The Know-Nothing party and Irish Catholics in Massachusetts

The Know-Nothing party, formally the American Party, is the reason a legislative committee searched Catholic convents for hidden captives, a Massachusetts governor disbanded militia companies made up of immigrants, and an Irish widow was put on a ship back to Europe from a state almshouse, all inside a single two-year run in power. It swept Massachusetts in the elections of 1854 on a platform built almost entirely around suspicion of Irish Catholics, and for one legislative session it had the votes to act on that suspicion.

A secret society that became a party

The Know-Nothing party did not begin as a political party at all. It started in 1849 as a secret fraternal order, the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, founded in New York by Charles B. Allen and built around opposition to Catholic immigration. Members swore an oath of silence and were told that if anyone asked about the order, they should answer, “I know nothing.” Outsiders turned that stock answer into a nickname, and the name outlived the secrecy: by 1852 the order had reorganised into an open political party, the American Party, though the public kept calling it the Know-Nothings.

Nationally the movement grew fast. Within a few years its candidates had won 8 governorships and more than 100 seats in Congress, and it held working majorities in several northeastern state legislatures. Nowhere did it win as completely, or govern as briefly, as it did in Massachusetts.

A landslide neither Whigs nor Democrats saw coming

Henry J. Gardner, the American Party’s candidate for governor, won the 1854 Massachusetts election with 81,503 votes, 62.58 percent of the total, well over double the combined vote of his nearest rivals. Emory Washburn, the sitting Whig governor, took 27,279 votes, 20.94 percent; the Democratic candidate, Henry W. Bishop, took 13,742 votes, 10.55 percent. It was not a close contest in any sense. It was closer to an erasure of the existing party system in the state.

The scale repeated itself down the ballot. In the Massachusetts House of Representatives, the American Party held all but 3 seats. It held every seat in the state Senate. Only 35 of the newly elected legislators had ever served before. A party that had barely existed in public two years earlier now ran the Commonwealth with no experienced opposition left standing.

Support was strongest in the industrial towns where native-born workers felt Irish labour most directly, places such as Ipswich, Haverhill, and Lawrence, where mill and shoe-shop jobs put newly arrived immigrants and established residents in daily competition for the same wages.

Why Irish Catholics became the Know-Nothing party’s target

Massachusetts nativists did not invent their anxiety out of nothing. By 1850, roughly 35,000 of Boston’s 136,000 residents, about 26 percent, had been born in Ireland. By 1855 the Irish-born share of the city’s population stood near 25 to 27 percent, and Irish immigrants made up around 85 percent of everyone in Boston born outside the United States. Through the Famine years of the 1840s and into the 1850s, Irish arrivals accounted for more than 90 percent of the city’s foreign-born population.

That concentration, arriving fast and mostly poor, gave nativist politicians a specific, visible target rather than an abstract one. The American Party’s platform folded fear of Rome, fear of wage competition, and fear of poor relief costs into a single argument: that Irish Catholic immigration was changing Massachusetts faster than its Protestant, native-born population could absorb.

The legislature backed that argument with policy well beyond convents and deportation. It also passed a strict liquor law, imposing prison terms of up to six months for selling alcohol without a licence, a measure aimed squarely at the taverns and boarding houses that anchored Irish immigrant neighbourhoods in Boston and the mill towns.

The nunnery committee’s raids on Catholic schools and convents

Suspicion of convents was not new to Massachusetts. In 1834, a mob had burned the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, acting on rumours that a nun was being held there against her will. The 1855 committee revived the same claim, that women were being kept behind convent walls against their wishes, only this time with the authority of the state legislature behind it rather than a mob.

On January 22, 1855, the Massachusetts House approved a petition asking the state to inspect “convents, nunneries, or by whatever name they may be designated.” A joint special committee, soon nicknamed the nunnery committee, was formed to carry that out, and on February 15 its mandate widened to cover Catholic schools and seminaries as well as convents.

The committee travelled to Worcester to look over the College of the Holy Cross, then, on March 26, 1855, to the Academy of the Sisters of Notre Dame in Roxbury, arriving in hired omnibuses and demanding entrance. The lady superior let them in and answered their questions. Three days later, on March 29, the committee reached a Catholic school in Lowell.

It was at the Lowell hotel where the committee stayed that the operation collapsed. One member, Representative Joseph Hiss, had a room booked there for a woman identified as Mrs. Patterson, and had dinner sent up to her. A chambermaid later gave evidence that two people had slept in that bed while Hiss’s own bed went unused, and the Commonwealth had covered her expenses. A House investigating committee recommended Hiss’s removal, and on May 9, 1855, the full House voted 230 to 30 to expel him. Hiss fought the expulsion through habeas corpus with the lawyer Benjamin Butler, but the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld the House’s power to remove him. He was the first member ever expelled from that body.

