The Tumultuous Times of

John Wilkes Booth

Growing up in the 1850s

• Every political conversation centered around the growing divide between North and South

• Abolitionist fervor grew

• In response, Southerners grew more vocal in the defense of slavery

• And enacted harsher slave codes

Political Parties• National parties had been held together by the

spirit of compromise (and an equal balance of free and slave states in the Senate)

• Now began to come apart as new territories moved today statehood

• The Whig party – Party of commerce– In ruins due to North/South split

• The Democrats– Still a national party– Put their faith in “Popular Sovereignty”

The Balance of Power

PBS American Experience, 1999-2000

Popular Sovereignty

• Proposed by Senator Douglas as a way to avoid confrontation while bringing territories into statehood

• Ruled that voters in a territory could to decide whether they were to be slave or free

• Repealed the Missouri Compromise that had kept the peace for twenty years

• Heralded the start “Bleeding Kansas” as heavily armed pro-slavery “Ruffians” fought with anti-slavery settlers to win the majority

Territorial Kansas Online, 1854-1861, 2003

The Democrats in the 1850s

• Slave owning Presidents, Southerners and Democrats– 50 of our first 71 years– Majority of Speakers of the House– Majority of Supreme Court Justices– “The Southern Democratic vision of America

was American politics” (Vlahos, 1996).

Turmoil in CongressGrowing hostilities left both Southerners and

Northerner with hair trigger nerves.

This scene in the Congress was shortly after the death of John Calhoun, the fiery southern nullificationist, when a fight erupted between Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton and Mississippi Senator Henry Foote (with the pistol).

The Economic Revolution

• Industrialization• Growth of Urban Life in the North

– Immigrant labor fed industrialization– NY went from 20% urban in 1950 to 40%

urban in 1860– The yeoman farmer was being replaced by

the factory worker

• The spread of the railroads– Linked to industrialization– Required immigrant labor

• From 1820 to 1845, the arrival of newcomers to our shores had been steady — 10,000 to 100,000 a year.

• Unsettled conditions in Europe caused some 2.9 million immigrants poured into seaboard cities like Boston and New York from 1845 through 1854.– including 1.2 million Irish– more than a million Germans

Immigration Surges

Evicted Irish leave for America during the Potato Famine

Evictions of the Irish, n.d.

Poverty, religion, and strange speech kept the Irish from assimilating into American society. They worked the railroads, crowded the cities, and joined the Army.

• A new world was being built in the North– Big Money– Big Banking

• The South was being left behind– Southern politics was the exclusive domain of

the aristocracy of slave owning, landed gentry– Debt to Northern bankers– Fear of Northern abolitionists

The south was agrarian, with an aristocratic social structure

Cotton

plantation

Atlantic slave trade and slave life in the Americas, n.d.

Slaves were sold at auction under dehumanizing conditions

They were often brought to the West Indies or Cuba after the International slave trade was outlawed in 1808, then smuggled into the Deep South.

Atlantic slave trade and slave life in the Americas, n.d.

The Death of the Whigs

• For decades the Whigs had been the other party– The party of economic growth (commence)– Their fiscal issues they supported went away

with the growth of New Money – They were finished in the election of 1852– Two new parties emerged from the rubble:

• Know Nothings• Free Soilers

Free Soil Party

• Opposed spread of slavery into territories• United anti-slavery factions in the North• In 1856 was absorbed by newborn Republican

Party• Here the entrance of Big Money made it a solidly

Northern Party that would win Lincoln the Presidency as Democrats split into Northern and Southern factions

• “Free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men!”

Know-Nothing Party

• A nativist political movement in the United States in the 1850s

• Organized to oppose the great wave of immigrants who entered the United States after 1846.

• Know-Nothings claimed that the immigrants—who were principally Irish and Roman Catholic threatened to destroy the American experiment.

Nativist Movement

• Championed the so-called rights of Protestant, American-born male voters– Reaction to new waves of immigration– Fearful of the future– Immigrants were seen as impoverished and

disease-ridden– Many were Catholic– Nativists blamed immigrants for destroying the

old way of life.

• Called Know Nothings because as a secret party, members were instructed to say they “Know Nothing” when questioned

• Came to be called the American Party– Won offices nationwide 1854 election– Put members in Congress and local

governments

• Know Nothings believed that the Roman Catholic church was subservient to a foreign prince (the pope)

• They saw the church growing in power (as numbers of immigrants grew)

• Could the American government exert political control over a large group of people?

• “Such nativist sentiments had long existed among many Americans, but they had never before been expressed in such powerful form.”

Anti-immigrant cartoon, intimating that Irish, by passing out whisky, and Germans, freely distributing their beer, had stolen votes

Bill the Butcher, from Gangs of New York belonged to the American Party. Based on the real New York butcher, William Poole, “his Washington Street gang served as ‘shoulder-hitters’ for the Native American party. A shoulder-hitter enforced the will of a political boss by using threats or violence and played an important role in ‘persuading’ voters to vote for their candidate at the polls” (Carle, 1999-2004).

Know Nothing Party Platform

3) A pure American Common School system

4) War to the hilt, on political Romanism

1) Repeal of all Naturalization Laws

2) None but native Americans for office

No Knowing Party, 1996

John Wilkes BoothJohn Wilkes Booth • Joined the Know Nothings as a

youth – Inherited the task of runningthe family farm, which required Irish

laborers to harvest– He was enamored by the

message, the ceremonialism, and the secrecy of the Party.

• With his innate (but by no means secure) sense of Southern elitism:– Became a strong Nativist (aswell as a racist)– Later he maintained alliances with

Copperheads (Northerners, mostly former Know Nothings, who supported the South) during the war.

• During the War the Knights of the Golden Circle, a secret organization formed from the old Know Nothings, Copperheads, and various other conspirators throughout the North and South, smuggled supplies, cotton, currency, gold, refugees, and other contraband through the lines, from and into Canada.