Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration by Harold Holzer

Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration by Harold Holzer published by Dutton (2024)

Harold Holzer is one of the foremost scholars of Abraham Lincoln and his presidency. I was at a talk back a decade ago in which he was a participant and I was surprised to hear him discuss issues of immigration during the Civil War Era with a great deal of sophistication. When I heard a couple of years ago that Holzer was working on a book examining Lincoln’s views on immigration and his interactions with immigrants, I felt that he was the perfect author to take this subject on.

The Concise Lincoln Library published a good short treatment of Lincoln and immigrants in 2015 by Jason H. Silverman. But this volume by Holzer really fleshes out the story. If you have read any of his books on Lincoln, you know that Holzer is scholarly, with a detailed knowledge of the period, and with an engaging writing style that draws readers into the narrative. Holzer has done so much research on his subjects that he always has some involved story that makes his more prescient thesis easily understandable. And, to move the story along, he always has an Irish joke (told by Lincoln) to illustrate his points, one of which is that Lincoln loved ethnic humor.

This work is a major treatment of Lincoln and immigration. At more than 450 pages, Holzer explores when Lincoln began to experience immigrant America-not until he was a teenager and went down the Mississippi to New Orleans. His hometown had very few immigrants even coming through it. Holzer also traces Lincoln’s encounters with xenophobic bigots who were called, by themselves(!), Know Nothings. Lincoln opposed the ideas of the Know Nothings, but not too loudly. While the Know  Nothings were equally strong in the South as in the North,  in the Northern states, many of the anti-immigrant leaders were former  members of the Whig Party and likely to be against slavery as well. Lincoln did not want to alienate this important block of anti-slavery voters  before inviting them into a new party seeking to contain Black bondage.

Lincoln was personally revolted by attempts to check immigration, but he also saw immigrants as a key factor in coming elections to restrict slavery. In February 1856, even before the Republican Party was fully organized, Lincoln tried to keep the anti-slavery movement from embracing Know Nothingism. Anti-immigrant candidates had been winning elections over the last two years and many, who would be elected in 1856 later became Republicans! Holzer tells the story of a crucial gathering of Illinois anti-slavery journalists in Decatur in which Lincoln pressed through a resolution welcoming immigrants:

George Schneider, the pro-Lincoln editor of Chicago’s Staats-Zeitung, arrived at the gathering determined “to fight with all my might” to make sure his fellow editors did not leave without officially denouncing Know-Nothingism. Toward that end, he offered a resolution pledging to “welcome the exiles and migrants from the Old World, to homes of enterprise and of freedom in the new . . . with merit, not birthplace, the test.” To Schneider’s “utter despair,” the proposal encountered a “storm of opposition” at the gathering. Lincoln came to its rescue, arguing that “only through an unqualified proclamation can we count on support” from the foreign-born. “The citizens who have adopted this country as their own,” he argued, “have a right to demand this from us.” The resolution passed.

That Summer, the Republicans held their first national convention and nominated explorer John C. Fremont as their presidential candidate. Fremont was running against James Buchanan, a Northern man with Southern sympathies, and Millard Fillmore, the candidate of the “American Party”, the political arm of the Know Nothings. The American Party denounced Fremont because he was born to an immigrant father who was a Catholic, and because Fremont had been married in a Catholic ceremony. The Democrats denounced him for having supporters who  were Republican Know Nothings. While Fremont did better than expected for the first-time candidate of a new party, he lost many immigrant voters. Democrats has resisted Know Nothing propaganda, whereas the Republicans tried to both attract immigrant liberals and bigoted xenophobes.

Lincoln tried to stem the tide in 1856. William Herndon, his law partner, remembered that “Lincoln dared be just and stand bolt upright. [He] opposed Know Nothingism in all its phazes [sic], everywhere and at all times when it was sweeping over the land like wild fire.” While he failed to get Fremont elected, it did teach Lincoln lessons that he would use in his future campaigns. Lincoln embraced outreach to immigrant communities over the coming decade. He worked with leaders in those communities, translated his campaign materials into the languages of new Americans, and he spoke in his speeches to address the needs of those who were not born here.

