immigrants in major cities, including Chicago, Baltimore, Cincinnati, and New Orleans, in political riots that killed more than seventy people and wounded several hundred.25
Initially, Lincoln treated the Know-Nothings dismissively. When in 1854 Douglas accused him of being connected with the group, Lincoln quipped in a speech that “he Knew Nothing in regard to the Know-Nothings.” If the group “had for its object interference with the rights of foreigners,” Lincoln said, “he was unqualifiedly against it; and if there was anything good in it, why, he said God speed it! [Laughter and applause.]” He turned the tables on Douglas, joking that if the group’s “members were bound by such horrid oaths as Judge Douglas told about, he would really like to know how the Judge found out his secrets? [Renewed laughter.]”26
By 1855, when Know-Nothingism was in full flush, Lincoln took it seriously. Viewing nativism as a form of hateful prejudice, he redoubled his commitment to human equality. One of his fullest condemnations of ethnic and religious bias came in his August 1855 letter to Joshua Speed, in which he wrote:
I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].27
This paragraph, written to his closest friend in the same letter in which he confessed his “continual torment” over slavery, would prove to be a key one in Lincoln’s career. His denunciation of America’s “progress in degeneracy” toward racism and nativism matched the deep bitterness expressed in the mid-1850s by Walt Whitman, who wrote that recent political and social developments showed how “villainy and shallowness . . . are just as eligible to These States as to any foreign despotism, kingdom, or empire.”28 Whitman responded to the surrounding intolerance and prejudice by writing poetry in which he democratically announced himself as “pleas’d with the native and pleas’d with the foreign,” asserting that he did not separate “the white from the black, or the native from the immigrant just landed at the wharf.”29 But he quickly learned that his poems would not have immediate social impact. He wrote in 1856 that only a new kind of leader—a shrewd, beard-faced “American blacksmith or boatman” who would “come down from the West across the Alleghenies, and walk into the Presidency”—could save America.30
Unbeknownst to him, the kind of president he imagined was in the making in Illinois. During the first half of 1856, Lincoln worked to push the Republican Party, already dedicated toward containing slavery, toward a more egalitarian position on immigration and religion. In his turn away from Know-Nothingism, Lincoln pointed himself and the nation toward the democratic embrace of people of various nationalities and faiths that would characterize his presidency.
He was genuinely repelled, therefore, by the intolerance of the Know-Nothings. And so, on the immigration issue, he worked for progress tactfully, often behind the scenes. He undertook this delicate maneuver in two state political conventions that he attended in 1856: the convention in Decatur, Illinois, in February and the one in Bloomington, fifty miles north of there, in June.
At the conventions, which led to the formation of the Illinois Republican Party, Lincoln’s revulsion against Know-Nothingism moved him toward an especially broad interpretation of the Declaration of Independence. The Decatur meeting of state anti-Kansas-Nebraska Act newspaper editors saw him collaborate with Georg Schneider, editor of the Illinois Staats-Zeitung, to provide an anti-nativist plank for the emerging party.
Born in Bavaria in 1823, Schneider had been condemned to death after participating in the revolution of 1848 but escaped to America, where he edited a St. Louis newspaper before establishing the Staats-Zeitung in Chicago. He and many other German Forty-Eighters who joined the antislavery ranks of the Republican Party felt threatened by the suddenly potent Know-Nothings. In Schneider’s words, the Germans “were in a most unpleasant and critical position, and their political future seemed dark.” To combat the Know-Nothing surge, he proposed at Decatur a plank that challenged nativism. His proposal at first aroused “a storm of protest” at the convention, and he was overcome by “utter despair.” But Lincoln intervened and mollified the convention’s attendees. He announced that Schneider’s ideas were “already contained in the Declaration of Independence and you cannot form a new party on proscriptive principles.”32 “This declaration of Mr. Lincoln’s,” Schneider remarked, “saved the resolution and, in fact, helped establish the new party on the most liberal democratic basis.” The convention, swayed by Lincoln, adopted a plank in its platform forbidding discrimination “on account of religious opinions, or in consequence of place of birth.”
The antinativist precedent having been established, the major Republican convention in Bloomington adopted a similar plank, as did the Republican National Convention held in Philadelphia in June.
In the presidential race that year, Lincoln vehemently opposed the candidacy of the Know-Nothing Party’s candidate, the ex-president Millard Fillmore. He attacked Fillmore’s position on slavery and added that he “could not go for Fillmore for another reason”: Lincoln “did not like the Know Nothings.” He assured his audience, “They were, however, an ephemeral party, and would soon pass away.”33 But nativists had broad appeal, as he learned that November, when Fillmore won 22 percent of the popular vote—enough to tilt the key states of Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey away from Frémont to Buchanan. That Lincoln in 1860 would win these states owed much to his success in reacting to Know-Nothingism as he did to other controversial isms: he avoided taking a partisan stance and making extreme statements.
