Inventing America’s First Immigration Crisis

Front matter

Inventing America’s First Immigration Crisis

Political Nativism in the Antebellum West

TF

Introduction

HY HAVE AMERICANS EXPRESSED concern about immigration

at some times but not at others? In pursuit of an answer, this book

examines America’s first nativist movement. Open immigration and citizenship persist in the United States because Americans have historically believed their principles are universal. The founding generation made it radically easy for immigrants to become full American citizens. Boards of education provided free public schooling for foreign-born children. A host of benevolent organizations raised enormous amounts of money to assist newcomers to the states. U.S. cities announced to the world that they were open for business. Citizens made these efforts to spread the American gospel of “Capitalism, Protestantism, and Republicanism.” Political nativism—the exception—replaced tolerance— the rule—when Americans panicked that assimilation, conversion, and economic progress were not happening quickly enough. The first self-proclaimed nativists in the United States seized the reins of political power at the national level for only a few years between 1854 and 1856, but the tactic they employed, namely identifying “outsiders” as the source of their various anxieties, has persisted as a useful political tool.

Nativism is the idea that a certain group of people can be identified as original to, or the rightful heirs to, a geopolitical territory; consequently, “natives” claim the privilege of deciding who belongs and who counts as an “outsider” based on supposed foreign connections.’ The case could be made that nativism in this sense is universal. Nativist movements stress the interests of the locally born as a priority over nonnative, or foreign-born, people (for example, “Americans First”). Political nativism describes the coming together of nativism—the belief in inheritance—and a nativist movement—the reemphasis on “natives first”—to induce measurable political changes. At its core is the innate human desire to feel at home. What people need to feel “at home” varies across time and space but often entails economic stability and some combination of uniform behaviors, values, religious beliefs, language, or race. It must be noted that nativism does not always entail racism, although the intensification of race-based ideas and acts often corresponds to a rise in political nativism.” Nativists fashion themselves as protectors of local attributes against perceived foreign threats in their midst and are often willing to take extreme actions.*

America’s first nativist movement responded to the rapid influx of roughly 4.2 million European immigrants between 1840 and 1860. Immigrants composed up to 15 percent of the total population of the United States. These figures do not take into account second-generation immigrants—that is, children born to immigrant parents on American soil.* Most of these newcomers were German or Irish. Not only did they speak different languages, but they also harbored diverse cultural customs and ideas, approached politics in alternative ways, and worshipped within different religious traditions. While the vast majority of white Americans born on American soil worshipped in Protestant Christian churches, approximately 95 percent of all Irish immigrants after 1840 were Catholic, while more than 30 percent of Germans were as well.’

Political nativism gradually emerged within the ranks of the American Republican, or “Native American,” Party in the mid-1840s, the Know-Nothing Order in the 1850s, and the National American, or “Know-Nothing,” Party between 1854 and 1858. In the election of 1856, the presidential candidate running on behalf of the American Party received roughly 22 percent of the popular vote. The American Party thus became the second-largest third party in American history. Its official platform demanded raising the residency requirement for citizenship from five to twenty-one years, supported only native-born Americans for office, and resisted all who would pledge a higher allegiance to a foreign church or state than to the U.S. Constitution.® Certain anti-immigrant thought patterns in the antebellum era have since been repeated, especially amid demographic changes due to immigration, yet much of the historical context for American nativism, and thus its meaning, has varied across time and place.’

Before the 1960s, much of the relevant scholarship disregarded antebellum nativist propaganda as mere cultural panic or xenophobia. In the classic book on the subject, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860 (1938), historian Ray Allen Billington argued that American nativism originated in and was driven by English prejudices and religious fanaticism.’ Historian Richard Hofstadter famously equated political nativism to paranoia.” With Strangers in the Land (1955), historian John Higham inaugurated a more nuanced line of inquiry about what American nativism has revealed about society across time and place. He argued that Americans are more likely to endorse political nativism when they perceive threats to their social status within the nation.’° Higham changed the way scholars treated American nativism, historian Jason McDonald observed, as “not just the preserve of ‘crackpots’ but a major characteristic of American public opinion.” Rather than religious fanaticism, a common desire to identify and solidify proper roles within the nation motivated these movements.'! Much of the scholarship since Higham has focused on nativism as a national identity-making process.12

