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Rising Democratic Spirits: Immigrants, Temperance, and Tammany Hall, 1854-1860
- Civil War History
- The Kent State University Press
- Volume 22, Number 2, June 1976
- pp. 138-157
- 10.1353/cwh.1976.0047
- Article
- Additional Information
RISING DEMOCRATIC SPIRITS: Immigrants, Temperance, and Tammany Hall, 1854-1860 W. /. Rorabaugh In discussing the politics of the 1850's, historians have often stated that the slavery question dominated the decade's politics, that the free-soil issue drove angered northerners from the Democrats to the Republicans,1 and that hitherto Democratic German immigrants voted Republican.2 While each of these claims contains a grain of truth, they reflect a macroscopic rather than microscopic view of antebellum politics. That broad perception is not entirely 1 For a century historians have linked the political crisis of the 1850's to slavery, largely by citing the predominance of the slavery issue in party oratory, platforms, and editorials. See, e.g., Arthur Charles Cole, The Irrepressible Conflict, 1850-1865 (New York, 1934), pp. 272-278; Avery Craven, The Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1942), pp. 361-393, 419-423; Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union: A House Dividing, 1852-1857 (New York, 1947), II, 316-346, 487-514; J. C. Randall, Lincoln the President, Springfield to Gettysburg (New York, 1945), I, 82-86, 100-101, 188189 . Practically alone, Roy Franklin Nichols, in The Disruption of American Democracy (New York, 1948), explored other crises in antebellum politics. His major theme became the clash among ten attitudmal parameters reflecting America's "cultural federalism." (See pp. 20-40.) Recently historians have used voter analysis techniques to dispel some of the hoary myth that slavery dictated the decade's politics. See, e.g., Ronald P. Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827-1861 (Princeton, 1971), esp. pp. 217-238; Michael Fitzgibbon Holt, Forging a Majority: The Formation of the Republican Party in Pittsburgh, 1848-1860 (New Haven, 1969). Still the question remains how to relate political developments in the fifties to the torrent of opinions on slavery. It does seem plausible, as Eric Foner, in Free SoU, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970), has argued, that Republicans coalesced around free-soil, but it must be remembered that many northern Democrats also opposed slavery expansion: while all Republicans may have been free-soilers, not all free-soilers were Republicans . The question is why anti-slavery politics had more appeal to some men than to others. The answer lies buried in the social, psychological, and symbolic dimensions of the slavery controversy. See David Brion Davis, "Some Themes of CounterSubversion : An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature ," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XLVII (1960), 205-224. 2 Ioseph Schäfer, "Who Elected Lincoln?" American Historical Review, XLVII (1941), 51-63, challenged Carl Schurz' claim that Germans had elected Lincoln by showing that rural Wisconsin Germans voted Democratic. In Cincinnati and Chicago, however, Germans did vote Republican. See William E. Gienapp, "The Transformation of Cincinnati Politics, 1852-1860" (Yale University seminar paper, 1969), pp. 81-124; Kenneth Kann, "The Chicago Republican Party, 1854-1861" (University of California, Berkeley seminar paper, 1971), pp. 30, 37, 46, 49. For a discussion of German political preferences, including Schafer's article, see Frederick C. Luebke (ed.), Ethnic Voters and the Election of Lincoln (Lincoln, 1971). 138 accurate, because in an era of local elites and courthouse cliques, before nationwide business chains or mass media campaigns, politics was planned, directed, and performed on a nearly autonomous local level. A given locality's politics could differ markedly from the general pattern. In New York City, for example, prohibition eclipsed slavery as the leading issue, many free-soil Democrats, such as Samuel J. Tilden, remained loyal to their party, and most Germans continued to vote Democratic. The consequence was that at the moment of national Republican success Democrats gained long-range control of the nation's wealthiest and most populous city. New York's peculiar behavior resulted from unique local conditions . Less than half of the city's residents were native-born; more than one-quarter had migrated from Ireland, one-sixth from Germany .3 The immigrant waves of the forties and fifties had made New York not one but two cities: first, the city of Broadway's fashionably attired ladies, of Wall Street's bustling bankers, and of native...