Ohio History Journal

JED DANNENBAUM

 

Immigrants and Temperance:

Ethnocultural Conflict in

Cincinnati, 1845-1860

 

 

In the United States the decade of the 1850s was marked by pro-

nounced social and political upheaval. Until recently, most historians

believed that this turmoil derived almost entirely from the issues of

sectionalism and slavery which dominated American life in this era

and which culminated in the Civil War. However, recent historical

work at the state and local level has revealed that so-called "ethno-

cultural" issues, principally anti-Catholicism, nativism, and temper-

ance, were frequently more important than sectional issues in spark-

ing  the  breakdown    of electoral politics and    the realignment of

contemporary cultural mores during the 1850s.1

The validity of this new perspective is demonstrated by the political

history of Cincinnati, Ohio, in the early 1850s. There, ethnocultural

issues severely disrupted the local party system and led to the virtual

demise of the Whig party several months before the sectional contro-

versy had been revived by the Kansas-Nebraska Act. But the history

of growing conflict between recent European immigrants and native-

born residents of the city during these years also reveals that anti-

Catholicism, nativism, and temperance agitation were not necessarily

overlapping or mutually reinforcing phenomena, although they have

frequently been treated as such by ethnocultural historians. Rather,

they were distinct, if sometimes interrelated, threads in the pattern of

antebellum history. They developed separately, had their own ad-

 

 

 

Jed Dannenbaum is an Instructor in the Art Department at Carleton College, North-

field. Minnesota. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting

of the American Society for Ethnohistory in October 1977.

 

1. See, for example, Ronald P. Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties in

Michigan, 1827-1861 (Princeton, 1971); Michael F. Holt, Forging a Majority: The For-

mation of the Republican Party in Pittsburgh, 1848-1860 (New Haven, 1969); Idem.,

"The Politics of Impatience: The Origins of Know Nothingism," Journal of American

History, LX (September 1973), 309-31; and Joel H. Silbey, The Transformation of Amer-

ican Politics, 1840-1860 (Englewood Cliffs, 1967).

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126                                                    OHIO HISTORY

 

herents, and occasionally clashed with one another. Thus, the ex-

perience of Cincinnati can help both to reinforce and to clarify the new

ethnocultural perspective on antebellum politics.

During the 1840s Cincinnati's population increased nearly 150 per-

cent, growing by an average of seven thousand each year. A large por-

tion of the city's new residents were German and Irish immigrants.

The Germans began to arrive in large numbers during the 1830s and

their proportion in the population amounted to 28 percent by 1840.

They settled primarily north of the Miami Canal, a section soon

known as the "Over-the-Rhine" district. By 1850 Germans consti-

tuted a majority of the population in four of the city's twelve wards,

and the Over-the-Rhine district became pivotal in the balance of local

political power. After the 1848 revolution in Germany, a group of po-

litical refugees appeared in the city, few in number but very active

politically. These "Forty-eighters" were frequently agnostic, anti-cleri-

cal, and socialist. Immediately powerful within the German commu-

nity, the Forty-eighters began to exert their influence throughout the

city as well. Thus, by mid-century, Cincinnati's German-born were a

visible, controversial, and politically potent force.

The Irish formed the second major new ethnic group in the city.

Irish immigrants began to arrive in the region in the late 1830s, at-

tracted by booming river commerce and canal and railroad construc-

tion. When the devastating potato famine of the mid-1840s inundated

American ports with arrivals from Ireland, a large number followed

family or friends to Cincinnati. They settled primarily along the water-

front and by 1850 accounted for 12 percent of the city's residents. Al-

together at mid-century, the foreign-born made up 44 percent of Cin-

cinnati's population. Of these, 86 percent were German or Irish. Immi-

grants were in the majority in five of the twelve wards of the city and

since a disproportionate number of immigrants were adult males, they

wielded even greater strength among potential voters. Both German

and Irish-born voters had readily formed close ties with the Democra-

tic party in the 1840s and were primarily responsible for the political

hegemony that party had achieved locally by the early 1850s.2

As these recent immigrants grew in political power, native-born

Cincinnatians increasingly associated them with rapidly Worsening so-

cial problems in the city, problems which first became pressing in the

late 1840s and which reached their peak in the early 1850s. For most

Americans at the time, the social disorder that erupted in rapidly ur-

 

2. Charles Cist, Cincinnati in  1841: Its Early  Annuals and Future Prospects (Cincin-

nati, 1841), 32-39;  1dem., Sketches and Statistics of Cincinnati in 1851 (Cincinanti,

1851), 47; William Baughin, "Nativism  in  Cincinnati before  1860 (M.S. thesis, Uni-

versity of Cincinnati, 1963), 38-39, 84-89, 93-95.

