Lincoln on Immigration -- Blood of the Blood and Flesh of the Flesh

In 1858 Lincoln ran against Stephen Douglas for United States Senator from Illinois. A minority yet significant presence on the American political landscape at that time was the American Party, known as the "Know-Nothings" because when asked about its inner workings its members claimed to "know nothing." The primary ideology of the American Party was that it was anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant. The Party had originally been known as the Nativist American Party, and it retained its nativist, Protestant orientation.

The Republican Party was first formed 170 years ago in 1854 in Ripon, Wisconsin, to protest the expansion of slavery caused by the adoption of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Two years later on May 29, 1856, Abraham Lincoln helped to found the Republican Party in Ohio is his rip-roaring "Lost Speech" in Bloomington, Illinois. According to William P. Kellogg, in this speech Lincoln rebuked Stephen Douglas for obtaining the passage of Kansas-Nebraska, saying, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." According to J.O. Cunningham Lincoln deprecated the use of force to oppose the expansion of slavery, saying "I'll tell you what we will do, we will wait until November and then we will shoot paper ballots at them!" According to Will Porter Lincoln's directed some of his remarks to the people of the South, warning them against secession: "We WILL not go out, and you SHALL not!" And according to George Brown, in the Lost Speech Lincoln declared, "It is to be remembered that the Union must be preserved in the purity of its principles as well as in the integrity of its territorial parts."

By 1858 Lincoln and the Republican Party had to make a choice. Should the newly-formed anti-slavery Republican Party appeal to the Know-Nothings in order to capture the 20% of the electorate that they represented? Or should they, as Lincoln had argued in Bloomington, stay true to the ideals announced in the Declaration of Independence?  

Lincoln made his decision in his inaugural speech in his campaign for the Senate against Douglas. The date of the speech was July10, 1858; it was an Independence Day event. And the speech was in Chicago, Illinois, bursting with growth. In 1830 Chicago had been a village with a population of 250. By 1840 it was a large town with a population of 4,500. By 1850 it had grown into a city of 28,000, and by 1860 it was over 100,000, the ninth largest city in America. Lincoln was speaking to a diverse crowd, at least half of whom were immigrants. What could he say to them about patriotism to America, about American independence, and about the principles of the Declaration? Would he seek the nativist vote by declaring natural-born citizens superior to them?

Here is what Lincoln said. I have highlighted one sentence in bold type.

We are now a mighty nation, we are thirty – or about thirty millions of people, and we own and inhabit about one-fifteenth part of the dry land of the whole earth. We run our memory back over the pages of history for about eighty-two years and we discover that we were then a very small people in point of numbers, vastly inferior to what we are now, with a vastly less extent of country, - with vastly less of everything we deem desirable among men, - we look upon the change as exceedingly advantageous to us and to our posterity, and we fix upon something that happened away back, as in some way or other being connected with this rise of prosperity. We find a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers; they were iron men, they fought for the principle that they were contending for; and we understood that by what they then did it has followed that the degree of prosperity that we now enjoy has come to us. We hold this annual celebration to remind ourselves of all the good done in this process of time of how it was done and who did it, and how we are historically connected with it; and we go from these meetings in better humor with ourselves – we feel more attached the one to the other, and more firmly bound to the country we inhabit. In every way we are better men in the age, and race, and country in which we live for these celebrations. But after we have done all this we have not yet reached the whole. There is something else connected with it. We have besides these men – descended by blood from our ancestors – among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe – German, 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 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, and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration 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.

Lincoln rejected nativism. Instead he embraced immigrants as blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of us all.