What Was the Know Nothing Party?

The Know Nothing Party burst onto the U.S. political scene in 1854 as a popular alternative to the Whigs and Democrats, the two major political parties at the time. The Know Nothings began in 1849 as a secret society called the “Order of the Star-Spangled Banner,” dedicated to combating the influence of Catholic immigrants, who were arriving by the millions in the mid-19th century.

In a few short years, the Know Nothings emerged as major players in American politics, electing eight governors, winning more than 100 seats in Congress and gaining powerful majorities in state legislatures across the Northeast.

The Know Nothings were proudly nativist, promoting the idea that the United States was founded by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and that Catholic immigrants—the Irish in particular—were a threat to the American way of life and governance. The Know Nothings were also staunchly anti-slavery, a position that attracted many of the party’s early supporters.

The party capitalized on a flashpoint in U.S. history when anxiety over immigration was at an all-time high and Irish Catholics were painted as drunken criminals whose only true allegiance was to the pope.

“Even though the United States has always been a nation of immigrants, there has simultaneously been an undercurrent of anti-immigrant sentiment,” says Tyler Anbinder, a historian at George Washington University. “That’s kind of the yin and the yang of America's identity. And every once in a while, the anti-immigrant part becomes ascendant.”

European immigration to the United States slowed to a trickle during the Revolutionary War and remained at low levels through the War of 1812. Even when peace was established, typical annual immigration totaled 10,000 to 30,000 new arrivals each year.

Immigration in America was generally seen as a good thing. As the country acquired more territory, it needed skilled workers, tradesmen and farmers to populate the frontier and build up the economy. Most of the new arrivals were Protestants from Great Britain and northern Europe and caused little anti-immigrant angst.

The situation began to change in the 1830s as Catholics from poorer parts of Ireland and Germany fled their homelands to escape difficult economic conditions and religious persecution. The tipping point was the catastrophic potato blight that struck Ireland in 1845. As many as 1.5 million people died in Ireland from starvation out of a total population of about 8 million.

Desperate to escape death and disease, a tidal wave of Irish Catholic immigrants arrived on America’s shores. From 1845 to 1854, roughly 2.9 million immigrants landed in the U.S., a number greater than the seven previous decades combined.

“By the time you get to the late 1840s and early 1850s, you've got the great potato famine in Ireland, so whereas immigration from Ireland up through 1845 had been maybe 30,000 people a year, within a couple of years it becomes 300,000 people a year,” says Anbinder, author of Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s. “Just the sheer numbers you're talking about are unprecedented.”

By 1855, immigrants outnumbered native-born Americans in major U.S. cities like Chicago, Detroit and Milwaukee, with New York City not far behind. While competition for jobs was a concern, Anbinder says that the vast majority of anti-immigrant sentiment was driven by anti-Catholic prejudice.

“A lot of people want there to be a ‘rationale’ for prejudice, people lashed out against Catholics because they were afraid of losing their jobs. But there doesn’t always have to be a rational explanation for bigotry,” says Anbinder. “What they were thinking was, we’re a Protestant nation and we want to stay Protestant. We want to keep political power and not share it with the Catholics.”

As immigration numbers soared, Catholics became the target of salacious accusations and endless controversy. The “confessional” 1836 novel Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal by Maria Monk purported to expose the licentious and murderous acts of Catholic priests and nuns behind closed convent doors. The anti-Catholic screed sold more copies than any other book in America until the 1852 publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, according to Anbinder.

Newspaper editorials labeled immigrants as "the chief source of crime in this country” and cited dubious statistics that immigrants were 10 times more likely to be arrested than native-born Americans. Writers alleged that Catholics felt no remorse for committing crimes because they could confess their sins to a priest and be absolved of guilt. In political cartoons, the Irish were routinely drawn as ape-like and subhuman.

Public schools were another source of controversy. In some cities, Catholic parents objected that their children had to read from the Protestant King James Bible in school and that history lessons were rife with anti-Catholic messaging. Many native-born Protestants were livid, says Anbinder, and railed against “foreign encroachments” in America’s public schools.

Openly espousing anti-Catholic rhetoric could be dangerous, so Protestant nativists mounted their first organized opposition to Catholic immigrants through secret societies.

In 1844, the Order of United Americans was founded in New York City for the purpose of “more effectually securing our country from the dangers of foreign influence.” Similar secret fraternal orders popped up in other cities, like the United Sons of America and the Order of the United American Mechanics, both founded in Philadelphia.

Membership in those early anti-Catholic societies was only “semi-secret,” writes Anbinder in Nativism and Slavery, because members would sometimes give public lectures and march in parades. But the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner (OSSB), founded by Charles B. Allen in 1849, was different. After an elaborate initiation ceremony, members not only vowed to keep their affiliation secret but to deny the existence of the OSSB altogether.

If asked about the secret society, members of the OSSB were told to reply, “I know nothing.” Some newspapers tried to insult the OSSB by labeling them the “Know Nothings.” The name caught on.