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Ethnocultural Conflict in Cincinnati                              127

 

banizing nineteenth-century communities was incomprehensible. The

one clear, seemingly irrefutable fact was that their new difficulties

were linked in some way with the recent immigrants. For example, the

Germans and Irish seemed to be carriers of epidemic diseases which

terrorized communities at mid-century: during a cholera outbreak in

1849, these newcomers accounted for nearly three-fourths of the over

four thousand deaths. Those well-bred Cincinnatians who ventured

into the worst neighborhoods brought back reports of unimaginable

degradation, filth and squalor; of children growing up "breathing foul

air, drinking filthy water and surrounded by a pestilent moral atmo-

sphere."³

Moreover, the immigrants required a disproportionate share of the

city's poor relief funds. In 1848 official records showed that the Irish,

only 12 percent of the city's population, made up 40 percent of the

cases of indoor relief. A Protestant missionary, visiting the indoor re-

lief wards in the Commercial Hospital for the first time in 1852, re-

corded in his daily journal that "most of the men are from Ireland;

several from Germany, and comparatively few from the States. The

Catholic priest visits daily and spends four or five hours there."⁴ By

1853, four-fifths of relief recipients were immigrants. The cost of wel-

fare soared during these years, creating resentment among the city's

property tax payers. The Cincinnati Commercial complained that the

city had been "more cursed and more imposed upon by the emigration

of paupers into it, probably, than any city in the Union."⁵ The Commer-

cial also expressed a fear that recent increases in German arrivals

had been caused by Germany "having opened her poorhouses, and

set the inmates adrift across the Atlantic, to get rid of them."6

Even more upsetting to the city's residents than either disease or

pauperism  was the association of the Irish and Germans with a fright-

ening rise in crime. The number of felony crimes increased by over 200

percent between 1846 and 1853. Murders rose from an annual total of

three in 1846 to twenty-two in 1854. "Some fifteen years ago," claimed

the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1853, "a murder in Cincinnati was but a

yearly event. . . . Now, how changed! . . . in our city scarcely a

week floats off that the bowie knife or the pistol ball has not laid a

human being low    with the dead."⁷ The Commercial estimated that

 

3. Cincinnati Commercial, July 12, 1853.

4. Joseph Emery, Thirty-five Years Among the Poor, and the Public Institutions of

Cincinnati (Cincinnati, 1887). 33: Cincinnati Commercial, March 16, September 3,

1849.

5. Cincinnati Commercial, July 17. 1852: Cincinnati City Departments, Annual Re-

ports, 1854, "City Infirmary, Clerk's Report," 40.

6. Cincinnati Commercial, October 4. 1852.

7. Cincinnati Enquirer, June 25, 1853.

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128                                                  OHIO HISTORY

 

Cincinnati harbored at least three thousand professional criminals

and complained that, "As matters now stand, no man is safe in the

streets; even boys sport their pistols! Strumpets have a wide range

in the most prominent localities, and insult respectable ladies; vaga-

bonds assail innocent men in the streets or go unmolested to brickbat

or stone respectable houses."8 About two-thirds of those arrested for

crimes were foreign-born. Disreputable immigrant neighborhoods-

the German "Sausage Row" and the Irish "Rat Row" and "Gas Al-

ley"- became notorious sources of brawls, stabbings, shootings, drunk-

enness, gambling, and prostitution.

Even the more prosperous and respectable immigrants possessed

cultural traits that offended native-born Protestants. Both the German

and the Irish communities were the scenes of frequent celebrations

and festivals, where beer or whisky flowed freely and in public. More-

over, they openly and unapologetically violated the American Protes-

tant concept of a solemn Sabbath. Germans particularly liked to en-

joy their one free day a week, and Sunday afternoon was a time of

boisterous revelry in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood. Thus, the

Irish and German immigrants in Cincinnati became inextricably as-

sociated in the minds of the native-born with disease, pauperism,

crime, violence, and immorality.

This explosive atmosphere bred the ethnocultural hostility we as-

sociate with the middle years of the 1850s. But there was not always

a direct and simple line of causation between anxiety over social dis-

order and conflict between the native- and the foreign-born. Indeed,

the first intense manifestation of hostility arose not over disorder nor

over ethnic differences, but rather over the Roman Catholicism ad-

hered to by most immigrants. Moreover, many non-Catholic immi-

grants were among the most vehement anti-Catholics in Cincinnati.

