Nativism
Sources
Definition. The term nativism describes a generalized hostility to foreigners, immigrants, and outsiders that has characterized several periods in American history. While it is not inherently religious in nature, nativist sentiment has often been couched in religious terms and has been associated historically with Protestants of Anglo-Saxon ancestry. The targets of nativism are usually seen as subversive elements that threaten the security of the American nation, its institutions, and its ideals.
Anti-Catholicism. During the nineteenth century nativist attacks were most commonly directed against Catholics. Anti-Catholic sentiment came to America with the first British settlers some of whom had arrived intent upon purifying their own religion from any remaining popish elements. Over the years the intensity of anti-Catholicism rose and fell in relation to both local and international events. Hostility declined somewhat during the revolutionary period due to the support of American Catholics for the revolution as well as the aid of Catholic France. Indeed, for a time Britain itself became the focus of much of the rhetoric about luxury and corruption formerly reserved for the Catholic Church. During the early national period, however, as Britain became an ally and revolutionary France an object of some suspicion, feelings toward Catholics shifted again. After the 1820s, when Catholic immigrants began to arrive en masse, antiCatholicism took on a newly virulent form, manifested in political opposition, propaganda in dozens of Protestant newspapers and periodicals, and individual and mob violence.
PRIESTS’ PRISONS>
On 11 August 1834 a Protestant mob attacked the Irish quarter in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and burned down the Ursuline Convent. In America as elsewhere many Protestants harbored deep suspicions about what went on behind the walls of convents, or “priests’ prisons.” The celibacy practiced by priests and nuns seemed unnatural and certain to provoke immoral acts. One Protestant rioter said of the convent he helped to destroy: “the institution was a bad one; . . . the bishops and priests pretended to live without wives, but the nuns were kept to supply the deficiency in that particular. This sentiment found popular expression in a new genre of anticonvent literature that included Rebecca Reed’s Six Months in a Convent, an exposé of convent life ostensibly written by a young girl who had escaped after three years of captivity and abuse. Reed’s book sold ten thousand copies in Boston in its first week of publication, but even more popular was Maria Monk’s 1836 Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery, which offered lurid tales of sexual abuse and infanticide and sold three hundred thousand copies by 1860, becoming the best-selling American book of its time. Although Awful Disclosures was eventually revealed as a fraud after Monk’s mother testified that her daughter had been a prostitute and the inmate of an insane asylum rather than a convent, a Nunnery Committee was formed to investigate Mas sachusetts convents. The committee turned up no evidence to support the claims of Reed’s or Monk’s books, but this hardly lessened the impact of their anti-Catholic message.
Source: Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome. The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
National Anxieties. Hatred of Catholics became an outlet for many of the common anxieties of the day. Concern about social conditions in the growing urban areas (which many feared were havens for drunkenness and immorality) were magnified by the influx of poor Irish immigrants into the cities. Among Protestant workingmen already in the cities, Catholics represented unwelcome competition for jobs. A more abstract but equally pervasive source of anti-Catholic sentiment lay in uncertainty about the stability of the American republic. While such anxieties were rooted in the newness of the American political system and the changes wrought by rapid economic development and westward expansion, they were often expressed in the belief that Catholics were proponents of hierarchy and tyranny who would reject republican ideals and undermine the political system. Rather than allowing their congregants to think and act for themselves, they argued, Catholic priests sought to tyrannize people and bring them under control, “covering their hypocrisy with the cloak of religion, and with
more than the serpent’s guile, worming themselves into the confidence and affections of their unsuspecting victims.” Clergyman Lyman Beecher’s influential essay A Pleafor the West, which warned of the dangers to republican freedom and true Christianity that might result from the further spread of Catholicism in the new Western territories, was typical of a new genre of anti-Catholic literature. Some writers went so far as to suggest there was a papal plot to conquer the United States.
Mormons and Masons. Similar anxieties about the preservation of the republic lay behind the nativist sentiment directed at groups other than Catholics. Mormons attracted widespread public opposition because their beliefs not only differed from common notions of religious orthodoxy but also seemed antidemocratic. Most non-Mormons knew little about Mormon practices, many of which were kept secret, but they suspected the worst. Mormon leaders seemed to have an almost dictatorial control over their followers, who would probably vote and act according to their wishes. Those wishes, many feared, might directly contradict the interests of the United States. Similarly, the 1820s and 1830s saw a surge in opposition to the Ancient Free and Accepted Masons, a secret fraternal order with members and lodges across the nation. The Masons were suspected of having heretical beliefs, harboring infidels, practicing magic, and plotting to destroy the nation. Anti-Masonic sentiment reached its peak after 1827, when William Morgan of Batavia, New York, disappeared under mysterious circumstances after threatening to expose Masonic secrets. The anti-Masonic political platform that emerged in response to this incident received widespread support on the local level, although it had little impact on national politics.
The Know-Nothing Party. The most significant political expression of nativist sentiment came in the form of the American Party, also known as the KnowNothings. Founded in New York in 1849 as the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, the Know-Nothings were a secretive group dedicated to preserving the “native” American stock of Anglo-Saxon blood by keeping out immigrants. They received their informal name from their tendency to answer “I don’t know” in response to outsiders’ questions about their beliefs and goals. Membership in the group was limited to American-born Protestant men without Catholic wives or parents, all of whom swore to oppose the election of foreigners and Roman Catholics to public office. During the 1850s seventy-five Know-Nothing candidates were elected to the United States Congress. Their cause, and nativist sentiment in general, waned in the late 1850s as the threat of sectional conflict came to overshadow other issues. After the Civil War, however, immigration and industrialization progressed, and nativism emerged again with full force.
David B. Davis, “Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 47 (1960): 205–224;
Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