Historian Tyler Anbinder’s seminal book, Nativism and Slavery (1992), attributed the rapid rise and demise of the American Party between 1854 and 1856 to the sectional crisis over slavery. Political expediency was the primary factor, according to Anbinder. After the collapse of the Whig Party in 1854, many ex-Whigs in the North courted the Know-Nothings because they initially promised antislavery and antialcohol reforms. Although most members were indeed anti-Catholic and xenophobic, once party leaders downplayed the issue of slavery, ex-Whigs in the North left the American Party for the solidly antislavery Republican Party.” Anbinder’s account of political nativism still holds much of its original value. As it focuses primarily on the Northeast, however, it does not entirely explain why so many proslavery and neutral-on-slavery Americans in the western border states supported Know-Nothingism. As most studies have focused on the coasts, historians have not yet produced a complete explanation for why residents of the North American interior espoused political nativism when they did and why the nation’s bloodiest election-day riots erupted in western cities, namely the St. Louis Election Riot of 1852, the St. Louis “Know-Nothing” Riot of 1854, the Cincinnati Election Day Riot of 1855, the Chicago “Lager” Riot of 1855, and the Louisville “Bloody Monday” Riot of 1855.

During the antebellum era, Americans often thought of the West in three parts, the Far West, like California, which became the destination of some migrants after the Mexican-American War in 1848, the Trans-Mississippi West, or the territory west of the Mississippi River, and the First West, the region in the interior touched by the Mississippi River and its tributaries. Unless otherwise noted, all references to the “West” in this study generally refer to the Upper Mississippi and Ohio River valleys.” Several regional factors rendered the “First West” a rather distinct place. Residents experienced ceaseless migration, rapid growth, a large and active German immigrant population, and a politics of compromise between the slaveholding states of Kentucky and Missouri and the free states of Illinois and Ohio. American-immigrant tensions increased in the western border states regardless of their slaveholding status, precisely in the areas where immigration from Europe surged.!° In focusing on the antebellum West, this study illuminates the cultural, economic, and political issues that originally motivated American nativism and explains how it ultimately shaped the political relationship between church and state.

À Introduction

The antebellum nativist movement aspired to replace local tribalism, regional sectionalism, and religious factionalism with a national identity based on a set of shared American values, but immigrants challenged the status quo.” Chapter one explains how unprecedented levels of immigration, the evangelical revivalism of the “Second Great Awakening,” and rapid westward expansion reignited fears of Catholicism as a corrosive force. For native-born Americans living in the mid-nineteenth century, the successful assimilation of German and Irish immigrants, many of whom were Catholic, was not a foregone conclusion. The United States thus became a testing ground for what happens when a pluralist nation committed to universal democratic principles encounters an unexpected host of immigrants with unpopular beliefs. Native-born Americans often expressed more concern about European immigration to the West than to any other region of the country because Catholics and immigrants would influence new towns there as they took shape. European immigrants did not spread out evenly across North America; rather, they followed regular pathways of settlement and concentrated in northern and western cities. Much has been written about their influence in big port cities like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia; immigration to bourgeoning western cities like Chicago, Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis occurred at a rapid rate as well. Fifty percent of all immigrants who came to the United States during this period arrived at the port of New Orleans before they began their journey up the Mississippi River.” By the time of the Civil War, 60 percent of St. Louis’s population of more than 160,000 was foreign born.” These daily arrivals fueled the astonishing growth of previously nonexistent Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches, seminaries for priests, Catholic schools, and German and Irish groceries and pubs. In entire quarters of the city, one could hardly hear anything spoken other than German or English in an Irish brogue. Foreign-born residents increasingly influenced state and national election cycles. Many Americans believed that the outcome of religious competition in the West would decide the fate of the republic.

Catholics remained primary targets, but chapter two explores an ensuing culture war that circumscribed various immigrant customs deemed culturally corrosive by native-born Americans. Schools performed the vital function of teaching children the values that supposedly united Americans into one nation. Because many Americans insisted on using the King James Bible as a textbook in public schools, an essentially theological disagreement between immigrants and the native born became a national dilemma. Likewise, local leaders utilized Sunday closing laws to prevent Catholic feasting and German-style recreation on the Lord’s Day. The Sunday laws not only enabled native-born Americans to define the requirements for national belonging but also compelled immigrants of all backgrounds and creeds, ironically enough, to unite politically against Sunday regulations and thus mainstream “Americanness.” This process was most clearly observed among the German population in the antebellum West. The school and Sunday controversies directly motivated the rise of political nativism in the mid-18 4.08.7"

Chapter three explains the power of nativist rhetoric to mobilize disaffected voters across the country. Rhetoric emphasizing the incongruities between the beliefs and behaviors of native-born Americans and immigrants signaled simultaneously a national-identity crisis and a solution. In the American nativist mindset, Protestant forms of Christianity, as opposed to Roman Catholic practices, formed the basis of American values and behaviors. To this end, nativists developed a mythical, nationalist story that rendered Catholicism incompatible with true Americanism and Christianity.”