Fear of the Catholic Church was deeply rooted in American history,

but there had been a marked decline of anti-Catholicism among Prot-

estants in the late 1840s.⁹ In 1853, however, a number of factors

brought about its dramatic resurgence. The influx of stridently anti-

Catholic European refugees of the 1848 revolutions created an active

articulate center of opposition to the church, while the enmity of the

Catholic hierarchy toward all efforts at social reform generated resent-

ment among reformers. Finally, anxiety over social disorder was eas-

ily vented against Catholics who, as the majority of immigrants,

seemed responsible for most of the problems.

 

 

8. Cincinnati Commercial, February 24, 1851, June 24, 1853.

9. Baughin, "Nativism," 98; Ray A. Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860:

A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (Chicago, 1964), 238.

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Ethnocultural Conflict in Cincinnati                              129

 

The catalyst for the eruption of religious hostility came in early

1853, when Cincinnati Archbishop John Purcell called upon the Ohio

state legislature, then writing a reform of the school code, to change

the system of taxation for public school funds, either alloting a portion

of the tax money to parochial schools or exempting from school taxa-

tion those citizens who contributed money to a church school. He ar-

gued that public schools were not truly non-sectarian but rather in-

doctrinated children with Protestant teachings from the Protestant

(King James) Bible. Purcell's proposal reflected a growing self-con-

fidence among Catholics, particularly Irish Catholics, in Cincinnati

and elsewhere that reflected the group's increasing sense of perma-

nence, acceptance, and political influence within their communities.

Catholic assertiveness did not stop with demands for school funds,

but extended to the claim among some clerics that Catholicism meant

to "convert the world-including the inhabitants of the United

States."10

Outraged and suspicious Protestant Cincinnatians saw in the new

Catholic demands "a bold effort to unite . . . the Church and the

State. .. ,"¹¹ and "to uproot the tree of Liberty. .. .12 Almost from

the first, Protestant counter-attacks exceeded the confines of the

school issue itself, extending to denunciations of Catholic social

behavior. Cincinnati's Methodist journal, the Western Christian Advo-

cate, remarked that Archbishop Purcell seemed to have "no concep-

tion of the evil influence of drunkenness, Sabbath-breaking, profan-

ity, and other vices among his own people."¹³ A well-known lecturer,

Dr. D. L. Rice, spoke at length on "the prevalence of intoxication,

gambling and profanity" among Catholics. "Now this is the class of

people," he concluded, "that are called on in their zeal for purity, to

break down our common schools."¹⁴ The city's local election cam-

paign in the spring of 1853 was totally dominated by the school con-

troversy. As a result, party loyalties splintered and traditional voting

patterns changed markedly.

Non-Catholic German immigrants were among the most strident

anti-Catholics in the city. Religious antagonisms between German

Catholics on one hand and German Protestants, Jews, and agnostics

on the other hand, had broken out within the German community the

 

10. Archbishop John Hughes of New York quoted in Billington, Crusade, 291, 289-

93; Holt, "Know Nothingism," 324; Formisano, Birth, 222-23. Pennsylvania, New York,

Maryland, and Michigan were among the other states where Catholics agitated for a

share of the public school money.

11. Cincinnati Commercial, March 26, 1853.

12. Ibid., March 29, 1853.

13. Western Christian Advocate, March 30, 1853.

14. Cincinnati Commercial, April 4, 1853.

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130                                                       OHIO HISTORY

 

previous year, first over the visit of Hungarian patriot Louis Kossuth,

a hero to non-Catholic Germans but vilified by the Catholic hier-

archy, and then over the revelation of a secret organization within the

Democratic party intended to provide a set number of political offices

to Irish and German Catholics, but to exclude from office all radical

Germans. In the city elections of that year large numbers of non-Cath-

olic Germans defected to the Whig party in certain races, giving the

Whigs the first victories they had had in years.¹⁵ Rutherford B. Hayes

wrote to his uncle on election night that "every Whig in the city [is]

either drunk or crazy over our victory." He added later that "Every

two minutes I hear some Whig cry, 'Hurrah for the Germans!' They

gave us the victory."¹⁶ But in the school election of 1853, the dissident

Germans refused to support any of the political groupings: the Demo-

crats were too pro-Catholic, the Whigs were too timid on the school

fund issue, and the openly anti-Catholic Free School ticket contained

a few candidates who were suspected of harboring nativist as well as

anti-Catholic sentiments. The non-Catholic Germans, led by the radi-

cal "Forty-eighters," formed a separate ticket made up of nominees

from the other three slates and ran their own candidate for mayor.