Holzer makes good use of a speech Lincoln gave in July of 1858 while running for the Senate from Illinois. Holzer writes:

Only days later, Lincoln made it to Chicago after all, and there, during a lengthy antislavery speech…provided an unanticipated, and eloquent, defense of immigration. Though the oration was not officially part of the Lincoln–Douglas debates—those would come later—Douglas had spoken from the same spot the night before, and Lincoln had vowed to respond. Appearing on the hotel’s balcony on July 10 before a crowd “about three-fourths as large as that of the previous evening . . .and in point of enthusiasm, about four times as great,” Lincoln lit into popular sovereignty, the 1857 Dred Scott decision, and Douglas himself…Lincoln directed some of his most suggestive observations that night to the “mighty” American nation made mightier by the foreign-born. Granting particular honor to the “race of men living in that day” of revolution—and to their descendants—Lincoln attributed the magnitude of current American prosperity in part to “something else”: the immigrants who had more recently populated and enhanced the nation. For its time, this was an extraordinarily inclusive sentiment. As Lincoln expressed it:

“We have besides these men—descended by blood from our ancestors—among us perhaps half our people . . . who have come from Europe—Germans, Irish, French, and Scandinavian—men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, (loud and long continued applause) and so they are.”

“That,” Lincoln said, concluding the gorgeous passage to more applause, “is the electric cord . . . that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.” Arguably, nothing Lincoln would say during the seven three-hour-long debates with Douglas later that year would match this offering in benevolence or eloquence.

Holzer offers many examples of Lincoln’s bravery in defending immigrants from the charges of disloyalty, laziness, and poisoning the blood of our country, he also accurately represents the future president’s outreach to former American Party adherents. Luckily, in the 1860 Presidential Election many Know Nothings voted for the Constitutional Union Party ticket nominee John Bell, an old immigration restrictionist, so Lincoln did have to worry about courting that segment of voters too carefully.

At the 1860 Republican Presidential Convention, the strongest candidate in the first round of voting was William Seward, a New Yorker whose stance against the Know Nothings was even stronger than Lincoln’s. Salmon Chase, a former Democrat, was generally well-liked by immigrants, and he came in fourth behind Seward, Lincoln, and Cameron in the first-round voting. Simon Cameron and Edward Bates were two anti-immigrant candidates who between them had about a fifth of the delegates. Both anti-immigrants, and actual immigrants were represented at the convention! When Lincoln emerged with the nomination, he set about reuniting the anti-slavery part of the electorate. We do not know if Lincoln won the majority of votes of immigrants in the 1860 election, but he did considerably better with them than did Fremont or any preceding Whig presidential candidate.

After taking office, Lincoln did place anti-immigrant politicians like Cameron (Sec. of War) and Bates (Attorney General) into high positions in his government. However, he sought advice and counsel from many immigrants, like, for example, Karl Schurz. One of his most trusted aides was his secretary John Nicolay. He was German-born and throughout his time working diligently for Lincoln, he had not even become a United States citizen!

During the Civil War, Lincoln needed the immigrant communities of the U.S. to turn-out to fill the ranks of the Union Army. While about one-third of the native born men who served went into the Confederate forces, 90% or more of immigrants who saw service served with the Union.

Holzer gives extensive treatment to the war time emergency for the country and its immigrant communities. With 500,000 immigrant serving in the Union forces, the foreign-born portion exceeded any of the major armies during the war. Lincoln allowed immigrant officers, immigrant units, and immigrant languages to be spoken in the Army of the Potomac, the Army of the the Tennessee, and all other armies of the United States. At a time when only Protestant ministers had previously been allowed to be chaplains, Lincoln allowed immigrant regiment to choose their own chaplains, including Catholic priests, rabbis, and even a German “Freethinker” who did not think their was a God. He promoted immigrant officers even if they belonged to the Democratic Party. In fact, he made a general of James Shields, an Irish politician who had challenged him many years earlier to a duel.

While Holzer could not focus on too many different “ethnic-units”, he tended to write about the Irish Brigade (about 3% of Irish servicemen served with that brigade) and the “German” XI Corps regiments (about 8% of German servicemen). Most Irish were not in “ethnic-regiments” and German units, which was where half of Germans served, were particularly effective in the West.

Holzer also does a good job in highlighting the 1863 New York City Draft Riots in which the overwhelming majority of the rioters were immigrant Irish resisting the Draft and angered at increasing numbers of freedmen in the city. Lincoln quelled the riots with violence, but he did not deport those who were guilty of participating in the unprecedented civil conflict.

Toward the second half of his presidency, Lincoln devoted considerable attention to facilitating immigration. Think about the world’s  conflicts today. Are people immigrating to Ukraine or Gaza? Lincoln did not want the Civil War to be the death knell to immigration. In his December 1863 Annual Message, after warning that some immigrants were still not enlisting in the Army, Lincoln said that more had to be done to encourage immigration. This was not an attempt to  encourage enlistment, but rather to expand the workforce. Lincoln said that with “tens of thousands of persons, destitute of remunerative occupation,” families stood ready “to emigrate to the United States if essential, but very cheap, assistance can be afforded them.” Lincoln pleaded for Congress to help pay for immigrants to come to the United States and to have a reception for them when they came to help them resettle here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:

•