America Aflame (15 page)

This perspective accounted for Lincoln's recoil from the abolitionists and his support for Henry Clay's Compromise of 1850, Fugitive Slave Law included. The law was the law, and any appeal to higher authority or secular intervention threatened the collective security of the Union. The failed European revolutions reinforced Lincoln's perspective on events closer to home. He read
Uncle Tom's Cabin
and wept at Tom's fate. He hated slavery; like his father, he always had. But he loved the Union more.

CHAPTER 4

RAILROADED

THE REVOLUTIONS IN EUROPE
caused Americans to look more closely at their own revolutionary legacy, to see how easily discord could undermine fragile democratic institutions. But America possessed something Europe did not: a vast western territory to absorb the hopeful and the hopeless, the farmer, the merchant, the laborer, and the immigrant. The West was the essential element that would hold America intact and preserve the legacy of its revolution.

The South did not want to be erased from this future; the North came to believe that only by excluding the South would there be a future for America. For Horace Greeley, the editor of the nation's most popular newspaper, the
New York Tribune
, and for many other northerners, the maintenance of the West as a bastion of white freedom secured freedom for everyone: “The freedom of the public lands to actual settlers … [is] vitally necessary to the ultimate emancipation of labor from thralldom and misery.” Southerners would fight hard for the West because they were Americans too and because they also had a labor force that required room to migrate and settle new lands in order to survive.
1

Carl Schurz came to America in 1852, to a nation both hopeful and guarded about its future. He had forsaken the cloistered life of a student in provincial Bonn four years earlier to join his classmates in revolution, only to flee for his life when the Prussian monarchy regrouped and routed the republican forces. Schurz had moved to London and joined the community of exiled revolutionaries that included Karl Marx, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Lajos Kossuth. He taught German to support himself. He fell in love with Margarethe Meyer, a dark-haired German beauty visiting London, whom he married in the summer of 1852. While Schurz was grateful for England's hospitality, he never felt totally at home. Like many other German “forty-eighters,” he looked to America. Writing of his intentions to his future brother-in-law, Schurz placed the matter before him. “By and by I might have a good living here in England. But citizenship here, for the alien is merely formal. The stranger remains a stranger here. Under such circumstances I cannot feel at home. What I am looking for in America is not only personal freedom, but the chance to gain full legal citizenship. If I cannot be the citizen of a free Germany, at least I can be a citizen of free America.” With his young bride, Schurz sailed into New York Harbor in September 1852, clutching a copy of the
Visitor's Handbook
to orient him to this strange metropolis.
2

New York City in 1852 exuded a chaotic thrum of activity, one that inspired the poetry of Whitman and the prose of the pulp novelists and awed the young German immigrants. The Schurzes arrived in the midst of a listless presidential campaign. Both the Whigs and the Democrats had accepted the finality of the Compromise of 1850. With slavery in the territories off the table and with a general consensus on economic policy, there seemed little to distinguish the parties. But the debate over the compromise had fractured the Whig Party, irreparably as it turned out, with northern Whigs, many staunchly anti-slavery, supporting the candidacy of Mexican War hero Winfield Scott, a Virginian, and the pro-compromise faction, predominantly southern, promoting President Millard Fillmore. Scott received the nomination, and many southern Whigs stayed home. The Democrats proved the more disciplined group heading into the 1852 election, uniting behind New Hampshire's Franklin Pierce and fiercely embracing the Compromise of 1850 as the bedrock of its party platform. Pierce won a lopsided election, with Scott carrying only Tennessee and Kentucky in the South.

The schism of the Whig Party told only part of the election story. Since 1848 more than one million immigrants from Ireland and Germany had settled in the United States, primarily in the cities and towns of the Northeast and Midwest. Ireland was a tragedy-in-waiting long before the potato blight of 1845, especially in its Catholic south where absentee English landlords squeezed the land and the labor out of tenants. Disease accompanied poverty: in 1840 less than one fifth of the population lived beyond the age of forty. Gangs freely roamed the cities. Irish revolutionaries, Young Ireland, they called themselves—an alliance of liberal Protestants and Catholics—attempted to rally nationalist sentiment against the English.