Chapter four examines the intermittent phase of secret nativist fraternalism during the early 1850s. To this day, especially little is known about the Order of Know-Nothings in the West. Shedding new light on the inner sanctums of such orders has proven particularly difficult because Know-Nothings attempted to confound outsiders with misinformation. The extant evidence, including minute books and private correspondence, reveals, on one hand, continuity with the political nativism of the mid-1840s and, on the other, the forging of a new political response to an increasingly polarized and volatile nation. The fraternal secrecy of these organizations exhibited a hallmark of American nativism: the tendency of its most ardent supporters to take drastic measures to protect their communities against unwanted outside influences. Another hallmark of American nativism, which the Know-Nothing movement in the West well attested, has been the tendency of nativists on the fringe to mimic the very behaviors and tactics they have projected upon their enemies. Their version of secret democracy featured as a perverse imitation of popular anti-Catholic motifs.”

Scholars have attributed political nativism during the antebellum era to cultural paranoia, social anxiety, and political expediency. Much less examined are the ways in which economic motives contributed to it. During the late 1840s and early 1850s, Americans in urban areas resented higher expenditures on poorhouses, prisons, mental asylums, police, and other institutions that expanded to serve immigrants. Chapter five argues that the outbreak of political nativism in western cities provides a representative example of the relationship between immigrant conditions, the election riots of the mid-1850s, and the dramatic rise of the American Party. Cultural issues and the potential increase in immigrant voting power intensified economic-related resentment among the native-born population and resulted in the widespread outbreak of political nativism.

Chapter six explains why Know-Nothingism, while rhetorically powerful, struggled to overcome certain longstanding regional disputes, legislative limitations, and political circumstances. The debate over slavery raised seemingly insurmountable sectional disagreements. The increasing violence at the polls ironically forged the very thing nativists had feared: a coalition of Americans and immigrants, German and Irish, Catholic and Protestant, rallied together against the nativist onslaught. Moreover, the American Party tried to garner broad political support at the national level for immigration reform and additional social controls, but even contemporaries who sympathized with some of their fears rejected their policy goals as “un-American.””

Public discourse eventually forged the transformation ofbase anti-Catholicism within the nativist movement into a greater commitment to the ideal of church-state separation. Despite its hallmark bigotry, the nativist movement yielded a relatively more inclusive American civil religion in which it did not matter if one was Protestant or Catholic, only that each citizen pledge his highest allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, the guarantor of religious freedom. Nothing in this rearticulated formulation required an explicitly “Protestant Christian” language. Nativists in the West cast their net so wide by the end of 1854 that even German and Irish citizens, Catholics and Jews, could potentially embrace their principles, which they increasingly did during the Civil War era. Religious prejudices remained, but the country’s first bout of nativism culminated in a renewal of Americans’ commitment to the separation of church and state.” These otherwise subtle developments are clearly observed in the antebellum West.

Native-born Americans compelled Catholics and immigrants who might have otherwise shared an affinity for monarchism to accept American-style democracy; Catholics and immigrants compelled many Americans to accept a more inclusive definition of religious freedom. During the era of anti-Catholic revolutions in 1840s Europe, the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy remained uneasy about the compatibility of democracy with its teachings and ecclesiastical structure. Political nativism in the United States might have seemed like another dark mark against secular democracy, yet Catholic American leaders around the country constructed a series of powerful arguments contra political nativism. “Catholic Americanness” developed in this milieu as a direct response to more exclusive versions of nationalism. American democracy, U.S. Catholics joined together in arguing, was the best mode of government for Catholics because, unlike some of the European regimes, it at least ensured their religious freedom.

That claim remained a debatable point, but the very act of asserting it seemed to warm Catholic immigrants to the idea of making America a new home. The constitutional principle of free exercise of religion was something with which both sides could firmly agree.”