On the one hand, he made known his opinion that prejudice against foreigners resembled prejudice against blacks, and that both biases subverted the nation’s central idea of human equality. Having made this point in his 1855 letter to Speed, he went public with the argument four years later when his letter on the topic, addressed to the German-born journalist Theodore Canisius, appeared in the Illinois State Journal. Lincoln agreed with Canisius’s criticism of a stiff naturalization law in Massachusetts, and he went on to argue that the whole idea of America was the elevation, not degradation, of immigrants. “I have some little notoriety,” Lincoln wrote, “for commiserating 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.”34 Shortly after writing this, Lincoln bought a printing press and appointed Canisius as the editor of a German-language newspaper in Springfield, the Illinois Staats- Anzeiger (the Illinois State Advertiser), which promoted the Republican Party throughout the 1860 race. Lincoln also gathered around him skillful German American operatives, including Gustave Koerner and Carl Schurz. During the Civil War 216,000 troops—about 10 percent of the total Union army—were German-born.
Lincoln’s remarkably open attitude toward different religions and nationalities extended to one of the most ostracized groups in America: Jews. Immigration from Europe swelled the US Jewish population from around 4,500 in 1830 to 40,000 in 1845 and 150,000 by 1860.35 Moving to America in search of opportunity and relief from the persecution they experienced in Europe, Jews succeeded economically, mainly as shopkeepers or peddlers, but they found acceptance into American society difficult. As one rabbi noted, “Suspicion and contempt met [the Jew] at every step, and forced him not seldom, to hide his origin and bury his faith in his bosom.” Ulysses S. Grant, who had briefly joined the Know-Nothings in the 1850s, took typically harsh action in December 1862, when he ordered Jews to be expelled from his military department in Tennessee. Lincoln quickly revoked Grant’s order—a signal of his warm feeling toward Jews. The feeling was not in all cases mutual, as indicated by the some 2,000 Jews who supported the Confederacy, among them Jefferson Davis’s secretary of state, Judah P. Benjamin. But for the large majority of American Jews who supported Lincoln, he was “Rabbi Abraham, . . . one of our nation—the seed of Israel,” whose “entire nature,” one rabbi opined, was “truly Judaic and truly Jewish in spirit.”36
In 1862 Lincoln signed into law a bill that provided the nearly seven thousand Jews who served in the Union army with chaplains, and during the war he awarded some fifty military appointments to Jews. He had high regard for his Jewish podiatrist, Issachar Zacharie, whom he appointed as a special envoy to the South. The Jewish photographer Samuel G. Alschuler took two important pictures of Lincoln: one of the beardless lawyer in an ill-fitting, borrowed black coat in 1858, and the other of the bearded president-elect two years later. Lincoln befriended and collaborated politically with a number of Jews.37 Closest to him was the Illinois haberdasher Abraham Jonas, whom Lincoln called “one of my most valued friends.”38 Born in 1801 in England, Jonas immigrated to the United States in 1819, settling first in Cincinnati and then in Williamstown, Kentucky, before moving to Quincy, Illinois, where he became a lawyer and a Whig politician. He met Lincoln in Whig circles and, like him, joined the Republican Party and campaigned for Frémont in 1856. He became one of Lincoln’s most ardent boosters, promoting him both before and after Lincoln’s nomination for the presidency in 1860.
During the 1860 presidential campaign, Jonas gave Lincoln a crucial warning about the Know-Nothings. Jonas informed Lincoln that the Democratic congressman Isaac N. Morris was about to go public with the story that Lincoln had been spotted leaving a Know-Nothing lodge in Quincy. Lincoln denied the story and told Jonas not to publicize his denial. As was often true on controversial issues, Lincoln took the cautious route. He wrote Jonas: “Our adversaries think they can gain a point if they could force me to openly deny the charge, by which some degree of offence would be given to the Americans. For this reason it must not publicly appear that I am paying any attention to the charge.”39
After all, despite his compassion for immigrants, he did not want to alienate holdover Old Line Whigs in the Republican Party who leaned toward the “American” (that is, the Know-Nothing) view of foreigners. He had learned a lesson about party conservatives as early as 1844, when he called a Whig meeting in Springfield to protest against nativist riots in Philadelphia. At the meeting, he expressed deep sympathy for foreigners, but a reporter noted that his was not the typical Whig attitude. The reporter wrote, “Lincoln expressed the kindest, and most benevolent feelings towards foreigners; they were, I doubt not, the sincere and honest sentiments of his heart; but they were not those of his party.”40
The truth was that as a Whig and then as a Republican, he had to be careful not to lose the backing of nativists. His experience with A. M. Whitney, the father of his Illinois law colleague Henry C. Whitney, showed how the Know-Nothing movement held sway among conservatives even after it had died as a party. During the 1860 presidential race, Lincoln got word that Whitney was taking steps to win him the nativist vote in Illinois, including contacting the state’s former leader of the American Party, John Wilson. Three years later, in the middle of the Civil War, confident that he had saved the state for Lincoln, Whitney approached the president, asking for political favors for Chicago. Whitney reminded Lincoln that he had “worked faithfully” for him in the 1860 campaign as “one of the representatives of the American party.”41
In the end, religion rather than nationality was a better predictor of how Christian European immigrants cast their vote in the 1860 race: Republicans won the majority of the Protestant vote, while Catholics, in the main, went Democratic.42 (Jews did not tend to vote as a bloc, as indicated by the editor of New York’s Jewish Messenger, who wrote, “there is no ‘Jewish vote.’”)43 During the Civil War, Lincoln faced the special challenge of generating support among Catholic immigrants. He was able to do so in large part because the war itself stirred patriotic spirit among recently arrived immigrants who saw military service for the Union as a means of gaining respect while earning an income.