Just when it seemed things in that troubled land could get no worse, they did. First came the potato blight and then the British repeal of the Corn Laws, which had protected Ireland's wheat farmers from foreign competition. The English landlords evicted their Irish tenants, throwing nearly a million people out of work. A general breakdown of law and order followed. An Englishman visiting a village in County Mayo in 1847 left this account: “Out of a population of 240 I found 13 already dead from want. The survivors were like walking skeletons.” America offered a better alternative. By the mid-1850s, Ireland had lost one quarter of its population to either famine or emigration. By the late 1850s, there were 1.6 million Irish-born immigrants in America, more than 20 percent of whom crowded into the three cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. That these rural people typically settled in cities is hardly surprising given the association between farming and poverty in their native land.
3

Poor, mostly illiterate, and Roman Catholic, the Irish arrivals faced a rocky reception. Irish neighborhoods became synonymous in the public mind with intemperance, prostitution, gambling, violence, and disease. Illnesses that some cities thought they had conquered, such as smallpox, reappeared in the Irish slums. Not all Irish immigrants fit this profile, but stereotypes would prove difficult to dispel. Unremarked at the time was the fact that hardworking Irish immigrants were remitting millions of dollars annually to the folks back home, a remarkable feat given the circumstances and recency of their arrival. These impressive sums underscored how much Irish labor pushed the urban economy. The Irish filled positions in the growing municipal services sector, heaved cargo on docks, built railroads, descended into mines, and manned looms in mills. In turn, many native-born young men and women moved into higher-paying occupations in the expanding urban economy. In tribute to the Irish immigration, Boston Unitarian clergyman Edward Everett Hale noted in 1852, “The consequence is that we are, all of us, the higher lifted because they are here.”
4

Carl Schurz, like many other German forty-eighters, differed from the majority of Irish immigrants in terms of education, skills, and wealth. Many Germans had arrived in America to escape the oppressions of the petty German princes, especially Jews, whose civil liberties were progressively eroded during this era. Others, like Schurz, arrived as failed revolutionaries or because of the same problems the Irish encountered: a potato blight in 1845, oppressive landlords, and a shortage of tillable land. Often traveling in groups, the Germans settled more diversely than the Irish, selecting midwestern farmland as well as cities from the Northeast to the Mississippi River. Nearly as numerous as the Irish, 1.3 million German immigrants had arrived in the United States by 1860.
5

The Germans were builders: factories, refineries, distilleries, musical instruments, professions, and associations of all kinds. Henry Steinway, chafing under production restrictions established by his guild in Germany, migrated to New York in 1851. Together with his four sons, he began to manufacture pianos. Within eight years, he employed eight hundred workers turning out sixty pianos a week. Although most of the Germans were Protestants or Catholics, some ten thousand Bavarian Jews entered the migration stream in the 1840s. Mainly middle-class, they brought their mercantile skills and traditions of philanthropy and mutual assistance to American cities. One young Jewish German woman, Rebecca Gratz of Philadelphia, pioneered the profession of social work, and her good deeds so impressed Sir Walter Scott that he may have modeled the character of Rebecca in
Ivanhoe
after Miss Gratz.
6

Ivanhoe
and Scott were immensely popular throughout the country, not only in the South. Scott's works were among the most read across a broad geographic and social spectrum in the United States in the three decades prior to the publication of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
. In America's Romantic Age, chivalry, sacrifice, and the triumph of good over evil resonated widely. Fred Bailey, a young black runaway, changed his last name to Douglass in honor of Scott's epic poem
The Lady of the Lake
. The hero of the epic was Lord James of Douglas, who was willing to give up his life to avert a bloody civil war between highlanders and lowlanders. Bailey's black benefactor, Nathan Johnson of New Bedford, Massachusetts, suggested adding an extra
s
for good measure. Bailey would now be known as Frederick Douglass.
7

