The Know Nothings in Louisiana by Marius M. Carriere Jr. (review)

Louisiana nativism often leaves historians scratching their heads. As the nation hurtled toward secession and war, the nativism movement burst onto the electoral scene like a shooting star and fizzled out nearly as fast. Its main vehicle, the American Party, was cloaked in secrecy, its adherents told to answer "I know nothing" when queried about it. It seemed more Illuminati than mainstream political movement, what with its three degrees of membership and speakeasy admission rituals. But by harnessing the period's turbocharged ethno-nationalism, the Know Nothing movement came within a whisker of enshrinement as the nation's second major party. And nowhere else in the Deep South did the American party make deeper inroads than in Louisiana. New Orleans was the reason. Far and away the agricultural South's largest city, not to mention a gateway for heavy immigration from Ireland and Germany, New Orleans was home to a large foreign-born population. In this, it resembles such other border state cities as Baltimore, Cincinnati, and St. Louis—except for one oddity. Nationwide, the American Party was famous for its staunch opposition to Catholicism. In Louisiana, Know Nothings drew a surprising number of Catholics under their banner.

Who were the men who led the Know Nothing movement in Louisiana? Marius Carriere Jr. finds that several were anticlerical French Catholics who wrangled with their ultramontane Irish counterparts over papal supremacy and church property. They included former Whigs like Charles Gayarre and ex-governor A. B. Roman, too. Carriere unearths a couple of surprises: that upwardly mobile lawyers favored the Democratic Party because of the greater promise of advancement, while "wealthy younger, and middle-age 'political leaders'" gravitated to the American Party (54). In truth, Know Nothingism was "Whiggery in disguise," a safe haven for former Whigs who had been cast adrift after the capsizing of their national organization (50).

As instructive as Carriere's midlevel discoveries may be, the real value of The Know Nothings in Louisiana is the picture it paints of American nativism during one of its earliest high tides. It's a timely book. The rhetoric of these antebellum xenophobes, never mind their favored remedies, has a contemporary ring. Dirt-poor, the famine Irish who swept into New Orleans between 1830 and 1860 were scapegoated for rising crime, falling wages, vanishing jobs, and lawless elections. Such were the perils of opening the doors to the "worst classes of the common laborers of the monarchical governments of Europe" (quoted on 63).

Back then, the support for curbing immigration or deporting recent arrivals was somewhat muted. (However, the Know Nothings did oppose an early Homestead Bill for fear it would encourage more immigration.) The young republic was in the throes of a commercial revolution, and labor was scarce. Instead, Know Nothings crusaded for voter suppression—another remedy with present-day resonance. They demanded extending the naturalization period from five to twenty-five years, followed by an additional two-year waiting period. And they enforced voter identification measures. Anyone speaking with an Irish brogue or a German accent was required to present valid naturalization papers. But here is where the parallels between past and present diverge. In the 1840s and '50s voter fraud was rampant. Democratic judges manufactured votes by turning their benches into naturalization mills. Know Nothings fought fraud with force. Between 1853 and 1857, telling the difference between the city's polling places from cage matches required real skill.

The denouement was predictable. The sectional rifts over slavery that ravaged the Whigs and disrupted the Democrats also destroyed the American Party. But in New Orleans, class tensions also contributed their mite. The economic elites who had incited white natives against European newcomers panicked when Democratic officeholders, elected with immigrant votes, began to threaten the subsidies that the business community had lavished on pet railroad projects. To these elites, that agenda was as vital, maybe more so, than the putative social and cultural threat...