Who were the Know nothings?
The Know Nothings was made up of mostly Whig deflectors when the Whig Party broke up after the 1854 election. They were a nativist party that was anit-catholic and wanted to decrease immigration and make life difficult for immigrants. The Know Nothings common criticisms of immigrants was that they blamed the immigrants for urban crime, they thought that immigrants were prone to political corruption, they tried to play up immigrants liquor consumption, they didn’t like the job competition, the didn’t like that a lot of immigrants were followers of the pope, and they didn’t like that the immigrants did not have experience with democracy. The Know Nothings swept the vote in the 1856 election with Millard Fillmore as the only presidential candidate. For a while it was though they might be a second majority party but they never wore. Most of them eventually absorbed into the Republican party.