The large Irish and German immigration of the late 1840s and 1850s did not meet with universal approbation, especially outside the Democratic Party. Never before or since has the proportion of immigrants coming to American shores been greater. Although the total number of immigrants arriving between 1845 and 1854—2.9 million—was considerably less than the 9.2 million who came between 1905 and 1914, they represented nearly 15 percent of the total population compared with the latter group, which comprised less than 11 percent of Americans living at that time. In some cities, especially the northeastern ports and the major midwestern cities, immigrants accounted for more than 50 percent of the total population in the 1850s. Southern cities also experienced an unprecedented influx of immigrants. The foreign-born in Richmond, for example, comprised 40 percent of the white workforce. While some reveled in the dizzying diversity of American cities, others looked upon the exploding foreign population with alarm. Already skittish about the potential of disorder to disrupt democracy, added to the always-present concern about an aggressive Roman Catholic Church, nativist sentiment flared anew in American cities, growing into a formidable political force.
8

The presidential election of 1852 confirmed some of the nativists' fears. Most of the Irish and German immigrants voted Democratic. The party had forged this affiliation during the presidency of Andrew Jackson and had solidified the connection in the succeeding decades. Although evangelical Christians could be found in both political parties, those evangelicals who particularly feared the Catholic Church adhered to the Whig Party. That party's promotion of temperance and Sabbath legislation further alienated Irish and German immigrants, many of whom voted for the first time in 1852 and contributed to Pierce's victories in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.
9

With the slavery issue temporarily quieted and economic questions less salient, nativism filled the political void as former Whigs cast about for a viable party and cause. Political nativism had attracted some northern Whigs since the early 1840s as conflicts over school prayer, electoral fraud, and job competition erupted in the rapidly growing cities. One group, the Order of United Americans, combined a strong belief in free labor with an equally strong inclination to limit immigration and restrict the rights of foreigners already on American soil. The Order singled out Catholic immigrants in particular.

A new group, the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, appeared in New York City in 1849, a nonpartisan secret organization promoting nativist candidates for elective office. The organization packaged an amalgam of traditional nativist ideas such as lengthening the period of naturalization from five to twenty-one years, limiting the political rights of foreigners and their sons unless they were educated in American schools, and prohibiting foreigners from holding elective office, along with traditional Whig principles favoring the construction of a Pacific railroad and a homestead act to provide western land for settlers. These retreaded Whigs named their organization the American Party, though more commonly called the Know Nothings because its members claimed ignorance of the party's existence. Secrecy, its supporters hoped, would veil the party's actual strength until election day.

Although the Know Nothings presented themselves as the advocates of a modern, industrial economy—super-Whigs promoting electoral reform, land for workers and the poor, the expansion of urban services, and city planning—their appeal rested on good old religious bigotry. As much as they qualified their proposals for restricting the political and civil rights of immigrants, their animus against foreigners, especially Catholics, drew a significant following. It was true that in some Democratic-controlled cities and precincts, registrars ushered immigrants into citizenship with remarkable alacrity. It was also true that Democrats spent freely on spirits and financial emoluments to ensure a good turnout at the polls. Both parties engaged in such chicanery, and there was no evidence that fraud ever swung a major election to one candidate or another. These complaints reflected more the fear of Roman Catholics as a threat to American democracy than a genuine effort to cleanse the electoral system. William Brownlow, a newspaper editor, expressed the raw prejudice behind the veneer of reform: “We can have no peace in this country until the CATHOLICS ARE EXTERMINATED.”
10

The Order's anti-Catholic position tapped into the broad evangelical Protestant movement that perceived the Roman Catholic Church as a threat both to America's millennial aspirations and its democratic traditions. Immigration restriction, like anti-slavery, became a Bible-based political issue. Charles Elliot, a noted evangelical minister, quoted the Book of Deuteronomy as justification for restrictive laws against the foreign-born: “The Almighty, in conceding that Israel might choose a king, laid down the law that they must not choose a
stranger
, but a Hebrew of their own nation.”
11