Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (13 page)

For Irish-Catholic spokesmen in the city’s ethnic press, a “homogenous” America was an Anglo-Saxon America, a Protestant America. Those who spoke of homogeneity in America invariably sounded like those who sought the conversion of Catholics in Ireland. Anglo-Saxons, wrote the editors of the
Freeman’s Journal
, “believe in their own divine right and mission to set the world straight” and that all other groups in the New World owed their rights and privileges to the “ ‘praying and prayerful men’ who landed first on Plymouth Rock.” The editors of the
Irish World,
writing several years later, described “the Anglo-Saxon race . . . in England and in America” as “our traditional enemies,” and featured a poem entitled “I Am Not an Anglo-Saxon.”

Out upon the very name . . .

It tells of wrong and outrage,

Of slavery and crime . . .

O! I’m not an Anglo-Saxon,

I am Irish blood and bone.
¹³

These Irish-Catholic newspapers offered a counterpoint to the dominant narrative of the American experience that emphasized Puritans and Pilgrims and an assumed supremacy of Anglo-Saxon values. The Irish, with the support of Tammany, asserted a more expansive view of the American experience, one that included the stories of those whose hyphenated identities were just as legitimate, just as American, as the Anglo-Saxon’s.

In the elections of 1854, however, the narrow view of American identity prevailed; in fact, it delivered a smashing, almost catastrophic assault on those, like Tammany’s leaders, who spoke up for the immigrant and for a more pluralistic society. In New York, the temperance advocate Clark prevailed in an ugly four-way race in which the Know Nothing candidate, Ullman, recorded about a quarter of all votes cast. It was at the local level, however, where Know Nothing power was most on display. Four Know Nothing congressional candidates captured seats from New York, and several Whigs prevailed thanks to secret deals with Know Nothings.

The Know Nothing victories in New York were significant, but they were a political pittance compared with the movement’s success in Massachusetts. There, the Know Nothing Party won every one of the commonwealth’s eleven congressional seats, and the party’s gubernatorial candidate won with more than 60 percent of the vote.

The Know Nothing whirlwind swept through Manhattan even in areas where Tammany seemed strongest. Perhaps sensing electoral disaster, or perhaps simply bored in Washington, freshman Congressman William Tweed did not run for reelection in 1854 after winning a seat in 1852. In a four-way race to succeed Tweed in New York’s 5th congressional district, the cofounder of the Know Nothing movement, Thomas Whitney, stunned the two established parties and became one of sixty-two Know Nothing candidates to win seats in the House beginning in 1855. While the Democrats retained a majority in the House, despite having lost seventy-one seats in 1854, the Know Nothings were the second largest party in the House from 1855 to 1856.

As he contemplated the end of his short tenure in Washington, Tweed was nearly disconsolate, not for himself but for his party. The Know Nothing movement seemed on the verge of even greater power as its winning candidates took office following the 1854 elections. “Our only hope this fall,” Tweed wrote of a fellow Democrat in early 1855, “is in having the [Know Nothings] fight among themselves. Otherwise we are a used up party for the present.”
¹⁴

Tweed decided that the Know Nothings “must be beaten at all hazards.” Even as he prepared his departure from office, the soon-to-be-former congressman kept careful watch over the disbursal of federal patronage in his district to make sure jobs did not fall into the wrong hands. An ally of Tweed named James Murphy occupied the patronage-rich position of postmaster in the city of Williamsburg on Long Island, which was part of Tweed’s congressional district. Murphy, at Tweed’s urging, had appointed a man named Newcombe as a letter carrier, but the congressman now had disturbing intelligence about his choice. Tweed told Murphy that he had “heard stories” that Newcombe was a closet Know Nothing.

