Anti-Immigrant Sentiment/Nativism

Nativism during the first half century of American nationhood played nothing like the part it did in the second. No movement to define nationality in a restrictive way coalesced sufficiently to produce local political movements like New York City's Native American Democratic Association of the mid-1830s, much less putatively national organizations such as the American Party of the 1850s. At the end of the third decade of the nineteenth century, there were still no colorful nativist fraternities like the Order of United Americans or the Sons of the Sires of '76. There were no convent burnings, lurid public exposés of the "licentiousness" of the Roman Catholic confessional, street battles between immigrant and "native" fire companies, or employers' windows posted with "No Irish Need Apply" notices. There was only a hint of the mass immigration from Europe that later offered nativists their foils, the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon (1793–1815) and the United States's own economic doldrums providing little encouragement to transatlantic migrants.

the question of nationality

Yet the roots of the robust nativist movement that spawned a major third party political insurgency at mid-century, played a role in the remaking of the American political landscape, and had a prominent and enduring cultural impact lasting into the twentieth century were nurtured in the decades before 1830. It should not be at all surprising that a movement about defining nationality had its origins in a period of nation building.

The opportunity for a nativist movement was provided by the unprecedented character of the American nation itself. The preexisting European definitions of "nation" did not seem to fit this new creation. The United States neither drew identity from association with a historic "people," with cohesion in common traditions, values, culture, or "blood," nor from time-tested institutions nor even long-established territorial boundaries in the ways to which Europeans were accustomed. To be sure, the United States had established political and legal structures, but the notion that they operated by the voluntary subscription of the citizenry rather than as the inheritance of monarchical authority or feudal obligation was untested.

European doubters regularly reminded Americans that they might not be a nation at all, certainly not one calculated to endure. Americans were disposed to have their own doubts. Political rhetoric inherited from eighteenth-century Britain posited that republics faced endemic internal threats. The rich and powerful might come to dominate as oligarchs or the poor and ignorant might fall to the sway of demagogues and tend to anarchy. Consequently, the central requisite for a republican citizen seemed to be what was then called "independence" or what later might be called "autonomy." The only reliable citizen was one with the freedom of mind to resist manipulation and the material possessions or prospects to avoid domination. This outlook encouraged scrutiny of others, and a conventional ethnocentrism directed attention to those who looked, talked, or lived differently. But, as important, it encouraged judgment of self. For if citizens fell into dependency of almost any sort, not only was the nation in peril, but their very identity as Americans was threatened. Nativists, or in the period from 1789 to 1829, protonativists, were those for whom anxieties about both self and nation became particularly intense.

alien and sedition acts

Authentic nativism and the beginnings of organized nativist activism should not be confused with the nascent party politics behind the four pieces of legislation passed by the Federalist leadership in Congress in the summer of 1798, which collectively came to be known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. Particularly vexing to hard-line Federalists was the enthusiastic participation in press and politics of small numbers of Irish expatriates whose experiences with nationalist organizations like the United Irishmen had inclined them to take their ideological cues from revolutionary France rather than conservative Britain. Finding outlets in the Philadelphia Aurora and the publications of the Carey brothers, Mathew and James, the group included such outspoken anti-Federalists as James Callender, William Duane, and John Daly Burk. While three of the four measures were directed at the foreign-born, the legislation was much less about nationality than about the uncertainties of political party formation, doubts over legitimate political opposition, and a neocolonial outlook which suspected that the Republic remained a pawn of the European Great Powers. Suspicious of revolutionary France, eager for commercial alliance with Britain, and observing that neither the French in the United States nor many recent arrivals from the British Isles were likely friends of Federalism and the administration, Federalist votes in Congress supported a "Naturalization Act," an "Act Concerning Aliens," an "Act Respecting Alien Enemies," and an "Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes" (the Sedition Act). The first extended the probationary period for naturalization from five to fourteen years; the second and third—never enforced—created conditions for the punishment or deportation of politically troublesome aliens in either peace or war; and the final act, of which a congressman and several prominent Republican newspaper editors were the chief victims, outlawed publicly shared "false, scandalous, or malicious" words about the government or officers of the government. While political enemies did not hesitate to castigate the Irish origins of Republican Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont, the most visible public figure convicted under the Sedition Act for "libeling" President Adams, the issue was not nativity or nationality but ideology. The chief consequence of the acts was not an enduring nativism but the solidification of the Republicans as an opposition party.

