The Demise of the Pennsylvania American Party, 1854-1858
INEXTRICABLY ENTANGLED with the questions of the collapse of the Jacksonian-Whig party system, the birth of the Republican party, and the coming of the Civil War is the career of the Know Nothing or American party in the mid-1850s. Historians have produced two general but conflicting interpretations of the significance of the Know Nothing movement for the antebellum decade. The older one, fashioned by such luminaries as Allan Nevins and Roy Franklin Nichols, held that the slavery issue destroyed the Jacksonian party system and that the Know Nothings, though an actual expression of distrust of immigrants and Catholics, was an attempt by displaced Whigs and conservatives to create a new organization that would substitute the issues of nationality and Protestantism for the potentially disastrous one of slavery extension. Recent scholars, such as Michael F. Holt, Ronald P. Formisano, Paul Kleppner, and Joel Silbey, have claimed that the older portrayal of the Know Nothing movement is a serious misreading of the historical record. In their view, anti-Catholicism, hostility to immigrants, and Protestant evangelistic fervor were the main forces behind the emergence of political nativism; sectional questions over slavery were of marginal importance. Indeed, the current writers on antebellum politics argue that anti-Catholicism and opposition to immigration, not slavery, destroyed the second party system. They posit that the nativist explosion in the middle part of the decade realigned the groups that supported and opposed the Democratic party, and they describe the typical nativist supporter as one who was young, from the lower or middle class, a small town or village resident, and an adherent of an evangelical Protestant sect.