A Nation Rising (19 page)

 

“N
EVER WAS A
city more disgraced; never a city more justly punished,” wrote a correspondent in Philadelphia's abolitionist newspaper, the
Pennsylvania Freeman
, on July 18, 1844. “Our sins have been their own punishment, and we have been made to eat most bitterly the fruits of our own doings. It is to be hoped that our city will now learn wisdom and put away the evil of her doings, and that she will at last be persuaded to respect the rights of the poorest and most unpopular of her citizens.”
⁴

Benjamin Lundy, a Quaker, had begun publishing the
Pennsylvania Freeman
as the
National Enquirer
in 1836. In 1838, after Lundy's business and possessions went up in flames at Pennsylvania Hall, an abolitionist meeting place that was burned to the ground by a mob, he left the city. The journal was taken over by another Quaker, the poet and ardent abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, who renamed it. When the
Pennsylvania Freeman
wrote of Philadelphia's “sins,” it was not referring only to the Bible Riots.

The city had been ripped apart by violence aimed at stilling its increasingly vocal abolitionist faction. A few years before Pennsylvania Hall was burned out, mobs had torched the homes of forty black Philadelphia families. The rising tide of abolitionism and the destructive counterattacks that the movement was beginning to provoke were warning signs that America was fracturing along some very deep fault lines: race, region, party, and politics. Although slavery had lost its hold in most northern states by the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was no love for blacks, and no integrated society, anywhere in America, save among a few radical abolitionists. In New York and New England, anti-abolitionist mobs had begun to attack abolitionist leaders—including William Lloyd Garrison, who was paraded through Boston with a noose around his neck in the same year that Pennsylvania Hall was burned.

An uncompromising abolitionist who preferred disunion to an America with slavery, Garrison had given John Greenleaf Whittier his first jobs as an editor and helped shape the young poet and writer's ardent devotion to the cause. In 1833, Garrison and Whittier were among the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society,
originally formed at the Adelphi Building in Philadelphia but later based in New York. With a surge in evangelical Protestantism, following a second Great Awakening, abolitionism—along with temperance, prison reform, and a budding suffrage movement—spoke to the country's changing mood and ethics. The American Anti-Slavery Society quickly grew to more than 1,300 local chapters around the country and had 250,000 members.

But the public at large did not share the sentiments of these nineteenth-century reformers, whose ideas about the races, about temperance, and about votes for women were far from the mainstream of American public opinion. Mobs frequently struck at abolitionist meetings, attacking the speakers and destroying their printing presses. The antipathy toward “nigger lovers” and the whole gamut of “papists, micks, wops, and dagos” that made up the bulk of arriving immigrants was evidence of a deep, dark mean streak in America about these issues. And it was creating a crisis in the mid-1830s, just as America was beginning to suffer one of the worst economic downturns of the century.

The Panic of 1837 was one of the first broad-scale, far-reaching financial dislocations in American history. Before that time, most Americans were still subsistence farmers, relatively insulated from the worst impact of boom-and-bust business cycles. But the problems facing the nation in 1837 sound all too familiar to twenty-first-century Americans: speculative real estate bubbles, bank failures, unemployment in a rapidly changing economic landscape, and a crash in prices due to oversupply (back then it was cotton prices). Ultimately, a full-blown depression hit America and lasted five years. “The Panic of 1837,” writes the historian Daniel Walker Howe, “merged with
that of 1839 into a prolonged period of hard times that, in severity, and duration, was exceeded only by the great depression that began ninety years later, in 1929.”
⁵

This panic began almost as soon as Martin Van Buren took the oath of office, partly because of a series of events that had been happening under his predecessor, Andrew Jackson. But the opposition Whigs successfully blamed “Martin Van Ruin” for the crippling economic disaster and doomed his chances for reelection. Immigrants and free blacks—the least powerful groups in America at the time—also bore the brunt of anger over the loss of jobs and income, feeding the powerful anti-Catholic sentiment that already coursed openly through American society.

The anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic sentiment that sparked the Bible Riots went well beyond the streets of Philadelphia. It ran deep in American waters. The sectarian hatred between Protestants and Catholics had arrived on America's shores with the first Europeans to land. After the European religious wars of the Reformation era; the persecution of Protestants under England's queen, Bloody Mary; and the long history of Spain's attempts to invade England during the reign of Elizabeth I, there was deep mistrust and hatred of Catholicism among many Anglo-Americans. The 1565 massacre of French Huguenots in Florida by the Spanish had been the first bloodletting on America's shores. Centuries of anti-Catholic propaganda had deepened the antagonism. The hatred went beyond intolerance; it was a sectarian blood feud (which, as the sad history of Northern Ireland proves, continued well into the twentieth century).

In some of the American colonies, this deep division was apparent in laws limiting or prohibiting Catholics. In colonial Boston,
Catholic priests were banned; and each November 5—which the English celebrated as Guy Fawkes Day to commemorate a failed Catholic plot against Parliament—was celebrated as Pope's Day, and effigies of the pope were paraded around Boston.

Pennsylvania had seen a wave of immigrant bashing as early as the 1750s, when even the greatest figure of the American Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin, had voiced anti-immigrant sentiments. “Few of their children in the country learn English,” Franklin once complained. “The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages…. Unless the stream of their importation could be turned…they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.”

The language so vexing to him was the German spoken by new arrivals to Pennsylvania in the 1750s, a wave Franklin viewed as the “most stupid of their nation.” At about the same time, the Lutheran minister Henry Mühlenberg, himself a recent arrival, worried, “The whole country is being flooded with ordinary, extraordinary and unprecedented wickedness and crimes…. Oh what a fearful thing it is to have so many thousands of unruly and brazen sinners come into this free air and unfenced country.”
⁶

Often, disdain for foreigners was inflamed by religion. Boston's Puritans, for example, banned Catholic priests and Quakers—hanging several “Friends” for good measure. But the greatest scorn was generally reserved for Catholics—usually the Irish, French, Spanish, and Italians. Generations of white American Protestants resented newly arriving “papists.”