One group that took advantage of this trial by fire was the Irish, who before the war had been the favorite targets of the Know-Nothings.44 Of the some 175,000 Irish who participated in the Civil War, 85 percent fought for the Union. Many were inspired by Irish-born revolutionary leaders who had immigrated to America, including Thomas Francis Meagher, who rallied Irish troops at the beginning of the war, and Michael Corcoran, who became a Northern hero when he was captured at Bull Run and was treated harshly in a Confederate prison before being freed in an exchange. Lincoln knew these leaders and also consulted with Archbishop John Hughes about appointing Catholic army officers and chaplains for military hospitals. Although many Catholic priests disapproved of abolitionism, most Northern ones supported the Union war effort. The war did not do away with nativism, but it dampened it. Like African American troops, Irish soldiers earned widespread respect for their courage on the battlefield. Although the draft riots in New York in 1863 caused an anti-Irish reaction, Irish priests and soldiers were among the harshest critics of the rioters.
All in all, Lincoln’s pivot away from Know-Nothingism toward toleration made possible his productive relationships with foreigners. He had expressed this broadmindedness while on the hustings in Illinois in the 1850s. He mocked the Democrats’ supposed regard for foreigners by taking Stephen Douglas to task for saying that when the Founders affirmed human equality, “they were speaking of British subjects on this continent being equal to British subjects born and residing in Great Britain.” By this logic, Lincoln said, “not only negroes but white people outside of Great Britain” including “the French, Germans and other white people of the world” were “all gone to pot along with the Judge’s inferior races.” Lincoln insisted that ethnic and religious difference must foster unity, not division, because people of all nations and faiths who came to America were bonded by its central principle that “all men are created equal.
GIVE ’EM JESSIE!
All men; but how about women? In July 1848, at Seneca Falls, New York, the world’s first women’s rights convention rewrote the Declaration of Independence to assert that “all men and women are created equal.”46 The approximately 260 women and 40 men who gathered at the two-day convention laid out an ambitious program calling for suffrage, property rights, employment opportunities, and fair marriage laws for women. Similar conventions met regularly over the following decades. Gains in property rights came steadily, as did advances in employment and marriage laws. Woman suffrage, though granted in certain states, did not become enforced nationally until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.
In the 1850s, women’s rights figures were caricatured as manlike oddities. The Republican Party, the alleged home of the isms, was associated with women’s rights. To a certain degree, this was true. Leaders of the women’s rights movement such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, though not always convinced that the Republican Party moved fast enough toward social change, generally aligned themselves with the party. Though the party leaned in a protofeminist direction, it did not openly embrace women’s rights, which was considered secondary to the slavery issue.
In 1856, Republicans found in Jessie Benton Frémont an attractive combination of political forthrightness and conventional womanhood. The well-educated daughter of the Jacksonian politician Thomas Hart Benton and the wife of the dashing Republican presidential candidate John Frémont, Jessie was unafraid to express her political opinions and yet remained devoted to her husband and children—a merging of independent thinking and domesticity that Republican voters found irresistible. A Jessie cult arose. (By a happy coincidence, her name corresponded with “Give ’em Jessie!,” a slang expression that meant, roughly, “Give ’em hell!”) Groups called Jessie Circles, Tribe of Jessie, Sisters of Jessie, and Jessie Clubs sprouted throughout the North. Women turned out at political rallies in unprecedented numbers, gaining a sense of empowerment by shouting, “Our Jessie!”47 A banner at a New Hampshire rally delivered the bold message “Jessie for the White House.” Popular campaign songs included “Oh, Jessie Is a Sweet Bright Lady” (to the tune of “Comin’ Through the Rye”) and “We’ll Give ’Em Jessie” (to the tune of “Wait for the Wagon”). Should Jessie Frémont “preside over the White House,” asserted the popular Frank Leslie’s Weekly, “we may look for a new era of glory,” and “we doubt not that she would do much to soften the asperities of sectional strife, and thus quietly, but not the less firmly, exert her influence beyond the circle of her home.”48
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