Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Know-Nothings Riots

WYTS: Baltimore Ravens. Original post here. 

You could have set the movie Gangs of New York in Baltimore. Though you’d have to rename it “Gangs of Baltimore”, and then nobody would have seen it. Pre-Civil War, this city got the nickname “Mob-Town”, which speaking of titles, sounds like a great TV show that I'd watch. (Netflix and I have a lunch date set up to discuss this further.) Baltimore was full of nasty gangs with such colorful names as the Plug Uglies, the Rip Raps, the American Rattlers, the Blood Tubs, the Wampanoags, and my personal favorite, the Butt Enders. Tag Yourself! They wore bowler hats, got extremely drunk, beat people up, and were extremely racist and xenophobic… oh, it kinda all seems less fun when you remember that last bit. I might leave that out of my Netflix pitch. I'll pretend I know nothing about it - Boom! Transition! 1856 Know-Nothings Riots!

To start, we need to go back to the 1840s, which saw a very bad famine across Europe, particularly awful in Ireland. This came with political upheaval, the failed Revolutions of 1848. American cities were seeing huge waves of immigrants, mainly Irish and German. Perhaps as many as 15% of the country was foreign-born by 1860s. Baltimore’s population nearly tripled between by 1860, hitting 212,000, a quarter of them foreigners. These huddle masses were not starving or ignorant. They were well-organized and successful, cannily understanding the political machines of their new cities. That actually made the newcomers all the scarier.

Worse, they were Catholic. Now, as tempting as it is to go all the way back to the Wars of Religion and the English Civil Wars to explain why there such a paranoia about tyrannical Popish plots, we’ll just gloss over that, this is long enough already. Not that this kind of vileness requires a rational explanation. We’ll speed up to the part where the Maryland colony was founded specifically as a Catholic refuge. There is a wonderful irony in proud Baltimoreans fighting for a Protestant Maryland in a city named after a Roman Catholic lord.

In 1839, a Catholic convent in B-more was attacked by a mob. Not a promising sign of things to come. Baltimore, like Cincy and NYC, loves to riot.

Then the 1850s are one of the weirder eras in American politics. It did end in a Civil War, after all. I mentioned in the Dallas riot that the party system was in flux and Republicans would win. But before that, it could have gone a lot of other ways. Take Millard Fillmore, whose name reeks of mediocrity. He was already a failed unelected president thanks to Zachary Taylor’s rebellious digestive system killing him and giving us a President Fillmore. Nobody much liked the idea of that, especially his own Whig Party. He started his career as a member of the Anti-Masonic Party (which I also cannot get into right now), so he was not a stranger to crackpot conspiracy theories. Fillmore was rejected by the Whigs for the 1852 nomination, ending his presidency in lame duck obscurity. But in 1856, he had a new home, the Know-Nothing Party, with its obscene official title “the Native American Party”.

“Native” of course, being in the scariest of scare quotes. The "Know-Nothings" nickname came from a loose organization of a few xenophobic secret societies, whose members claimed to “know nothing” when asked. This was not a Socratic method but perhaps it was an admission of their idiocy. Know-Nothingism was an example of those brief waves of militant Protestantism which bubble up into the mainstream of American politics every so often. If we’re lucky, they are defeated quickly and laughed out of the room. If we’re unlucky then…oof.

Also, in a weird quirk, the Know-Nothings were founded by a Jewish man, Lewis Charles Levin. Mass Jewish migration to the US would not be a thing until after the Civil War, and anyway, the party’s imagined enemy was radically conservative Pope Pius IX, not any rabbis. (Meanwhile, the Pope likely had no idea who they were.) Fillmore was the presidential candidate in 1856, an unsuccessful one. Voters knew then not to give failed presidents second chances. He came dead last in a three-way race, and won only one state. Guess which one?

Besides Baltimore, this wave of Nativism saw violence across the US. There were riots in NYC, New Orleans, St. Louis, Washington DC, and of course, Cincinnati - Cincy loves a riot. There were dozens of deaths across the country thanks to these incidents. Many of the Baltimore gangs like the Plug Uglies would travel to other towns and get into fights there.

1856 was going to be particularly rough because Baltimore had two elections, municipal and presidential, one month apart. Elections in this era were great fun, not really about having the most votes but the old sports cliché of “wanting it more”. If you were just walking down the street, you could be grabbed by a gang, say the Butt Enders, thrown into the ballot box, and made to vote for their man. Sometimes you’d be voting all day. Meanwhile the whole city was chaos of Rip Raps shouting in the street punching Democrats. Sometimes voters were given some coins or free drinks. You could get so drunk you’d be found a week later with no memory of how you got there, such as Edgar Allen Poe’s visit to Baltimore in 1849. He died a few days later. Not sure naming a Baltimore team after him is actually honoring the man based on his time in the city...

In 1856, the various gangs did not even wait until election day of October 8th to start shooting. In September a couple guys were murdered as a preamble. But the fighting really started on October 5th. Democrats pulled down a Know-Nothing flag and were fighting all comers. They had a cannon out until the police arrested them. A day later a tavern was sacked, with a fifteen-minute shootout on Holliday Street. On election day itself, twenty wards were hit by violence, with three Democrats killed, two Know-Nothings in return.

A month later for the presidential election of November 4th, the Blood Tubs and the others were far from done. Again, there’s reports of a cannon in town, this time being fired at the police. Apparently, the Maryland Infantry was on standby, but nobody bothered to send them in. By the end of the day, 67 people were injured, 17 people died. When the votes were counted, which were obviously fraudulent and nobody doubted this, Know-Nothing mayoral candidate Thomas Swann had won and Fillmore won Maryland. Fillmore disappeared from politics after his defeat in every other state.

In 1857, Baltimore increased its police force to 397 men, surely enough for a city of hundreds of thousands. Somehow despite this, there were still riots in the 1857 election… and then again in 1858. The Know-Nothings basically disintegrated as a political force by 1860, slavery was so hot-button everybody forgot about the Catholics. Even so, in 1861, the first Union soldier deaths of the Civil War occurred in Baltimore, in yet another riot.

Most of the gangs such as the Plug Uglies simply faded away during the war, as too many angry young men found other places to vent their violence. Decades of municipal reforms helped turn Mob-Town into Charm City, the WASP thugs calmed down. Baltimore was never known for criminal activity ever again, surely.

Nativism would return hard in the 1870s, now targeted against Chinese immigrants. ...But that is a story for another day... Get hype 49ers fans.