Anti-Catholic sentiment even fueled some of America's revolu
tionary ardor. After fighting in the French and Indian War, many Americans were incensed when they learned that King George III had accepted the Peace of Paris in 1763 and the Quebec Act of 1774, both allowing Catholic French-Canadians greater freedom of religion. The law was considered not only a betrayal of Protestantism in pre-revolutionary America but also a direct assault on land claims made by American speculators who had fought against the French and now felt deceived and abandoned by England's king and Parliament.

After the Quebec Act was announced, the Congregational minister Ezra Stiles (who would later be president of Yale) complained loudly and bitterly that the enactment had established the “Roman Church and
Idolatry
.” New York's John Jay, a delegate to the Continental Congress and later the first chief justice of the United States, spoke for many Americans when he expressed his fear that a wave of Catholic immigration would “reduce the ancient free Protestant colonies to [a] state of slavery.” In the Continental Congress, Jay railed “in astonishment” that Parliament should ever consent to establish “a religion that had deluged your island in blood and spread impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder and rebellion throughout every part of the world.”

Once independent, the new nation began solidifying these deep-seeded prejudices against immigrants into law. In considering New York's state constitution, for instance, Jay suggested erecting “a wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics.”
⁷
In Maryland, a supposed haven for “papists,” Roman Catholics were forbidden to vote and hold public office.

In 1790, the first federal citizenship law restricted naturalization
to “free white persons” who had been in the country for two years. That waiting period was later lengthened to five years and, in 1798, to fourteen years. Then, as now, politics was a factor. Federalists feared that too many immigrants were joining the opposition. Under the 1798 Alien Act—with war in the air, coincidentally—President Adams had license to deport anyone he considered “dangerous.” Although his secretary of state favored deportations of numerous foreign-born Americans, Adams never put anybody on a boat.
⁸
Back then, the French aroused the most suspicion. But a wave of “wild Irish” refugees was thought to include dangerous radicals. The anti-Catholic mood was also on display in the hatred voiced toward Spain and Mexico.

But the great influx of predominantly Irish and German immigrants, most of them Roman Catholics, was responsible for heightening the tension. Although the mass immigration of the Irish began in the 1840s, during the Potato Blight, there had already been a huge influx of Irish and German immigrants before that, beginning after 1815. During the 1830s, 500,000 immigrants settled in New York City alone. Surpassing in numbers the Episcopalians, Methodists, and Congregationalists, Roman Catholics became America's largest religious group. “By 1850 the Roman Catholic Church had become the largest denomination in the country, a status never thereafter surrendered to any other church,” write Edwin Gaustad and Leigh Schmidt. “‘Anti-popery,' the bread and butter of Protestantism, had reared its head regularly in America, but now it raised itself to new heights.”
⁹

By the early nineteenth century, dozens of anti-Catholic periodicals were being published in the United States. Many of these argued that Catholics could not be trusted, because they owed
their allegiance to the pope instead of to their new country. The famous political cartoonist Thomas Nast repeatedly depicted popish conspiracies to take over the United States. The most outlandish claims—widely accepted—included a prediction that the pope would land with a papal army and set up a new Vatican in Cincinnati, Ohio. When these rumors were combined with reports that a Catholic organization in the Austrian Empire was raising funds to proselytize for Catholicism in the United States, the hackles really stood up on the necks of staunch American Protestants.

There was also a deep strand of millennial end-time belief that the Second Coming was at hand. Many American Protestants believed that they were the “chosen people” and that the Catholic church and specifically the Vatican were the “whore of Babylon” described in the biblical Book of Revelation.

One of the most prominent examples of this movement was the success of William Miller, whose nearly fatal experience in the War of 1812 had been behind a powerful conversion. Around 1830, relying upon the Book of Daniel, he calculated that the Second Coming would arrive sometime between March 1, 1843, and March 1, 1844. Tirelessly preaching that message, he eventually attracted tens of thousands of followers, and produced millions of millennial tracts distributed across America. When March 1, 1844, came and went without incident, Miller merely recalculated his “end days,” determining that October 22, 1844, was the correct date. His reckoning was again mistaken, and the day became known as the “Great Disappointment.” Miller died a few years later, but his ideas took hold in the movements that later became Seventh-Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses.

Miller's apocalyptic vision came about the same time that Joseph Smith, Jr., who was born in Vermont in 1805, emerged with the Book of Mormon. Although poorly educated, Smith claimed to have had his first religious vision at age fourteen. In 1820, he told friends that he saw glorious beings who said all existing churches were wrong. Three years later, according to Smith, the angel Moroni revealed to him golden plates on which were written the truths of the gospel not yet revealed to man. The angel said that Smith had been chosen to prepare the world for Christ's return. Using special glasses given to him by Moroni, Smith began a three-year process of translating the plates. He sat behind a curtain and read from the plates as others recorded his words.

Smith began to attract converts immediately; but in 1838, arguments within his group and financial problems took him and many followers to Missouri. Largely because of their rumored polygamous marriages, but also because of their unconventional theology, Smith's followers were treated with suspicion in most of the locations where they settled. In 1844, Smith was arrested in a case involving polygamy and, while in jail, was killed by an angry mob. One of his followers, Brigham Young, decided to take the group farther west and settled in the Great Salt Lake Basin, which was then still Mexican territory but would later become Utah. Despite the antagonism of mainstream Christians and the federal government, the Mormons, or Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, prospered and grew much larger.