The Rise of Nativism as a Potent Political Force and the Large-Scale Violence in America

Questions
Student Name
Institutional Affiliation
Date
Questions
How do we explain the rise of nativism as a potent political force in the 1840s and 1850s?In the North, a market economy and industrial production system took root. Unlike the old system of local craft production and family farming, the revolutions experienced in transport, communication and manufacturing introduced a more efficient system. By the 1830s and 1840s, New England's capitalists brought workers together to America’s first factories. While the South remained predominantly agricultural, the inhabitants, too, felt the changes the international industrial revolution had brought. The shift had adverse effects on the native people. First, the whites' insatiable desire for land caused numerous hardships for the natives. Like during the European colonization, many Indian tribes faced imminent extermination as the whites proceeded to get more land for agriculture. The Indian tribes confronted faced imminent migration further westward. The need to create more land for the whites pushed some natives out of the communities to the reservations in the Indian Territory of preset day Oklahoma.
Pushed out of the land, the natives were forced to join the labor market. The rise of industrialization gave rise to a market economy where millions of Americans sold their labor or products. More and more people became dependent on wages, such that in the mid-1800s, two out of every five American workers were wage laborers. When manufacturing halted, these workers would later experience the negative implications of dependency on wage labor. The manufacturers were more concerned about the shortage of labor than its oversupply. In the 1840s, the manufacturers were relieved when a wave of immigrants from Northern and Western Europe came to America. The new immigrants were willing to work anywhere, including the factories and farms. Most of them came to America to escape their home countries' economic, social and political injustices. Since America offered numerous opportunities for new immigrants, they joined the labor market in full force, contributing to the growing multinational labor force.
Despite the immense contribution of the immigrants to America, not all people welcomed them. Many native-born Americans blamed the new immigrants for the adverse changes from industrial and urban development (Clark and Hewitt 267). The Native-born whites, in particular, despised the immigrant workers, claiming that the immigrants belonged in the low-paying jobs. For instance, Massachusetts educator and politician Edward Everett indicated that the Irish should be welcomed to America due to their inferiority as a race that compelled them to remain at the bottom of the labor market (Clark and Hewitt 267). Everett believed that the mere existence of the new immigrants elevated the Native-born Americans’ position higher. By the 1840s, prejudices directed towards the new immigrants led to a national movement. Instead of considering the contribution of the immigrant laborers, an army of anti-immigration writers, politicians, educators and ministers argued that the challenges facing the nation were due to the newcomers (Clark and Hewitt 404).
The rise of nativism was prompted by the desire to preserve the morals of society against corruption by the outsider newcomers. The native-born Americans saw immigrants as morally corrupt. For instance, the immigrant’s consumption of liquor and beer offended the natives. To make matters worse, while the Native-born Americans were predominantly Evangelicals, the new immigrants were Catholic. Between the 1840s and 1850s, immigration bolstered the number of Roman Catholics in America. The beliefs and ideals of the Roman Catholics contrasted heavily with those of the Evangelicals. For instance, while the Evangelicals advocated for human perfection, the Catholics believed in a more lenient view that humans were conceived in sin, hence they could not attain perfection as long as they were in the world. Catholicism allowed for human frailty and accommodated weaknesses that believers had since they were just human. As the Evangelicals continued advocating for a single conversion, Catholicism believed that the way from sin was not on one conversion, but through regular confession (Clark and Hewitt 405). The Native-born Americans thought that the Catholic Church required a kind of loyalty from its members, a majority of new immigrants, which undermined the ideals of democratic political practices.
The need to confront the wave of new immigrant workers led to clusters of anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic societies. Eventually, the secret cluster societies banded into a national organization, forming a political party a year later. The party was initially known as the American Party. Its followers came to be labeled as "Know-Nothings" since when questioned by outsiders about their ideas, they would often respond that they knew...