Conservatism, Nativism, and Slavery: Thomas R. Whitney and the Origins of the Know-Nothing Party

Bruce Levine

"Various causes are now and have for a long time been in progress tending to the establishment of a third political party in these United States," observed the prominent New York nativist Thomas Richard Whitney in mid-1852. That party, Whitney predicted, would "embrace the entire conservative Whig strength at the North" (less "the Abolitionists of that party") as well as "the entire Whig, and a good portion of the Democratic parties at the South." It would also include the "American" (that is, nativist) forces of the mid-Atlantic region and the Midwest—plus "the friends of the Union every where." And what issue would precipitate the creation of such a party? "The root of the causes which are likely to produce this grand irruption of the popular will," Whitney asserted, "is the slave question."1	1
Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, the Democrats and the Whigs had dominated American politics, two parties whose leaders disagreed about much while agreeing firmly on the need to avoid an explosive confrontation over the merits and future of chattel slavery. The Whig-Democratic partisan rivalry, which historians call the second party system, contained and diverted impulses that might have led to an earlier eruption of open sectional confrontation. In the early 1850s, however, the second party system—more specifically, the Whig party—dramatically disintegrated. The broader impact was momentous. As Horace Greeley recalled, the Whigs' "dissolution left the ground open and inviting for new combinations and developments"—eventually, for the radical recasting of partisan organization, ideology, and loyalty that put an antislavery Republican in the White House and triggered secession and civil war.2	2
Hence the importance of the question: Who, or what, killed the Whig party? For many years, the commonly accepted reply held that long-standing intraparty differences over slavery simply deepened, ultimately destroying the party. The same issue, slavery, then gave rise to the Whig party's replacement, the Republicans. But for the last twenty years, an alternative explanation has attracted influential support. Its champions hold that the Whig collapse and the Republican rise "were caused by different things," by "different political forces." The Republicans triumphed in 1856–1860, it is now generally conceded, because the electorate grew preoccupied with the slavery issue during those years. But the beginning of the decade is depicted differently. Following the Compromise of 1850, the slavery issue allegedly left the political stage. The Whig collapse in that period resulted, it is held, from a distinct set of developments.3 The Whigs disappeared in the early 1850s because they failed to echo with sufficient force and unanimity the mounting antiforeign and anti-Catholic sentiments of their native-born Protestant constituents. Thus, "just when . . . sectional calm seemed at hand ethnocultural issues destroyed the party system."4	3
To support assertions that the issue of slavery was marginal to the Whig demise, historians have pointed to the programmatic focus of the party that attracted disenchanted Whig voters—the American (or Know-Nothing) party, a new organization "those focus was on Catholics, immigrants, and unresponsive politicians, not the slavery issue." Additional evidence of a radical disconnect between long-standing divisions among the Whigs and the rise of the Know-Nothings has been found in the identities of the new nativist party's initiators and leaders—not Whig notables preoccupied with old issues, but obscure and partisanly peripheral individuals with distinct concerns. The Know-Nothing party "sprang from the people, not professional politicians." It was "the spontaneous creation" of "men outside of politics."5	. . .