The 1853 "school election" shattered the old party structure within

Cincinnati. The Whig party failed to respond adequately to the new

issues of social disorder and Catholic aggressiveness. The party tried

to redirect public attention away from the school issue and back to the

more traditional economic issues that had tended to define, at least on

the surface, the differences between Whigs and Democrats in the

past. The Whig slate contained familiar nominees, the same men who

would have been selected under any circumstances, whereas the pre-

vailing mood of the electorate demanded candidates with solidly anti-

Catholic, pro-free school credentials. As one speaker at a "free-school"

meeting observed, "the old points of issue between whigs and demo-

crats [sic], had grown obsolete, and . . . the free school question was

the only one of moment before the people.^"17 As a result, the Whigs

lost much support and took only 19 percent of the votes in the mayoral

race. The Democratic candidate for mayor only narrowly defeated the

nominee of the independent "Free School" ticket and would have lost

if the dissident German votes had not gone to a fourth candidate. In

 

15. For example, in the five Over-the-Rhine wards, the party's candidate for County

Commissioner, a Catholic who had admitted attending "the Tribe twice upon solicita-

tion," received an average vote 44.4% lower than the Democratic totals in the previous

year's election, and 32.2% lower than the non-Miami candidate for Auditor. Cincinnati

Commercial, August 6, October 18, 1852.

16. Rutherford B. Hayes to S. Birchard, October 12, 1852, Diary and Letters of Ruth-

erford Birchard Hayes, ed. Charles R. Williams (Columbus, 1922), 1, 424-25.

17. Cincinnati Commercial, March 26, 1853.

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Ethnocultural Conflict in Cincinnati                                     131

 

short, the Whig party lay moribund and the Democratic party stood

on the defensive, vulnerable to any united opposition that could win

the key swing block of non-Catholic German voters. All this occurred

a year before the Kansas-Nebraska bill reopened the sectional issue.

It was in this context of political confusion, anxiety over social dis-

order, and anti-Catholicism, that temperance activists in Cincinnati

joined with fellow reformers throughout the state in launching an all-

out campaign for a law that would prohibit the manufacture, distribu-

tion, and sale of alcoholic beverages in Ohio. Temperance reform in

mid-nineteenth-century America was one of the most popular and

powerful social movements of its day, involving hundreds of thou-

sands of active workers. Temperance organizations, based almost en-

tirely in rapidly growing communities, were primarily concerned with

attacking the problems of poverty, crime, and disease by eradicating

what they considered to be the source of these social disorders-the

trade in alcoholic beverages. While many of their contemporaries

called for harsher treatment of paupers and criminals, temperance ac-

tivists defended these people as by and large the helpless victims of a

vast and greedy network of drink manufacturers, distributors, sellers,

and their powerful friends in government and high society.¹⁸

Because the temperance movement, after the mid-1830s, advocated

total abstinence from all alcoholic beverages, historians have often

assumed that it must have come into immediate conflict with the rel-

atively heavy-drinking German and Irish immigrants who flooded into

northern cities in the thirty years prior to the Civil War. But such was

not the case. Prior to 1851 temperance reformers were dedicated to

the principle of moral suasion; that is, they sought to end the traffic in

alcohol through argument, persuasion, example, and education. So

long as they did not attempt to impose temperance forcibly on the

 

18. It is surprising that, for a reform movement which in many ways surpassed aboli-

tionism in its historical importance, there are as yet no reliable studies of antebellum

temperance agitation. However, a number of researchers are now working in the field,

and in the next few years they will undoubtedly greatly expand our understanding of

temperance reform. Until then, the best introduction to the subject is still John A.

Krout's The Origins of Prohibition (New York, 1925). See also Brian Harrison's excel-

lent study Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England 1815-1872

(Pittsburgh, 1971). That temperance agitation in Ohio developed primarily in rapidly

urbanizing communities is evidenced by an examination of the towns and cities where

Sons of Temperance lodges had been formed by January 1847. Even excluding Cin-

cinnati and Hamilton County, the average population growth rate for these communi-

ties during the 1840s was 78.6% compared to an average rate for all of Ohio of 30.3%.

93% of these temperance communities had growth rates higher than the state average.

Professor Stephen Nissenbaum, of the University of Massachusetts, in a study of Mas-

sachusetts communities around 1840, has found a strong correlation between the ex-

tent of local commercialization/industrialization and the degree of temperance agitation

(results described in the correspondence with the author).

