![]() ![]() Some parties-such as the Federalist Party-were able to put presidents in power others, like the Anti-Masonic Party, accumulated supporters by embarking on social and moral crusades and some parties splintered off or faded into obscurity after brief stints of relevance. This wealth of options inspired feelings of patriotism and civic duty in Americans and contributed to the rich political tapestry of the time. However, American voters weren’t always limited to the Republican and Democratic parties in the 19th Century, the American political system was comprised of multiple parties that encompassed a wide range of beliefs and ideologies and enjoyed various levels of success and notoriety. The same candidate got only 22 votes here the following year.Considering how deeply synonymous the two-party system and American politics have become, it’s almost impossible to imagine having alternatives at the voting booth. Although the Native party had had some success in Philadelphia, the best showing it could make in Cumberland County was 148 votes out of about 4600 cast for its 1845 statewide canal commissioner candidate. The Carlisle Herald, Carlisle's Whig paper, had even criticized the Kansas-Nebraska bill for excluding foreigners about to be citizens, such as "thrifty" Germans, from voting and holding office in the territories. The local Whig newspapers, and certainly the Democratic, had not shown any hostility toward Catholics or immigrants in the years before 1854, as they did toward black residents. Although a Catholic community had existed in Carlisle, at least, since the late eighteenth century, its size was small. The American party attracted the loyalties of many Cumberland County voters between 18. 4 When Know Nothings did organize a political party, they called it the "American” party. In other words, Americans should rule America. These goals included requiring a twenty-one year residence by immigrants before they might qualify for citizenship, and restricting political office to native-born, Protestant Americans. When asked, a member should reply, "I know nothing." The Order did not originally act as an independent party, but exerted its influence to support Democrats, Whigs or "independent" candidates favoring the Order's goals. Members of the Order recognized each other by handshakes, signs and passwords, and were forbidden to reveal anything about the Order's name, membership or goals to anyone not a member. The Know Nothing movement began in 1850 as the secret Order of the Star-Spangled Banner in New York. Disintegration of the whig party professional#2 There was also a growing sense of impatience with professional politicans unresponsive to the popular will, a will that more and more embraced nativism and anti-Catholicism among native-born Protestants. However, opposition to Catholicism sharpened in 18 with controversies over control of Catholic church land, the reading of (Protestant) Bibles in school, and public funding of Catholic parochial schools. In response to these problems, the Native Party had formed in the mid-1840s and captured some seats in Congress, but it failed to gain widespread support before 1852. Worst of all (for supporters of the Whig party), they voted overwhelmingly for Democrats. Urban immigration brought with it drunkeness, crime, poverty, and competition for jobs. This was the time, "when the Know Nothing furor swept over the land-when former majorities, political status, personal fitness and all similar considerations were tumbled into the common whirlpool of temporary political disintegration." 1Īmericans had had a long tradition of suspicion and fear of Roman Catholicism, and added to this a dislike for immigrants when Catholic Irish and Germans flooded from Europe into the northeastern coastal cities of the United States during the 1840s and 1850s. This movement, whose supporters were known derisively as "Know Nothings", came to Cumberland County and shaped its politics for more than two years. But 1854 was also the year that a new movement boiled up out of New York and Philadelphia to spill out across the entire country, a movement dedicated to suppressing the political power of immigrants in general, and Catholic immigrants in particular. Disintegration of the whig party free#This act, the warfare between pro- and anti-slavery settlers in Kansas that followed, and the rise of the free soil Republican party, so inflamed hostile feelings between North and South that the firing on Fort Sumter took place less than seven years later. It was the year of the Kansas-Nebraska act, which allowed slavery to spread into the formerly free Kansas territory. In 1854 Americans took a detour from the road to civil war. ![]()
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