Know Nothings

Maryland Historical Society

The Know-Nothing Party, which was especially powerful in Maryland, Massachusetts, and Louisiana, emerged in the 1850s. Its official name was the American Party. The nickname came from its secret origins when members responded to questions about their organization by saying, "I know nothing." Based on popular nativist prejudice against Roman Catholics and the foreign-born, the party developed from the societies of the 1840s that initially enrolled Baltimore mechanics and artisans. Proposing that Americans rule America, the party's national platform called for extending the period of naturalization to twenty-one years, preventing Catholics from controlling the public school system and cleaning up corruption in politics. Benefiting from the split over slavery in the Whig Party, by 1855 there were over seventy Know-Nothings in Congress where they worked unsuccessfully to lengthen the naturalization period for immigrants. By the mid-1850s, the height of the party's power, the Know-Nothings had also elected nine governors.

In 1856, Millard Fillmore (the first and last Know-Nothing presidential candidate) received 22 percent of the total vote in the United States. He carried Maryland with 55 percent of the vote in a three-way presidential contest. But by the end of the decade the Know-Nothings had dwindled away, the victim of their own disagreements over slavery and their irrelevance to the concerns of Marylanders about the Civil War.

The Know Nothing Party in Maryland
Especially powerful in Baltimore, the Know-Nothings burst into view with the surprise election of Samuel Hinks as the city's eighteenth mayor in 1854. The next year the party elected fifty-four of its candidates to the 85-member House of Delegates and eight of seventeen state senators. The party, unknown two years before, did well on the Eastern Shore and in southern and western Maryland against the Democrats. Many of these legislators were new to politics and had emerged through their leadership in nativist secret societies. Their victories exceeded even their supporters' expectations and were the result not just of the feebleness of the major parties but the belief that Catholics and immigrants were taking over Maryland.

As German and Irish immigrants continued to come to Maryland with as many as 15,000 landing in the port of Baltimore in one year, the Know-Nothings called for a return to American values, by which they meant Protestant ones. They filtered their sentiments into calls to extend the naturalization period to twenty-one years, to register all foreign-born, and to prevent federal courts from granting citizenship thirty days before an election. They appealed to voters to save public schools from Catholic interference and to elect only Americans to public office. They cast themselves as patriots in this period after the 1848 Mexican War, and they promised that once in power they would stop the corrupt policies of previous parties.

The Decline of the Party in the Late 1850s
In 1856, the Know-Nothings reached the high point of their power in Maryland, electing Thomas Holliday Hicks, a Dorchester County farmer and former sheriff, as governor. In Baltimore where Know-Nothings were increasingly held responsible for election violence, leaders of the community, frightened as much by the newcomers' lavish spending on public works projects like a new water-supply system as by their unsavory intimidation of opponents, organized the Reform Party. Nationally the Know-Nothings had scarcely organized when they split into northern and southern wings over the issue of whether slavery should be extended into the territories. By the end of the 1850s only in Baltimore did the Know-Nothings have control, as more pressing issues associated with the coming of the Civil War attracted Marylanders to the Democratic Party.

Anbinder, Tyler. Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know-Nothings and the Politics of the 1850's. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Baker, Jean H. Ambivalent Americans: The Know-Nothing Party in Maryland. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

Baker , Jean H. The Politics of Continuity: Maryland Political Parties from 1858-1870. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.