ABSTRACT
During the early nineteenth century, large numbers of Irish and German Catholics emigrated to the United States. Their foreign background and religion prompted the country’s first nativist movement, from roughly 1820 to 1860. In this instance nativism does not refer to indigenous populations, but to a notion of the rights and privileges of the descendants of the nation’s English, Protestant founders. The movement was not only anti-immigrant, but profoundly anti-Catholic. Nativists expressed their opposition to Catholicism and Catholic immigrants through sermons, popular print culture, politics, and violence, both rhetorical and physical. The chapter traces three episodes of nativist violence in particular: The burning of Mount Benedict convent in 1834, the Philadelphia Riots of 1844, and protests against a visiting Italian Catholic archbishop in 1854. What it calls the Popery panic arose out of real social and economic changes, wrought by immigration, industrialization, urbanization, and Western expansion, but was also driven by conspiracy theories, moral panic, and religious bias.
