5.4 Immigration, Nativism & The Antebellum City (1830–1860)

Two Blueprint Themes at Once

CLEP names "immigration and the history of ethnic minorities" and "long-term demographic trends (immigration and internal migration)" as separate themes, and both are concentrated here. Questions tend to test three things: the push factors behind each migration stream, the different reception of Irish and Germans, and the political consequence — nativism's rise and its sudden collapse.

The Scale of the Migration

Roughly 4.2 million immigrants arrived between 1840 and 1860 into a nation of about 17 million in 1840. Measured against the existing population, this remains the heaviest sustained immigration in American history — proportionally larger than the great wave of 1880–1920. In 1854 alone, over 400,000 people arrived.

Irish Experience

The Irish arrived with nothing and had no choice but to sell labor immediately. Men dug canals and laid railroad track, loaded ships, and worked in mills; women, unusually, migrated in numbers equal to men and dominated domestic service and textile work. Mortality was staggering — in 1850s Boston the average Irish immigrant lived about fourteen years after arrival.

Three factors made the Irish the special target of hostility:

1. Catholicism. In a country whose Protestant identity was still entangled with anti-Popery inherited from England, a mass Catholic population looked like a foreign allegiance.
2. Poverty. The Irish filled almshouses and prisons, and native-born taxpayers noticed the bill.
3. Politics. Irish voters aligned overwhelmingly with the Democratic Party, whose urban machines — Tammany Hall in New York above all — traded jobs, coal, and legal help for votes.

By contrast, German immigrants were roughly half Protestant and about a third Catholic, more likely to arrive with resources, and more likely to move west. They attracted hostility mainly over two issues: temperance (German beer gardens and Sunday drinking offended Protestant reformers) and their German-language schools, newspapers, and Turnverein societies, which looked like refusal to assimilate. Many German "Forty-Eighters," including Carl Schurz, were anti-slavery liberals who later became Republicans.

The Antebellum City

The urban share of the population rose from roughly 8% in 1830 to about 20% by 1860, and New York passed one million residents counting Brooklyn. Cities grew faster than any capacity to govern them:

• Housing. The purpose-built tenement appeared in the 1830s and 1840s. New York's Five Points became the internationally famous symbol of overcrowding.
• Sanitation and disease. Cholera epidemics struck in 1832, 1849, and 1866; typhoid and tuberculosis were endemic. Cities began building public water systems — New York's Croton Aqueduct opened in 1842.
• Public order. Volunteer fire companies doubled as ethnic gangs and fought each other. New York created a professional police force in 1845, Boston in 1838.
• Segregation by class. Omnibuses and horsecars let the affluent live away from work for the first time, beginning residential separation by income.

Organized Nativism

Anti-Catholic agitation preceded the famine. Lyman Beecher's A Plea for the West (1835) warned of a Catholic conspiracy to seize the Mississippi Valley; Samuel F. B. Morse, the telegraph's inventor, wrote similar tracts. Violence followed:

• 1834: a mob burned the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts.
• 1844: the Philadelphia Bible Riots — sparked by a dispute over whether Catholic children could read the Douay rather than the King James Bible in public schools — killed about twenty people and destroyed two Catholic churches.
• 1855: "Bloody Monday" in Louisville left over twenty dead in an election-day riot against German and Irish voters.

The political vehicle was the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, a secret society founded in New York in 1849. Members answered questions about it by saying "I know nothing," which gave the movement its nickname. It surfaced as the American Party and its program was explicit:

• Extend the naturalization period from five years to twenty-one years.
• Restrict officeholding to the native-born.
• Require Bible reading in public schools and oppose public funding of parochial schools.

The Know-Nothing Surge and Collapse

The Whig Party was disintegrating over slavery, and in 1854 the Know-Nothings filled the vacuum with astonishing speed. They swept Massachusetts — taking the governorship and nearly every seat in the legislature — carried Delaware, and won heavily in Pennsylvania, New York, and Maryland. Something like 100 members of Congress were elected with Know-Nothing support in 1854–55.

Then it broke apart, and the reason is the key exam point: the party could not hold a position on slavery. At its 1855 national council, southern delegates pushed through a pro-Compromise-of-1850 plank; northern delegates walked out. In 1856 the American Party nominated former president Millard Fillmore, who won 21.5% of the popular vote but only Maryland's eight electoral votes. Northern Know-Nothings moved en masse into the new Republican Party, which absorbed their organization and much of their voter base while keeping nativism carefully in the background.

The consequence matters more than the movement. Nativism destroyed what remained of the Whigs and supplied the Republicans with their northern infrastructure, while Irish and German Catholic voters were driven firmly into the Democratic coalition. Immigration politics thus helped produce the sectional party system that made secession possible.

Internal Migration

Immigration was only half the demographic story. Americans moved constantly:

• Westward along the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes; by 1860 more than half the population lived west of the Appalachians.
• Rural to urban, as New England farm children left exhausted land for mill towns and cities.
• Forced migration of about one million enslaved people from the Upper South to the cotton Southwest — the largest internal migration of the era, and involuntary.
• New England to the upper Midwest, carrying Yankee institutions such as common schools, Congregational churches, and reform politics into Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin — a cultural transfer that helps explain why those states became Republican strongholds.