Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/150

 was disintegrating both the old Whig party and the Democratic party at a fast rate, the “Native American” sentiment burst forth in one of its periodical manifestations. That sentiment was originally—in greatest part at least—directed against the Catholic influence—against “Romanism,” as the favorite phrase ran—but it demanded a curtailment of the political rights of the whole foreign-born element without distinction of origin or religious creed. A secret society, called the “Know-nothings,” was organized with all the paraphernalia of rituals and oaths and vows and passwords which seem to have a peculiar charm for people of weak minds and susceptible imaginations, and the “order” spread rapidly all over the Northern States. Some earnest anti-slavery men favored the movement because they thought that it would help in breaking up the old political organizations, especially the Whig party, and thus facilitate the eventual passing of citizens, once detached from their old party affiliations, into the Republican ranks. But when the Know-nothing organization became strong enough to control elections in such States as New York and Massachusetts, and when the proscriptive spirit awakened by it led, as it is always apt to do, to savage excesses in the larger cities—bands of ruffians committing bloody outrages upon peaceable foreign-born people—the anti-slavery men who had thought it “good politics” to countenance and encourage the nativistic dissolvent, became alarmed at their own work, for it evidently tended to drive the foreign voters into the arms of the Democratic party for their own protection.

In Massachusetts, where the “American” movement won control of the whole State government, the Legislature adopted for submission to a vote of the people an amendment to the State Constitution, providing that foreign-born persons should not have the right of voting until two years after they