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132                                            OHIO HISTORY

immigrants, and also saw these immigrants as enslaved victims of drink, there was little cause for hostility on either side. It was only af- ter the temperance movement abandoned moral suasion and adopted legal prohibition as its goal that a clash became inevitable. German and Irish-born voters opposed prohibition nearly unanimously and contributed to its defeat or ineffectiveness in many states. Only then did most temperance activists turn against the immigrants. In so do- ing, they greatly influenced the shift away from anti-Catholicism and toward nativism that characterized the development of the Know Nothing party. A variety of changes impelled the temperance movement to aban- don moral suasion and adopt prohibition: a growing understand- ing by reformers of alcoholism as a medical condition; the decline of fraternal temperance organizations such as the Sons of Temperance; the relative inaccessibility to temperance appeals of drinkers, particu- larly immigrants, in large, impersonal urban environments; and, most compelling of all, the rapid increase in social disorder. Temperance advocates believed that social problems such as disease, poverty, crime, and immorality emanated almost solely from the use of alcohol. Eliminating intemperance, according to a Cincinnati spokesman, would "prevent the disorders of your city, and empty your prisons and

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Ethnocultural Conflict in Cincinnati                                 133

 

alms-houses, and diminish your taxes fifty per cent. ..."19      A corol-

lary of this belief was that if drinking caused disorder, then increasing

disorder must stem from rising alcoholic consumption.²⁰ The temper-

ance reformers, rather than making progress toward their goal of a

truly temperate society, appeared instead to be losing ground in the

battle against drink. The disorder which evidenced their failure served

also to assure them that their goal was more vital than ever to the fu-

ture of their society. If social chaos were to be prevented, the cause of

disorder, the drink trade, must be cut off entirely.

Social disorder-its causes, its consequences, and its cure-totally

dominated the speeches, letters, articles, editorials, and pamphlets of the

prohibitionists in 1853.21 A typical editorial in the city's temperance

journal stated: "Crime of all description is fearfully on the increase-

the peaceable citizen is in danger of his life, whether on the highway,

in the lane, or on the broad streets of our fair city . . . Murder, riot,

and bloody assaults are so common to our courts that they have ceased

to excite wonder."²² Some judges and prosecuting attorneys estimated

that thirty-nine out of every forty criminal cases they saw were caused

by liquor. The solution to this horror seemed evident to temperance

advocates since, in their eyes, it was "undeniably true, that under the

operation of such laws as prohibit the [liquor] traffic, crime is lessened,

taxation is reduced, and order preserved in communities."²³ Prohibi-

tionists flatly proclaimed that their success would mean an end to the

most troublesome social ills of their day.

In all temperance rhetoric, the villains were the manufacturers and

sellers of alcoholic beverages. The drinker, on the other hand, was

invariably the subject of their pity and humanitarian concern. He im-

bibed, according to temperance doctrine, not out of moral weakness,

but because of a vitiated taste for alcohol that had been instilled

through the wiles of the drink seller. Even drinkers who became dis-

solute, immoral, or criminal were not to be blamed for their behavior.

The liquor dealers were far more responsible for crimes than were

the poor wretches who committed them while under the influence of

drink.²⁴ Once started on the road to ruin, the drinker was helpless to

 

19. Cincinnati Commercial, August 13, 1853.

20. In fact, alcoholic consumption seems to have been decreasing by 1850. See Nor-

man H. Clark, Deliver us From Evil: An Interpretation of American Prohibition (New

York, 1976), 20.

21. See, for example, The Ohio Organ of the Temperance Reform, January 21, 28,

February 11, March 4, April 1, June 13, 24, July 15, 22, August 12, 19, November 4,

1853 (hereafter cited as OOTR); Cincinnati Commercial, August 8, 13, 18, 1853.

22. OOTR, September 9, 1853.

23. Ibid., July 1, 15, 1853.

24. Ibid., February 11, 1853.

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134                                                 OHIO HISTORY

 

prevent his fate and became another "poor, tempted, deceived, de-

luded, ensnared victim" of the drink trade.²⁵ Only by eliminating the

liquor traffic altogether could this enslavement be prevented.

When the state of Maine in 1851 passed the nation's first prohibi-

tory liquor law, thereby signaling that the public at large might be

ready to support a total legal ban on the manufacture and sale of li-

quor, the temperance cause became almost solely a movement for pro-

hibition. In Ohio, the 1853 fall legislative elections were dominated by

the issue as temperance workers organized a massive statewide cam-

paign of speakers, rallies, pamphlets, endorsements, and often separ-

ate slates of temperance candidates, all aimed at electing a state

government favorable to passage of a "Maine Law" for Ohio. It was

this campaign that finally brought the temperance movement into di-

rect conflict with Cincinnati's immigrant population.

Temperance advocates had in the past treated all drinkers, whether

foreign-born or native-born, as equally deserving of both sympathy and

aid. They even declined to hold the many immigrant saloon keepers

up to especial scorn. When the City Council had considered granting

liquor licenses only to the city's most respectable and plush drink-

ing establishments, which were owned and run predominantly by na-

tive-born Cincinnatians, the local temperance journal had opposed

this course, arguing that it "never could see any good reason for per-

mitting a favorite few to peddle poison, and deny the right to many.

