From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   The Know Nothing party was a nativist political party and movement in the   
   mid-1850s. The party was officially known as the "Native American Party" prior   
   to 1855; thereafter, it was simply known as the "American Party". Members of   
   the movement were    
   required to say "I know nothing" whenever they were asked about its specifics   
   by outsiders, providing the group with its colloquial name.   
      
   Supporters of the Know Nothing movement believed that an alleged "Romanist"   
   conspiracy to subvert civil and religious liberty in the U.S. was being   
   hatched by Catholics. Therefore, they sought to politically organize   
   native-born Protestants in defense of    
   their traditional religious and political values. The Know Nothing movement is   
   remembered for this theme because Protestants feared that Catholic priests and   
   bishops would control a large bloc of voters. In most places, the ideology and   
   influence of the    
   Know Nothing movement lasted only one or two years before it disintegrated due   
   to weak and inexperienced local leaders, a lack of publicly proclaimed   
   national leaders, and a deep split over the issue of slavery. In parts of the   
   South, the party did not    
   emphasize anti-Catholicism as frequently as it emphasized it in the North and   
   it stressed a neutral position on slavery, but it became the main alternative   
   to the dominant pro-slavery Democratic Party.   
      
   The Know Nothings supplemented their xenophobic views with populist appeals.   
   At the state level, the party was, in some cases, progressive in its stances   
   on "issues of labor rights and the need for more government spending" and   
   furnished "support for an    
   expansion of the rights of women, the regulation of industry, and support of   
   measures which were designed to improve the status of working people." It was   
   a forerunner of the temperance movement in the United States.   
      
   The Know Nothing movement briefly emerged as a major political party in the   
   form of the American Party. The collapse of the Whig Party after the passage   
   of the Kansas–Nebraska Act left an opening for the emergence of a new major   
   political party in    
   opposition to the Democratic Party. The Know Nothing movement managed to elect   
   congressman Nathaniel P. Banks of Massachusetts and several other individuals   
   into office in the 1854 elections, and it subsequently coalesced into a new   
   political party which    
   was known as the American Party. Particularly in the South, the American Party   
   served as a vehicle for politicians who opposed the Democrats. Many of the   
   American Party's members and supporters also hoped that it would stake out a   
   middle ground between    
   the pro-slavery positions of Democratic politicians and the radical   
   anti-slavery positions of the rapidly emerging Republican Party. The American   
   Party nominated former President Millard Fillmore in the 1856 presidential   
   election, but he kept quiet about    
   his membership in it, and he personally refrained from supporting the Know   
   Nothing movement's activities and ideology. Fillmore received 21.5% of the   
   popular vote in the 1856 presidential election, finishing behind the   
   Democratic and Republican nominees.    
   Henry Winter Davis, an active Know-Nothing, was elected on the American Party   
   ticket to Congress from Maryland. He told Congress the un-American Irish   
   Catholic immigrants were to blame for the recent election of Democrat James   
   Buchanan as president,    
   stating:   
      
   "The recent election has developed in an aggravated form every evil against   
   which the American party protested. Foreign allies have decided the govt of   
   the country – men naturalized in thousands on the eve of the election. Again   
   in the fierce struggle    
   for supremacy, men have forgotten the ban which the Republic puts on the   
   intrusion of religious influence on the political arena. These influences have   
   brought vast multitudes of foreign-born citizens to the polls, ignorant of   
   American interests, without    
   American feelings, influenced by foreign sympathies, to vote on American   
   affairs; and those votes have, in point of fact, accomplished the present   
   result."   
      
   The party entered a period of rapid decline after Fillmore's loss. In 1857 the   
   Dred Scott v. Sandford pro-slavery decision of the Supreme Court of the U.S.   
   further galvanized opposition to slavery in the North, causing many former   
   Know Nothings to join    
   the Republicans. The remnants of the American Party largely joined the   
   Constitutional Union Party in 1860 and they disappeared during Civil War.   
      
   Anti-Catholicism was widespread in colonial America, but it played a minor   
   role in American politics until the arrival of large numbers of Irish and   
   German Catholics in the 1840s. It then reemerged in nativist attacks on   
   Catholic immigration. It appeared    
   in New York City politics as early as 1843 under the banner of the American   
   Republican Party. The movement quickly spread to nearby states using that name   
   or Native American Party or variants of it. They succeeded in a number of   
   local and Congressional    
   elections, notably in 1844 in Philadelphia, where the anti-Catholic orator   
   Lewis Charles Levin was elected Representative from Pennsylvania's 1st   
   district. In the early 1850s, numerous secret orders grew up, of which the   
   Order of United Americans and the    
   Order of the Star Spangled Banner came to be the most important. They emerged   
   in New York in the early 1850s as a secret order that quickly spread across   
   the North, reaching non-Catholics, particularly those non-Catholics who were   
   lower middle class or    
   skilled workers.   
      
   The name Know Nothing originated in the semi-secret organization of the party.   
   When a member of the party was asked about his activities, he was supposed to   
   say, "I know nothing." Outsiders derisively called the party's members "Know   
   Nothings", and the    
   name stuck. In 1855, the Know Nothings first entered politics under the   
   American Party label.   
      
      
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