Religious freedom thus became a panacea for many significant contests over individual rights long before U.S. courts bore anything resembling the power they gained at the turn of the twentieth century. The principle doubled as a catalyst for ethnic inclusion. Religious acts are often indistinguishable from cultural or ethnic customs, and thus the right to express one’s religious beliefs became indistinguishable from the freedom to express one’s cultural heritage or ethnicity in public spaces. By appealing to Americans’ special valuing of religious liberty, immigrants secured the potential to choose a path of gradual integration into U.S. society at a time when constitutional law did not necessarily guarantee equal treatment of newcomers, minority groups, or people of color.”

Nativists underestimated the resiliency of America’s democratic institutions. The ensuing debates between Americans and immigrants transformed U.S. political culture to yield an expanded, more inclusive, and more resilient system of democracy. The right to free worship has historically served as one of the most reliable sources of individual freedom in the United States. It is no wonder, then, why Americans have often framed their respective causes in the language of religious liberty. Overall, this study offers valuable insight into the historic role of nativism in American politics. The epilogue sheds light on present-day concerns regarding immigration, including the role of anti-Islamic appeals in the elections of 2016.

INVENTING AMERICA’S FIRST IMMIGRATION CRISIS draws on a vast assortment of literature in archives spread across the Midwest, including rare books, campaign paraphernalia, court records, minute books, newspapers, political pamphlets, private correspondence, religious tracts, sermons, speeches, and state congressional records. The region generated its fair share of nativist propaganda as well as immigrant responses in German, Irish, and Catholic communications, both public and private. Primary-source materials from the Chicago Historical Society, the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Cincinnati Historical Society, and the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Library Records feature prominently, as do records housed at the Missouri State Archives, Missouri History Museum, Pius Library at Saint Louis University, Olin Library at Washington University, and Western Historical Manuscript Collection at the University of Missouri.

A fellowship from the Filson Historical Society afforded me the opportunity to research their rich archives in Louisville, Kentucky. The William E. Foley Fellowship provided me a second chance to mine the St. Louis criminal-court records housed in the Missouri State Archives. Iam grateful to the Department of History at Saint Louis University for generously funding several research trips and to the Department of History and Philosophy at Troy University for sponsoring paper presentations at numerous conferences. Special thanks to the Journal of American Ethnic History, American Nineteenth Century History, and the Missouri Historical Review for permitting me to include research published in past issues of their journals.”

Many wonderful people assisted me during this project. I am much indebted to my dissertation advisor, Lorri Glover, a wise teacher, ruthless editor, and devoted friend. I have appreciated the consistently good advice of my colleagues at Saint Louis University, especially Scott McDermott, who commented on every chapter of my dissertation while he worked on his own. I am thankful for Maura Farrelly and Katie Oxx, both of whom offered crucial feedback on early drafts of my book manuscript. Special thanks to my colleagues at Troy University for their support. The editors and readers at Fordham University Press recommended substantial revisions that vastly improved the quality of this book, for which I am deeply grateful.

CHAPTER I The Valley of Decision

Ifwe gain the West, all is safe; if we lose it, all is lost.

—Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher, 1830

HE AMERICAN REVOLUTION TRANSFORMED a social system

founded on appearance, aristocracy, and church affiliation into one

based on a shared set of values. Rather than luck of birth, certain values determined one’s belonging to the American nation: the belief in natural rights to life, liberty, and property; the beliefin the sovereignty of the people; the belief in promotion by merit; and the belief in an individual’s freedom to think whatever one wants to think without the threat of persecution from the state, to say whatever one wants to say, to print opinions in public forums, to assemble with likeminded individuals, and to petition the government to change undesirable policies. These were the building blocks of modern democracy enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. To believe in them was to belong.

