“Their German Dream of Democracy”: Southern Conservatives, “Red Republicans,” and Nativism

Historians have long argued that the nativist Know Nothings were “essentially a Northern Party.” They have generally accepted John Overdyke’s argument in The Know Nothing Party in the South (1950) that southern nativism was never more than “lukewarm” and that southerners seized upon the issue primarily as an “opportunity to avoid the long-debated and touchy issues of slavery and state rights.” It was unionism rather than nativism that motivated Know Nothings in the immigrant-poor South.

This paper argues that such a characterization draws a false dichotomy between southern nativism and unionism in the 1850s. Southerners embraced nativism because they increasingly saw immigrants and their foreign ideas as existential threats to the republic. The Know Nothing order spread like wildfire through the Border South following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, spurred on by immigrants’—particularly German immigrants’—growing political activism against the expansion of slavery. This alone was sufficient to cause southerners great alarm, as they saw in such activity a palpable and growing threat to the Union (not to mention their own slave interest). But immigrants’ involvement in other reform movements, like those promoting economic equality and socialism, infused their antislavery activities with deeper meaning. In the pursuit of such egalitarian reforms, southern conservatives saw a perversion of American ideas that embraced equality as an unmitigated good and mistook “licentiousness for liberty.” These were “red republican” doctrines imported from Europe, and if allowed to flourish in the United States they would destroy the American republic as they had Europe’s nascent republics in 1848. The Union would devolve into anarchy and the reassertion of despotism would obliterate America’s great experiment in self-rule. Southerners thus embraced nativism and the Know Nothings as a means of preserving the country’s “original principles” and securing the blessings of “rational liberty.”