The Know Nothing Party, Political Chaos, and the Rise of the Republicans! | Turmoil After the Whigs

How did the Whig Party’s collapse put the conspiratorial ant-immigrant anti-Catholic Know Nothing movement in control of the American Congress? And how did it unleash years of political chaos and national violence that sent the country careening into a bloody civil war?

In this episode, we discuss what happened after the Whig Party imploded in the election of 1852. Specifically, how America’s political leaders made every mistake possible to turn a realignment into a true national disaster.

At first, America’s leaders didn’t appreciate the gravity of what happened in 1852. The Whigs naively believed it was merely a matter of time before the Democrats blundered and America had no choice but to put them back in power. The Democrats arrogantly believed the nation’s abandoning the Whigs was an endorsement of them. Both proved wrong, and tragically.

In the next Congress, the Democrats decided to go back on the long-settled Missouri Compromise to win over southern votes to clear the way for statehood for Kansas and Nebraska. By not only reopening what they just supposedly settled in the Compromise of 1850, but also breaching the very trust necessary to make any national compromises, the Democrats had now taken their turn to outrage America. The American people crushed their party in the 1854 midterm elections, an electoral rebuke almost as terrible as the Whigs suffered in 1852.

With the American people now disgusted by both major parties, in 1854 they sent to Congress instead representatives of a host of small new parties. The largest and most powerful of these new parties was the American Party, the political vehicle of an anti-Catholic anti-immigrant Know Nothing movement that believed in a papal conspiracy to undermine American democracy with mass Catholic immigration. These smaller parties entered into an alliance called “the Opposition,” electing a Know Nothing the new Speaker of the House.

It suddenly appeared the American Party was emerging as a new major party.

Over the next few years, the two-party system broken, America suffered political and national turmoil. Open violence and murder broke out among abolitionist and pro-slavery activists in Kansas. After taking offense to a speech, a Congressman nearly beat a Senator to death in the Senate chamber. A new alliance emerged among the small anti-slavery parties in Congress, creating a new national Republican Party hoping to push the Know Nothing off the nation’s stage to become a new major party themselves.

In 1860, America elected Abraham Lincoln the first Republican president. Before he could even take office, South Carolina succeeded from the Union. It was the start of a great civil war.
Check out the book: https://www.amazon.com/Next-Realignment-Americas-Parties-Crumbling/dp/1633885089

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Видео The Know Nothing Party, Political Chaos, and the Rise of the Republicans! | Turmoil After the Whigs канала Frank DiStefano