the authority to make all laws ‘necessary and proper,’ to give effect to the instrument. Without such a right, no government is competent to the great duty of self protection.”

Justice Joseph Story wrote to him days later, noting that Otis’ argument was “composed in a tone of manliness, urbanity, & candour” that honored the country and that while he had as a young man thought the Sedition Act unconstitutional, he had “now grown wiser in this, & I hope in many other respects; & for many years have entertained no more doubt of the constitutional power of Congress to enact that law, than any other in the Statute book.” 

Liberals of the period sound both distinct and familiar to our modern debates. In July 1854, former Secretary of State John Clayton, now a Whig Senator representing Delaware, introduced an amendment to the Homestead Bill, which was up for debate in the chambers. Clayton’s amendment would have stipulated, “That if any individual now a resident of any one of the States or Territories, and not a citizen of the United States, but of the time of making such an application for the benefit of this act shall have filed a declaration of his intention, as required by the naturalization laws of the United States, and shall become a citizen of the same before the issuance of the patent, as made and provided for in this act, shall be placed upon an equal footing with the native born citizen of the United States.” 

In a speech responding to the introduction of Clayton’s bill, Senator William Seward denounced the Know Nothings, claiming that it was chiefly immigrant labor that had built the railroads and canals so fundamental to American economic expansion in the period and that given the rise in the labor costs of native workers, “If there were no foreign immigration here, and native Americans had to perform all the labor, what would be the cost?…. The ingress of the foreign population into this country is a fixed and unchangeable fact; it has its cause in the condition of society in foreign countries; nothing could prevent the exodus of the population of Ireland when they were besieged in their native homes by famine and pestilence. They came here in obedience to a law which obliged them to come.” Once more, the divide between liberalism and true conservatism bears out. 

In all these episodes–the Alien and Sedition Acts, the rise and fall of the Know Nothing party, as well as McCarthyism–historians have almost uniformly treated them as among the worst episodes in American history. They have done so because they ultimately take the same view of American history that the mid-twentieth century historians like Louis Hartz did–that America has only ever had one political ideological tradition, and that is liberalism. Thus, according to the consensus history, such moments in American history are among our lowest points because they were illiberal–they rejected the open society, the conception of speech as a mere “marketplace of ideas,” the preference for the autonomous individual over the community and the desire for choice over order. Yet, those “illiberal” moments were among the most conservative in our country’s history, as they sprung from an idea to protect the American citizen, the people, and their traditions, and true ordered liberty against the forces aligned against it–particularly the corruption from foreign enemies offering the poison chalices of liberalism and its myriad offshoots. 

The object of such review is not to suggest that everything the Federalists, Nativists, and McCarthyites did was perfectly justifiable or praiseworthy. The robust anti-papism of the colonial period through the nineteenth century is well understood as a relic of its time. Circumstances also change, and this is part of the requisite reminder that the past is a foreign country–today’s challenge of citizenship and immigration has its own unique characteristics not faced by our forebears of the late eighteenth century and antebellum period and today’s internal enemy bears remarkable similarities to the Communists of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, but situated in a society that is decidedly secular and antagonistic towards Christianity. The view of Christian conservatives as atavistic antediluvians fits the trends seen in consensus history–conservatives have always been reflexively xenophobic and racist in their attempts to thwart the inevitable progress of modern, autonomous man. American history is a reminder that there were plenty of Americans, fallen and flawed as they were, who reacted to grave contemporary threats to the body politic and their communities not with the whimper of liberal tolerance and proceduralism, but with the necessary will to act in preservation of the organic society and its metaphysical constitution which conservatism at its moral basis seeks to defend above all. 


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Nicholas Mosvick is Buckley Legacy Project Manager at National Review Institute. Previously he was a senior fellow in constitutional content at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. He is a graduate summa cum laude of the University of Minnesota. He received his law degree from the University of Virginia and his PhD. from the University of Mississippi. He is the author of the forthcoming Legalizing the Draft: Jacksonian Constitutionalism, the American Civil War, and the Legitimization of Military Conscription (University of Kansas Press).

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