The German . . . has just as good a right to make drunkards in a

small way, as the more wealthy, but not more honest American. .. ."26

Although the temperance crusaders showed no overt hostility to

immigrants, they increasingly found reason to resent the attitude of

the Catholic Church toward their reform. The Church had for years

forbidden its members to belong to the temperance fraternal societies

since they used secret passwords and rituals. Once prohibition became

the goal of the movement, the stance of the Catholic hierarchy be-

came even more galling. The Catholic Telegraph lumped prohibition

laws together with "State Education Systems, Infidelity, [and] Panthe-

ism" as "parts of a great whole, at war with God."²⁷ The Church at-

tacked prohibition because it believed that merely passing laws would

not and could not change human behavior. It classed Maine Law cam-

paigners as "quack" reformers, along with advocates of manifest des-

tiny, slavery abolition, "European Red Republicanism," socialism,

Fourierism, and women's rights.²⁸ Predictably, during the anti-Catho-

 

25. Ibid., April 1, 1853.

26. The Western Washingtonian and Sons of Temperance Record, August 16, 1846.

27. Catholic Telegraph, March 19, 1853.

28. Ibid., July 9, 1853.

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Ethnocultural Conflict in Cincinnati                              135

 

lic fervor of the school campaign in the spring of 1853, the city's tem-

perance journal actively supported    the anti-Catholic  Free School

ticket.

Even though the temperance reformers expected strong Catholic op-

position to their campaign for prohibition, they believed they could

win the crucial political support of the non-Catholic Germans. The

county temperance convention proclaimed that "a German mission is

indispensable to success . . . 29 and planned for a German temper-

ance missionary, hired at $500 per year, and for a temperance jour-

nal to be published in German. A later report concluded that the Ger-

mans were "a reading and reflecting people, and if we are in advance

of them in temperance sentiment, it is doubtless mainly attributable

to the fact that they have not had the same opportunities of getting in-

formation.^"30

But to the dismay of temperance activists, the city's non-Catholic

Germans vehemently attacked the Maine Law proposal during the

campaign. German speakers stated that they might have sympathized

with an attempt to prevent drunkards from obtaining hard liquor.

However to call for a ban on the pure native wines and beers of Ger-

mans, "a sober and industrious people,^"31 was fanatical and unjust,

and struck "at the most sacred privileges of free men."³² The dissident

Germans led massive rallies in Cincinnati in opposition to the Maine

Law and temporarily returned to the ranks of the Democratic party

over the issue. With renewed German support, the Democrats swept

to a massive victory, winning an average 57 percent of the vote, com-

pared to 30 percent for the independent temperance ticket; the Whigs

once again ran a distant third with about 9 percent of the vote.

In the aftermath of the fall election, Cincinnati prohibitionists were

left bitter and dismayed. Although they had also failed in other parts

of the state, it was the vote at home that brought the greatest humili-

ation. Leaders directed blame for the defeat at familiar targets: the

combination of "political parties . . . , [wine growers], distillers,

wholesalers, retailers, and 'namby-pamby' editors."³³ But increasingly,

a new enemy was added to the list. The city's temperance journal

noted the success of prohibition candidates in the Western Reserve

region of the state, "where foreigners are not omnipotent. .. ."³⁴ For

 

29. OOTR, February 25, 1853.

30. Ibid., November 11, 1853.

31. Cincinnati Commercial, August 13, 1853.

32. Ibid., September 9, 1853. In later years, German influence within the Republi-

can party brought about the exemption of beer and wine from the prohibitory laws of

Iowa and Michigan.

33. OOTR, November 11, 1853.

34. Ibid., October 28, 1853.

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136                                                OHIO HISTORY

 

Cincinnati, "take out the vote of the German wards," the journal

claimed, and the Maine Law would have carried.³⁵ Quickly, bitter

hostility to the foreign-born spread through the temperance cause.

Cincinnati's first Know Nothing lodge formed the following spring.

By July of 1854, the city supported over a dozen active chapters of

the secret political organization. The Know Nothings at first attacked

only Jesuitism, Popery, and corrupt government. In the 1854 fall elec-

tions the local Know Nothing ticket challenged the Democrats with

a combination of Know Nothing issues and an attack on the Kansas-

Nebraska bill. This ticket picked up the cautious support of non-Cath-

olic Germans: one wrote that they would "try the Know-Nothings

this time for reform, and then if they be humbugs, we will try some

new sort of Know-Nothings next time."³⁶ As a result, the Know Noth-

ing ticket crushed the Democrats in the election. In all five Over-the-

Rhine wards, Democratic party percentages once again dropped pre-

cipitously, falling even lower than they had in the spring 1853 free

school election mayoral race.