One of the most radical elements of the U.S. Constitution was its neutrality on religion. The governments of France and Spain officially privileged the Roman Catholic Church; the king of England doubled as the head of the Church of England. But the United States became one of the first modern countries to deliberately ot select an official state religion. The unamended Constitution, ratified in 1788, mentioned religion only once (in Article 6, clause 3): “No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” The delegates at the Constitutional Convention knew exactly what this meant: men of all religious persuasions could serve as government officials.” The founders ushered in a new degree of toleration for a plurality of religious denominations. Although men who claimed membership in the Episcopalian Church composed the majority, the convention itself represented a diversity of religious affiliations, including Congregationalists, Quakers, Lutherans, and Methodists. Two Catholics signed the Constitution, Daniel

IO CHAPTERI

Carroll of Maryland and Thomas Fitzsimons of Pennsylvania. At least thirteen of the thirty-nine signers were affiliated with the Order of Freemasons.’ Furthermore, the First Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1791, ensured that the federal government would not prefer or persecute one religious group over another: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” It was determined then, at least at the national level, that religion would remain a private matter.“

Although the delegates to the Constitutional Convention established a secular federal government that could not endorse one religion in particular (or any religion for that matter), this did not mean that Americans wanted to completely remove religion from all governmental functions. From state constitutions down to the level of city ordinances, local American law often has invoked God and privileged Christianity, namely Protestant forms of Christianity. Massachusetts maintained an official state religion, Congregationalism, until its highest state court deemed this unconstitutional in 1833. Connecticut also chose Congregationalism as the state’s official religion until adopting a new constitution in 1818. New Hampshire at the same time permitted only five official state religions, none of which were Roman Catholic.’

U.S. courts eventually forced the disestablishment of preferred religious denominations in American states. In this way the United States matched the countries around the Atlantic Ocean in its level of religious tolerance under law. The United Kingdom, for example, passed the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, which after centuries of persecution finally permitted Catholic citizens to vote, hold office, and generally practice their religion without harassment. Catholic France likewise removed punishments for Huguenots (French Calvinists) in the country. Just as Catholicism retained privileges in France, as did Anglicanism in England, mainstream Protestant denominations in the United States continued to enjoy and expect preferential treatment, especially at local levels.‘

Hypothetically, anyone could become an American citizen. The U.S. government provided immigrants a simple pathway to citizenship after five years of residency. State governments enforced their own, often more lenient rules for naturalization. Asa result of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, an open-state policy in the West permitted residents, once they constituted a population of 60,000 in a given territory, to apply for admission as a new state in the American union. Territorial and state governments could determine residency requirements for enfranchisement. Most western states allowed immigrants to vote after merely two years of residency and a declaration of their intent to naturalize. In an attempt to attract laborers, some, such as Indiana, naturalized immigrants upon

Tbe Valley of Decision II arrival. Open immigration, westward expansion, and state-directed naturalization policies ensured the emergence of a radically diverse American citizenry.

By the 1830s, the unexpectedly rapid pace of immigration and western settlement posed a serious challenge to American national identity. What exact values would unite such a diverse array of peoples spread across the North American continent? Who did and did not belong? Rapid demographic change and territorial expansion triggered America’s first nativist movement.

Despite religious pluralism in America, anti-Catholic sentiment figured prominently in nineteenth-century conversations about immigration policy and western settlement. Many European immigrants to the United States affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church, while most native-born Americans embraced some form of Protestant Christianity. Americans’ anti-Catholic prejudices were part of the legacy of bygone centuries of theological divergence dating back to the Protestant Reformation. Theologically, Catholic doctrines traditionally emphasized the collective over the individual in matters pertaining to salvation. Historically and politically, Roman Catholicism had grown in prestige and power around the world alongside monarchical systems of government. The American Revolution raised additional concerns about the compatibility of Roman Catholicism with a democratic form of government.

Mass immigration, rapid westward expansion, and fervent religious revivalism reawakened the anti-Catholicism that had been so stark in the colonial era. The Upper Mississippi and Ohio River valleys, what most Americans thought of as the “West,” became a significant site of intense competition between Protestant and Catholic migrants, with the entire fate of the American experiment seeming to hang in the balance. Americanism became tied to visions of conquering the West with American customs and values.

The Mississippi Valley as National Crucible

The generation of Americans huddled along the East Coast around the time of the American Revolution imagined the lands west of the Appalachian Mountains as a vast “wilderness,” majestic and treacherous, trafficked by Indians but nonetheless a desolate and uncharted place. And it was all theirs for the taking, at least according to the terms of the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which granted the newly formed American republic a massive endowment of formerly British-occupied territory below Canada, above Spanish Florida, and stretching all the way west to the Mississippi River. Then in 1803 imperial pressures compelled the ruler of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, to sell the Louisiana Territory west of the Mississippi River, approximately 827,000 square miles, to President Thomas Jefferson’s administration for fifteen million dollars. In just twenty years’ time, the United States doubled in size and then doubled again. Before the Revolutionary era, very few Anglo-Americans ventured beyond the Kentucky and Ohio Territories. The acquisitions of 1783 and 1803 motivated rapid westward expansion thereafter.