protonativism

Actual protonativism originated with groups that established themselves to promote citizens' participation in republican government and the autonomy that permitted them to be reliable repositories of self-rule. Mechanics societies that sprung up in New York and Baltimore during the 1780s and 1790s lobbied for a just wage and economic competency for the laborer or craftsman, while promoting oratorical and debating skills considered essential to participation in public affairs. New York City's Tammany Society, founded in the late 1780s, sought to encourage effective participation in republican government for those without the wealth or connections of aristocracy. It endorsed free public education and the cessation of imprisonment for debt. Although a later version of Tammany would be closely associated with Irish American politics, its earliest incarnation actually had free-thought and anti-Catholic tendencies. Democratic Republican societies, which emerged in 1793–1795 in the tradition of the Revolution's Committees of Correspondence, not only supported public schools as training grounds for republicans but scanned the political horizon for evidence of republican degeneration and instituted mutual benefit insurance for members as a way of promoting autonomy and, accordingly, political reliability. This was a tradition sustained in New York City by the Washington Benevolent Society, founded in 1808, with a more Federalist temper.

These bodies organized to guarantee the ability of members to function as citizens but also to watch carefully for those who might imperil republican self-government by undermining citizens' autonomy. There was a pattern to whom they watched most closely. The conventional Anglo-American view of Roman Catholics as priest-drilled and illeducated raised the specter of an organized bloc of dependent voters. The poorest among foreign-born arrivals attracted attention as prospectively devaluing labor and throwing American workers into dependency. Ethnocentrism suggested that these might have a capacity for living at a low living standard, a capacity that the self-respecting American republican lacked. In fact, any collection of persons that could be regarded as clannish or under some form of uniform direction could be regarded by protonativist groups with suspicion.

the 1820s: a transitional decade

Conditions in the mid-1820s set the stage for the eruption of a real nativist movement. The death of the last of the Republic's founders underscored latent anxieties about the future. Franchise reform, such as that which increased the size of the New York City electorate by 30 percent, reawakened fears of dependent voters. The recession that had begun in 1819 ended and was succeeded by an agricultural boom, an emergent factory system of production, and a canal craze. All encouraged European immigration, and the foreign-born became more widely dispersed around the nation. Disfranchisement of small freeholders in Ireland in the mid-1820s, followed by landlord consolidations and dispossession of homes and livelihoods put Irish Catholics on the move to both England and America. These were the kind of people bound to impress anxious republicans as habitual dependents. Immigration figures, which had been running from 6,000 to 10,000 annually during the first half of the decade, increased to nearly 150,000—almost 51,000 of them Irish—by the end of the 1820s. Roman Catholics, who numbered only 35,000 nationwide in 1790, by 1830 made up nearly 75,000 residents of the New England states alone. (There would be 660,000 nationwide ten years later.) In 1829 a Provincial Council of American Catholic bishops specifically called for parochial education, which suggested to those of suspicious mind clerical thought control on the one hand and an affront to culturally unifying (and culturally hegemonic) public schooling on the other.

Nativism, appropriately associated with the decades of mass immigration following 1829, with the tensions of a growing and sectionally diverse nation, as well as with the stresses of urbanization and early industrialization, was, however, fundamentally about defining nationality. Its luxuriant growth in the antebellum period would have been impossible without the public debates and private anxieties about national character that were so prominent in the early American nation.

See alsoAlien and Sedition Acts; Catholicism and Catholics; Nationalism .

bibliography

Archdeacon, Thomas J. Becoming American: An Ethnic History. New York: Free Press, 1983.

Bennett, David H. The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Knobel, Dale T. America for the Americans: The Nativist Movement in the United States. New York: Twayne, 1996.

Murrin, John M. "A Roof without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Identity." In Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity. Edited by Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

Dale T. Knobel