Even though prominent Know Nothings headed the 1854 local ticket,

while the state candidate for Supreme Court Judge was known

primarily for his opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, there was

practically no ticket splitting. Voters did not try to distinguish be-

tween anti-Nebraska and anti-Catholic candidates, but saw the Know

Nothing party as representing both positions. Rutherford B. Hayes

wrote his uncle that "Anti-Nebraska, Know-Nothings, and general

disgust with the powers that be, have carried this county by be-

tween seven and eight thousand majority! How people do hate the

Catholics, and what happiness it was to thousands to have a chance to

show it in what seemed a lawful and patriotic manner."³⁷ Even by the

fall of 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska controversy was not so much a cata-

lyst of political change as it was simply an added boost to the popu-

larity of the Know Nothing party.

Given their overwhelming victory that fall, the Know Nothings

might well have been expected to continue emphasizing anti-Cathol-

icism, political reform, and opposition to the expansion of slavery.

But surprisingly, by the Cincinnati city election in the spring of 1855,

the party had instead adopted a strident nativist tone which predict-

ably alienated former German supporters. One non-Catholic Ger-

man wrote that those of his background were faced with a choice be-

tween "two ultra parties," one standing for Popery and the other for

 

 

35. Ibid., November 11, 1853.

36. Baughin, "Nativism," 181-82.

37. Hayes to S. Birchard, October 13, 1854, Williams, Diary, I, 470.

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Ethnocultural Conflict in Cincinnati                              137

 

opposition to all foreigners.³⁸ By election day, it seemed likely that

German votes would tip the balance of power back toward the Demo-

crats. Know Nothing mobs seized and destroyed ballot boxes in two

German wards. Fighting continued for days, resulting in several

deaths. Based on the testimony of election judges, the court declared

the entire Democratic ticket elected. In the aftermath of the riots,

large numbers of native-born supporters deserted the Know Nothing

party, stamped as it now was with the image of lawless and violent

bigotry.³⁹

Why had the Know Nothing party abandoned the safe policy of anti-

Catholicism and embarked instead upon an ill-fated course of nativ-

ism? The answer lies in recognizing three basic groupings within the

party: leaders who were primarily interested in protecting the public

school system or in opposing the expansion of slavery and who there-

fore saw the Catholic church as a bitter enemy and the non-Catholic

Germans as valuable allies; leaders who were principally concerned

with obtaining a prohibitory law and who were convinced that only

by breaking the political power of all the city's foreign-born could their

reform hope to succeed; and, in the words of the Cincinnati Com-

mercial, "a goodly number of gentlemen whose tastes are purely

physical, whose patriotism exhibits itself in . . . a tendency to load

themselves with broadsides of portable artillery and cutlery .. ."

This element of the party was known for "going it strong for our na-

tive land and Anglo-Saxon blood, pitching into the Irish, putting

down the dominion of a foreign priesthood, and kicking up a rumpus

generally."⁴⁰

Between the fall 1854 election and the spring 1855 ballot, the anti-

Catholic leaders who had originally formed the Know Nothing party

were, in effect, ousted from power. The spring ticket, nominated by the

"rowdies" in Rutherford B. Hayes' words, was headed by prominent

prohibitionists and nativists.⁴1 In short, the temperance movement,

bitter over the defeat of the Maine Law in Ohio at the hands of foreign

voters, had allied itself with the unruly, bigoted mob element in the

city, in order to shift the party away from anti-Catholicism and toward

nativism.

In the aftermath of the disastrous spring 1855 election, the Know

Nothing party declined rapidly in popularity. Although a majority of

 

38. Cincinnati Commercial, March 27, 1855.

39. Ibid., April 3, 5, 7, 1855; William A. Baughin, "Ballots and Bullets: The Elec-

tion Day Riots of 1855," Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio Bulletin, XXI

(1963), 267-73.

40. Cincinnati Commercial, September 30, 1854.

41. Hayes to S. Birchard, April 8, 1855, Williams, Diary, 1, 481-82.

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138                                                         OHIO HISTORY