“I think you had better see if [Newcombe] is not one of the K.Ns & if he is I would advise his dismissal,” Tweed wrote. If the Know Nothings were to be beaten, Tweed knew that Tammany had to use all means at its disposal, especially the spoils system. He urged Murphy to be “careful” about firing Newcombe, urging him to find a good reason “for his removal.” If Murphy couldn’t find a cover story for the suspected Know Nothing’s dismissal, Tweed suggested that he contact a mutual friend who, he added darkly, “can furnish you one.”
¹⁵

Within a few months of Tweed’s departure from Washington, Tammany’s John Kelly, the lone Catholic member of the House of Representatives, rose to deliver a speech that required no shortage of nerve. The chamber, after all, was now a hotbed of nativism thanks to the Know Nothing victories in 1854—not to mention the Whigs and Republicans who were elected with Know Nothing support. Kelly was the son of Irish immigrants and a mason by trade. Photographs taken later in his life show him stuffed into a respectable three-piece suit but displaying rough-hewn hands that told of another life lived far away from places of influence. Like so many ambitious sons of the downtown wards of Manhattan, Kelly was introduced to politics at the local volunteer firehouse, where he may have impressed minor Tammany officials with his oratorical gifts—he was a self-trained actor who enjoyed performing Shakespearean roles in local theaters.

Kelly dropped out of school at a young age when his father died—the loss of fathers at a young age would haunt the childhoods of many future Tammany figures—and while he later returned to the classroom, he had no degree or formal academic training. He seemingly was out of his element in Congress. But on July 28, 1856, his fellow New Yorker, Thomas Whitney, cofounder of the Know Nothing movement, took to the House floor to assail the Catholic Church as a menace to republican government and civil liberties. Most “of the Papists—I do not say Catholics—in this country are foreign-born, and . . . they carry with them to the ballot-box the anti-American influences, prejudices, and superstitions of their church,” he said. Catholics simply were not fit for citizenship upon their arrival on American shores—the longer they waited for naturalization and the right to vote, the healthier the republic would be.
¹⁶

Kelly decided that he could no longer remain silent in the company of his more learned colleagues. On August 9, Kelly replied to Whitney in a long address that, he said, would “vindicate the constitutional rights and liberties of every American citizen, whether Protestant or Catholic.” Responding not only to Whitney but also to those who were sent to Congress in the nativist surge of 1854, Kelly warned that, “in a government like ours, the rights of no class, however humble they may be, can be assailed without endangering the rights of all. The persecutor of today, when religious intolerance has fairly started on its disastrous course, will inevitably become the victim of tomorrow.”
¹⁷

Kelly continued to speak out against Know Nothingism, but his career in the House was short and otherwise undistinguished. After two terms, he left Capitol Hill for a job closer to home as sheriff of New York County. But his speech against intolerance, given in a legislative chamber filled with newly empowered Know Nothings, was a milestone in the nation’s fractious debate over culture and identity—not because he was the only advocate for immigrants (he was not) but because he was the sole Irish Catholic in the chamber, and the son of immigrants himself. The speech was ignored in the city’s press, but New York City’s Irish-Catholic community printed it in booklet form and distributed it to the city’s immigrant neighborhoods.

The debate over the worthiness of immigrants—which, in the context of 1856, meant Irish Catholics—was not nearly as passionate and poisonous as the ongoing argument over slavery. But on the streets of many Northern cities, it was an everyday reality for the people Kelly represented.

The Know Nothings disappeared almost as quickly as they rose to prominence, in part because events, including the Dred Scott decision in 1857, moved the more combustible issue of slavery closer to the forefront of national politics. Northern Know Nothings abhorred slavery just as much as they despised Catholics. Many found the new Republican Party to be congenial to both views.

. . .

With a temperance advocate as governor and a third of the state legislature in the hands of Know Nothings, New York quickly implemented the prohibition legislation that the ousted Tammany governor, Seymour, had vetoed in 1854. Among those who hailed the bill’s success was the great abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher, who spoke at a mass rally of fellow prohibitionists in the Metropolitan Theater on Broadway. Beecher said that if temperance could carry the day in New York City, it surely could triumph anywhere. But Tammany still had an ally in power. Fernando Wood owed his office in large part to the votes of working men who found comfort in whiskey and beer. To the outrage of the temperance crowd, Wood announced that the city’s police officers simply would not enforce the new prohibition law. It was, he argued, unconstitutional—a judgment that the courts would validate months later. He was shrewd enough to seize on a fatal flaw in the legislation—the bill made all other liquor legislation moot, but it did not take effect until July 4, about two months after it was passed. Wood threw open the saloon doors on Sunday, arguing that until July 4 there no longer was a legal ban on liquor sales on the Christian Sabbath.

