Immigration, Crime, and the Economic Origins of Political Nativism in the Antebellum West

Abstract

Abstract Scholars have described political nativism during the antebellum era of US history as the product of cultural paranoia, social anxiety, and political expediency. Much less examined are the ways in which economic motives contributed to political nativism. 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. The outbreak of political nativism in the border city of St. Louis provides a representative example of the relationship between immigrants’ conditions, the bloody election-day riots of the mid-1850s, and the dramatic rise of the National 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 large-scale outbreak of political nativism in 1854.