As the Know Nothings spread to other cities, members met in fraternal lodges and strategized ways to use their collective voting power to push an anti-Catholic agenda.

“They're not going around campaigning against immigrants, because they're secret—they don't tell anybody what they think,” says Anbinder. "For the first couple of years, they don't even tell people they're running for office. It's only spread through their fraternal lodges.”

By the midterm elections of 1854, Know Nothing membership had soared to as many as 1 million people. Anti-Catholic prejudice was the biggest driver of the Know Nothings’ popularity, but there were other factors, too.

Anti-slavery northerners were appalled by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and allowed the spread of slavery to new western territories. When neither of the two major political parties—the Whigs or the Democrats—did anything to oppose the bill, disgruntled voters flocked to the Know Nothings, who in many Northern states took positions opposing slavery.

The temperance movement was another factor that attracted people to the Know Nothing movement. In 1851, Maine became the first state to outlaw the manufacture and sale of liquor. Know Nothings wanted to pass anti-liquor laws in more states, starting with a ban on selling alcohol on Sundays. By tying the evils of alcohol to the trope of the “drunken Irishman,” the Know Nothings successfully linked their anti-Catholic and anti-liquor crusades.

The controversy over Catholics and public schools also reached a fever pitch in 1854. Not only were Catholic groups calling for no Bible readings at school, but they wanted to use public funds to build private Catholic parochial schools. Anbinder quotes a typical headline from the Philadelphia Sun: “Are American Protestants to be taxed for the purpose of nourishing Romish vipers?”

In Ellsworth, Maine, a local priest named John Bapst proposed that Catholic students be exempted from reading the King James Bible. That enraged anti-Catholic residents, who attempted to burn the church down in protest and then turned on Bapst.

“They kidnapped him, trussed him up and rode him out of town on a rail after tarring and feathering him,” says Anbinder, calling it the most “extreme” example of how school controversies drove people to align with the Know Nothings.

The 1854 midterm elections were the high-water mark for the Know Nothing movement. While not an official “party” yet, Know Nothing lodges in Northeastern states handpicked Whig and Democratic candidates who stood for the Know Nothing platform, namely:

Interestingly, the Know Nothings never called for the deportation of Catholic immigrants or even for restricting immigration from Catholic countries.

“There was no talk of limiting immigration whatsoever,” says Anbinder. “That’s the really important distinction between the Know Nothings and later anti-immigrant movements. The Know Nothings said, we want immigrants, we want people to come to the United States. We just don't want them to have political power.”

The Know Nothings scored huge victories in the 1854 midterms, especially in the Northeast. Massachusetts was an absolute landslide. Not only was a Know Nothing candidate elected governor, but the Know Nothings took all but three of the 400 seats in the Massachusetts Legislature. There were other major Know Nothing victories in Pennsylvania and New York.

In Massachusetts, Know Nothing lawmakers used their supermajority to pass some overtly anti-Catholic laws, starting with the public schools. No state funds could be used to fund Catholic parochial schools and all Massachusetts students were required to read from the Protestant scriptures daily.

In their zeal to promote “American” culture, Massachusetts lawmakers also barred foreign languages from being taught in public schools and even replaced a Latin inscription in the Massachusetts legislative chamber with an English translation. Concerned over the salacious rumors about Catholic priests and nuns, Massachusetts Know Nothings created a “nunnery committee” to perform surprise inspections at convents in the state.

After their surprise success in the 1854 midterms, the Know Nothings decided to make it official; they wanted to become a national political party with the ultimate goal of taking the White House in 1856. The Know Nothings changed their name to the American Party and held their first national convention in 1855.

But just as quickly as the Know Nothings ascended, the movement began to fall apart. The first cracks appeared at the American Party's national convention. Delegates from the North wanted the American Party platform to include repeal of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and block the expansion of slavery. Southern delegates objected and threatened to leave the party if the slavery issue wasn’t resolved.

In the end, opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act was left out of the American Party platform, and anti-slavery northerners revolted.

"It seems to northerners that the South will literally stop at nothing to spread slavery,” says Anbinder. "A lot of northern Know Nothings start to say, we don't like the Catholics, but the Catholics have kind of stepped back since we started this movement. They're not demanding as much anymore. The bigger threat right now is the South. So they mostly go and join the Republican Party.”

The flight of northern Know Nothings was a boon to the nascent Republicans, who welcomed the exiles into the anti-slavery movement but rejected their anti-Catholic rhetoric. In 1855, Abraham Lincoln wrote to a friend and stated unequivocally, “I am not a Know Nothing... How can anyone who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people?”

By the 1856 presidential election, the American Party was divided and toothless. It ran former Whig president Millard Fillmore as its candidate on a platform of harmony between the North and South. The pro-slavery Democratic candidate James Buchanan won handily and the Republicans took 11 states. Fillmore won only one state, Maryland, and by 1860 the American Party and the Know Nothing movement were effectively dead.