A law that shipped Irish paupers out of the state

The same legislature also gave Massachusetts officials the power to deport immigrants who had become dependent on public relief. In May 1855, the Commonwealth removed Mary Williams, an Irish-born widow, from the state almshouse at Monson and sent her to Liverpool, together with her daughter Bridget, who had been born in the United States and was an American citizen by birth. The Monson almshouse itself had opened only the year before, in 1854, on 175 acres the state had purchased in the north of the town specifically to house poor Famine-era immigrants.

Cases like the Williamses’ were not isolated. Historians estimate that Massachusetts deported roughly 50,000 people it classified as paupers or lunatics between the 1840s and the 1870s, the great majority of them Irish. The Boston Pilot, the city’s Irish Catholic newspaper, condemned the practice in 1855, writing that under the new law “poverty, Irishism and Catholicity” had effectively been made “crimes, and to be punished as such.”

Foreign-born militia companies disbanded

Governor Gardner also moved against the state militia, ordering the disbanding of companies made up largely of foreign-born members, several of them Irish. Rather than wait to be dissolved by order, the members of Boston’s Columbian Artillery voted to disband their own unit, then kept meeting informally under the cover of a literary association. The men had joined the militia for the same reasons any citizen soldier did, standing and status among neighbours, and the disbanding order told them plainly that their service still counted for less than their birthplace. That same group re-formed as the core of the 9th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment when it organised in April and May of 1861, six years after the governor who disbanded them left office, and went on to serve through the Civil War.

A two-year wait added to the ballot box

The American Party’s hostility to Irish Catholic voters outlasted its two years running the legislature. Massachusetts voters ratified a constitutional amendment in 1857 that barred naturalised citizens from voting for two years after they received their citizenship papers, on top of the residency requirements every other voter had to meet. An earlier, more extreme version of the idea, a proposed 21-year wait before a naturalised citizen could vote at all, had circulated in the legislature before the two-year figure was settled on as the version put to voters. Connecticut had adopted a similar restriction in 1855. Unlike the deportation law or the nunnery committee, the two-year amendment needed a statewide popular vote to become part of the constitution, which meant Massachusetts voters, not just the legislature, endorsed the idea of delaying the franchise for citizens who had been born elsewhere.

What historians cannot know

The record is thick with legislative journals, court filings, and newspaper coverage from 1855, but it thins quickly once the subject turns to motive. What proportion of American Party voters were driven chiefly by religious suspicion of Catholicism, wage competition with Irish labourers, or the party’s parallel temperance campaign is not something the ballot returns can settle on their own; the party bundled all three causes into one ticket, and few voters left a written account of which one mattered most to them.

The nunnery committee’s own internal deliberations survive mostly through the partisan press that covered them rather than through the committee’s own minutes, so how ordinary members privately weighed the Hiss scandal against their original mission is largely lost. Official deportation records also name the adults removed under the pauper laws far more reliably than they capture what became of children, such as Bridget Williams, once they were put ashore in a country most of them had never seen.

What the Know-Nothing episode left behind

The American Party’s grip on Massachusetts did not survive long past 1855. The coalition splintered nationally over the question of slavery within two years, and by 1856 its presidential candidate had lost badly to the Democrat, James Buchanan. But the two-year voting delay it wrote into the state constitution, and the deportation machinery it expanded, outlasted the party itself by years. The mechanisms a movement builds can persist well after the movement that built them has broken apart, which is part of why the paper trail, legislative journals, court filings, almshouse ledgers, is worth reading closely rather than treated as a footnote to 1854.

For emigrant families crossing from counties such as Mayo or Cork in these same years, the American letters passed between Massachusetts and home documented, in far plainer language, what the newspapers and statute books were arguing about. Anyone tracing that same migration back to its parish of origin will find the pattern repeated in the emigration records for County Mayo, and in the labour market Boston’s Irish immigrants faced once they arrived.

Sources and further reading

• Massachusetts Historical Society, “The Know-Nothing Party,” Object of the Month, and “Constitution of the State Council of the American Party of Massachusetts,” adopted August 7, 1855, MHS Collections Online.
• Wikipedia contributors, “Joseph Hiss,” “1854 Massachusetts gubernatorial election,” and “1855 Massachusetts legislature,” entries drawing on Massachusetts legislative and court records of the 1855 session and the Hiss expulsion proceedings.
• Hidetaka Hirota, “Expelling the Poor: The Antebellum Origins of American Deportation Policy,” Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
• Global Boston, Boston College, “First Wave, 1820-1880” and “Irish in East Boston,” immigration history project.
• Historic Ipswich, “1854: Anti-immigrant Know Nothing Party Sweeps Massachusetts Elections,” local history archive, 2024.