Wood’s actions certainly made him a popular fellow in the wards of Lower Manhattan, but they were a sign of something deeper as well. In his defiance of temperance, Wood strengthened the bonds between Tammany and its immigrant constituents as they confronted the growing forces of nativism. Tammany, Wood, and the city’s dominant immigrant group, Irish Catholics, became ever more closely associated with moral evils—whether the evil was drink, bloc voting, self-interested politics, or, to be sure, slavery.

. . .

Tammany Hall leaders like Wood and other Northern Democrats have been rightly called to task for their overt pro-slavery sentiments or their studied agnosticism on the subject. Republicans and abolitionists, however, have escaped the scorn of history for their alliances with overt nativism. For example, the Reverend Edward Beecher, a member of the celebrated abolitionist family, authored a tract entitled
The Papal Conspiracy Exposed and Protestantism Defended in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture
during the height of antebellum nativism. The Beechers were powerful advocates for abolition. They also were intensely anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic. Historian David Potter noted decades ago that it has been “psychologically difficult” for historians “to cope with the fact that anti-slavery, which they tend to idealize, and nativism, which they scorn, should have operated in partnership.” But this insight is critical to understanding how and why Irish-Americans in New York acted and voted as they did in the years just before the Civil War.
¹⁸

During his speech on the House floor in 1856, John Kelly called out abolitionists for their attitudes toward Catholics, particularly their complaints that Catholic clergymen acted as politicians rather than as ministers. Protestant clergy, Kelly noted, were “said to be at the head of the abolition party in the North, and some of them . . . I see sitting as legislators before me now.” But, as he surveyed the House floor, Kelly noted: “I look around me in vain for a representative of the Catholic clergy here.”
¹⁹

Irish-American hostility toward nativism, or anything that hinted at nativism, was visceral and instantaneous. New York’s Irish-American newspapers patrolled the city’s political culture for signs of nativism or abolitionist hypocrisy, and their forays were rarely in vain. Horace Greeley’s
New York Tribune
, one of the antebellum era’s most powerful abolitionist organs, breathlessly reported on a possible “Catholic conspiracy” against the city’s public schools in 1858. The paper went on to list the names of public school teachers in the heavily Irish 4th, 7th, and 14th wards—Mary A. Mahoney, Mary A. O’Brien, Mary S. McDermott, Mary B. Dolan, and three dozen others with similarly Gaelic surnames and suspiciously Catholic first names. “The foregoing names,” the paper’s correspondent wrote, “are given as a sample to show the sort of instructors placed over our school children, and who are expected to educate them for the responsibilities of American citizenship.”
²⁰

While an abolitionist organ like the
Tribune
freely cast doubts on the ability of Irish-Catholic women to administer a proper American education, Tammany Hall was happy to provide those women—and, of course, their male counterparts—with the jobs and favors that came with power. It was no wonder, then, that the connection between Tammany Democrats and the Irish community grew stronger as nativism took hold, not just as a potent third party in the mid-1850s but also as a powerful faction in the fledgling Republican Party.

As the Irish reorganized their lives and re-created a sense of community in a city that must have been both tremendously alien and profoundly familiar, they defiantly held onto qualities that, in the eyes of native-born Protestant New Yorkers, made them suspect and something other than American. They reorganized their lives through the Catholic Church, Tammany Hall, and organized labor—institutions that so many elites found disreputable at best, criminal at worst. They developed their own ideas of civic morality that challenged the Protestant framework of disinterest, temperance, Sabbatarianism, and laissez-faire economics. And they insisted on retaining a portion of their Old World identity in their settlement patterns, their continued interest in Irish affairs, and in their expectations from government.

Expressions of Irish cultural and political grievance took many forms, but one of the most prominent was a rejection of the abolitionist movement. Some historians have interpreted Irish antiabolitionist sentiment as evidence that Irish immigrants wished to be accepted as white people, entitled to the rights and privileges set aside for fellow citizens of a white republic. According to this view, the Irish refused to make common cause with African-Americans, another oppressed minority group, and instead sought to establish their bona fides as white people by joining in the oppression of blacks and otherwise seeking to prove themselves worthy of white-skin privilege.
²¹