The presence of indigenous Americans; native-born French and Spanish colonists; centuries-old Dominican, Franciscan, and Jesuit missions; and other sundry groups—this populated West—did not square well with American designs. Many of the French and Spanish-speaking creole inhabitants of major hubs like New Orleans and St. Louis remained even after their mother countries had withdrawn. When Anglo-American migrant John Fletcher Darby approached St. Louis from the east bank of the Mississippi River with his family in 1818, he marveled at the “striking and imposing appearance” of this formidable town of 4,000 French Catholic residents. French fur traders Pierre Laclede and Auguste Chouteau had founded the city in 1764, twelve years before Americans declared their independence, and named it in honor of their monarch’s patron saint, King Louis IX. Darby remembered that the residents’ “strange habiliments, manner, and jabbering in the French language ... had a new and striking effect upon myself and the other children, coming as we did from the plantation in the Southern country.” Even “the negroes of the town all spoke French,” he gawked, and attended mass too.’

Darby became the mayor of St. Louis seventeen years later. By that time, in 1835, the entire region was undergoing a profound transformation in character from being predominantly indigenous American, French, and Catholic to Anglo-American and Protestant Christian. When the United States acquired the vast territory west of the Mississippi River, the Missouri region had no Baptist, Methodist, or Presbyterian churches. By 1836, each denomination represented more than 200 congregations, and over two-thirds of Missouri’s population affiliated with one of these Christian sects. Americans took this as confirmation that all of the land drained by the Mississippi River and its tributaries belonged to them as their “new Canaan,” a popular allusion to the land promised to the ancient Jews in the Old Testament.*

The founding generation welcomed immigrants to join the American experiment, participate in democratic government, and settle the West.’ Indeed, the availability of land in the North American interior attracted a steady stream of immigrants from Europe. After the states ratified the Constitution, approximately 15,000 immigrants, the majority of whom were white Protestants from

Tbe Valley of Decision B the British Isles and enslaved Africans, arrived in the United States annually.’ In 1790, when the total population of the original thirteen states and the brand new states of Kentucky and Tennessee reached 3,929,652 (including 757,208 black slaves), Americans with Irish ancestry constituted about 8 percent of the total population and German Americans 7 percent, while figures for residents with familial ties to Holland, France, Sweden, and elsewhere were substantially smaller. Most residents who were not British or African were born in America.!!

Watered by the world’s fourth-largest river system, the Upper Mississippi and Ohio River valleys offered fertile soil and teeming wildlife.” Before the advent of railroads, American migrants concentrated in the booming cities of Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis because they lay at the epicenter of river traffic in the interior. Chicago boomed later in the 1850s once the construction of canals and railroads increased opportunities for trade. During most of the antebellum era, Cincinnati ranked as the sixth-largest city in the United States, followed closely by St. Louis.” The population of the Old Northwest increased from 1.5 million in 1830 to 7 million in 1860, constituting over 25 percent of America’s total white population.

Charles B. Boynton, an agent of the American Reform Tract and Book Society and minister of the Congregationalist Church, provided a mental image to describe development in the region at the time. “If we start at St. Louis and draw a semi-circular line northward and round to Pittsburgh, it will enclose a system of Railways north of the Ohio [River],” Boynton explained, which “bear commerce to Cincinnati and concentrate upon her as their focal point.” If one completed the southern half of the semicircle, “there is a Southern system of Railways pointing inward upon Cincinnati.” The main metropolises dotting the map of the West included Cincinnati; the Ohio River town of Louisville, 100 miles southwest; the Mississippi River town of St. Louis, 300 miles west of Cincinnati; and finally the Great Lakes port of Chicago, 300 miles north. The rivers and railroads connected the dots. By the 1850s, Chicago, Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis had become significant commercial and cultural centers. It was with a profound sense of the regions interconnected expansion that Reverend Boynton noted that the West’s “pulsations for good or evil will be felt throughout the land.”

Policymakers did not expect immigrants to travel to developing western states so rapidly and in such great numbers during the 1840s. Between 1840 and 1860, approximately 4.2 million immigrants arrived in the United States, 1.7 million of whom came from Ireland and 1.3 million from the German Confederation. The British constituted the next-largest immigrant group.” The population of