 

voters in both the city and the state were clearly ready to vote against

the Democratic party, a unifying banner had to be found. These vot-

ers had deserted the Whig party, and to a lesser extent the Democratic

party, over their failure to address pressing social issues such as anti-

Catholicism, nativism, and temperance, but it now appeared that these

issues were too divisive and controversial to serve as the unifying fo-

cus of a new party. Indeed, only on the recently revived question of

opposition to the expansion of slavery did these voters share a broad

consensus of opinion. In the summer of 1855, at the first state conven-

tion of the newly formed Republican party, a "Complete Fusion of

Know Nothingism     with Free Soil,"⁴² the Know Nothing forces repre-

sented a majority of the delegates, and many of these were ardent pro-

hibitionists. Yet in a compromise move to promote unity, only slavery

issues were addressed in the platform, while eight of the nine posi-

tions on the state ticket were given to Know Nothings. One result of

this compromise was that German radical leaders campaigned ac-

tively for the Republican ticket.⁴³

When the Republicans triumphed in the state elections that fall,

nativists and prohibitionists were jubilant, confident that with Repub-

licans in office, leaders of the new party would now support laws for

prohibition and extended naturalization. But Republicans strategists

assumed, correctly, that nativists and prohibitionists, having nowhere

else to go, would remain in the party regardless of its stance on ethno-

cultural issues. Instead, the party redoubled its efforts to win support

of German voters by systematically weeding out Know Nothings from

its upper ranks. In 1856, Samuel F. Cary, the foremost temperance

leader in Cincinnati and Ohio, wrote to a friend that although the Re-

publicans had the power in the legislature to pass a prohibitory li-

quor law, they refused to do so out of fear that "they will lose the

foreign vote . . . if they interfere with lager beer & whisky."⁴⁴

The Republican party in the late 1850s continued to concentrate

solely on its opposition to the expansion of slavery. Anti-Catholicism,

nativism, and temperance-those issues that had originally disrupted

the second party system and had prepared the ground for the very ex-

istence of the Republican party-were relentlessly suppressed. As the

 

42. Cincinnati Commercial, July 14, 1855.

43. Ibid.; Eugene H. Roseboom, "Salmon P. Chase and the Know Nothings," Mis-

sissippi Valley Historical Review, XXV (1938), 344-45; Idem., The Civil War Era,

1850-1873, vol. IV of Carl Wittke, ed., The History of the State of Ohio (Columbus,

1944), 311.

44. Samuel F. Cary to Rev. E. W. Jackson, December 12, 1856, Manuscript, Ohio

Historical Society Library; Roseboom, "Chase," 349; Jed Dannenbaum, "The Cru-

sader: Samuel Cary and Cincinnati Temperance," Cincinnati Historical Society Bulle-

tin, XXXIII (1975), 137-51.

• 14
 

Ethnocultural Conflict in Cincinnati                                 139

 

national sectional crisis grew, ethnocultural conflicts faded in im-

portance in the public mind until, during the Civil War, they all but

disappeared in the prevalent unity of the war effort.

The rise and fall of ethnocultural conflict in Cincinnati during the

1850s demonstrates that anti-Catholicism, nativism, and temperance

reform cannot all be treated as reflections of a single mind-set. Anti-

Catholics were not necessarily nativists (indeed, many were immi-

grants themselves). And temperance reformers, although they became

some of the most abusive nativists, launching attacks in the late 1850s

on "degraded and vicious foreigners,"⁴⁵ especially the "bloated, stu-

pid, loathsome" German beer drinkers,⁴⁶ did so only after they clashed

politically with the foreign-born. Until then they had been generally

compassionate in their view of immigrants. The ethnocultural issues

of the 1850s were linked not by their unity of viewpoint or purpose but

by their underlying concern with the social disorder that had become

endemic at mid-century. The economically oriented platforms and

business-as-usual attitude of the Whig party seemed inappropriate

and ineffective in the crisis atmosphere generated by social disorder

and the ethnocultural conflicts to which it gave rise. As one observer

wrote during the 1853 prohibitory law campaign, "the cry of 'banks'

is lost in that of 'rum-shops'; of 'tariff,' in that of 'fanaticism,' . . ."

so that "party traces have lost their power . .. [and] old division

lines are lost in the brilliancy of the new one."47

Finally, the case of Cincinnati suggests that opposition to the exten-

sion of slavery can best be understood, when viewing the local devel-

opment of politics in the North, as a relatively non-controversial issue.

Far from having been a violent catalyst that disrupted party lines and

that led to the breakdown of the second party system, the containment

of slavery was in fact a unifying issue, one that primarily pulled to-

gether all the disparate and disaffected groups of voters-anti-Catholics,

prohibitionists, nativists, free soilers, non-Catholic Germans-who had

earlier broken out of the existing party structure over ethnocultural

concerns.

 

 

 

 

 

 

45. The Crusader, September 1857, 113.

46. Ibid., May 1859, 374-75.

47. Cincinnati Times, October 7, 1853; that the Whigs and Democrats stressed eco-

monic issues in their rhetoric and platforms is not to deny Lee Benson's hypothesis that

the identities of the parties had been shaped largely by ethnic, religious, and cultural

factors. See Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test

Case (Princeton, 1961).

• 15