"Native Soil": Nativists, Colonizationists, and the Rhetoric of Nationality

Abstract

"NATIVE SOIL": NATIVISTS, COLONIZATIONISTS, AND THE RHETORIC OF NATIONALITY Dale T. Knobel "What shall we do with the colored people?" began the editorial in the January 1852 issue of the Republic, "A Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Politics, and Art." "This is now the great question with the pseudo-philanthropists, and the conclusion seems to be, that we must send them to Africa. To this proposition the colored people object, and, as we think, very reasonably and very naturally." Following this opening sally against the African colonization movement and its chief institutional patron, the American Colonization Society, Thomas R. Whitney added a much stronger opinion. "We are utterly opposed to the proposition of a wholesale expatriation of the colored race. . . . We question very much the assumed right to remove them, or the policy of encouraging them to emigrate."1 The American Colonization Society had confronted such criticism in leading forums for antislavery thought since the early 1830s. But the Republic was no mouthpiece for abolitionism. It was the official organ of the Order of United Americans, a New York City-based nativist secret society which had a richly deserved reputation for conservatism on issues connected with race and section. Founded in 1845, the OL1A devoted itself to most of the conventional goals of antebellum nativism. a twenty-one year residency requirement for naturalized citizenship, restriction of public office-holding to Protestants—preferably nativeborn —and the denial of public assistance to parochial education. In 1851, Thomas Whitney, one of the Order's organizers, won for his young journal the right to speak for the Grand Executive Committee and the New York State Chancery of the OUA.2 Considering the Order's history and political affiliations, Whitney's use of the Republic to denounce colonizationism at first seems unaccountable. Certainly there is little in 1 "The Colored People," Republic 3 (Jan. 1852): 40. 2 "A Good Word for the Republic," Republic 2 (July 1851): 45. Civil War History, Vol. XXVII, No. 4 Copyright© 1981 byThe Kent State University Press 0009-8078/81/2704-0002 $01.00/0 NATIVISM315 the historiography of antebellum nativism leading us to anticipate such an attack. That it can be explained is testimony to the importance nativist leaders invested in the avowed ideology of the movement, however heterogeneous nativism's sources. For Whitney's diatribe was only a particularly direct example of the sensitivity displayed by midcentury nativist ideologues about their conception of who should be accounted qualified to participate fully in American life. That Whitney and other representatives of the Order of United Americans found African colonization threatening suggests the extent to which a racial definition of American nationality interfered with an ethnocentric one. The falling out of conservative exponents of cultural and racial homogeneity over the question of black residency rights indicates just how unsettled the popular understanding of nationality remained in the midnineteenth century. During the 1850s, no group of northern politicians worked harder to evade the troublesome issues raised by pressures for slavery expansion and antislavery resistance or to conciliate southern sentiment than the leadership of the Order of United Americans. Most of Thomas Whitney's associates descended from the anti-Seward wing of the New York State Whig party which subscribed to the view that an effective challenge to the Democracy could only be sustained by an intersectional coalition of voters. Its head, Millard Fillmore, insisted that the only "national" position on slavery was acquiescence in silencing antislavery agitation, especially in Congress, and surrender of all legislation on the subject of slavery extension to the affected territories. Like Fillmore's "Silver Grey" Whigs, the Order's strength was concentrated in metropolitan New York where the interest of many merchants, manufacturers , and their employees was in intersectional harmony and commerce.3 By 1850, the two groups found it convenient to make use of one another. Conservative New York Whigs observed that by currying OUA favor they could enlist voters with nativistic concerns in their effort to wrest control of the state party apparatus from the reputedly antislavery Seward element. The OUA, which retained its identity as a fraternal society and resisted the temptation to take on the character of a political party, relied upon...