“When the principles of the Constitution are disregarded, when those ‘checks and restraints,’ put in it as Mr. Madison has told us, for ‘a defence to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions,’ are broken down and swept away, when the whole country shall have been brought under the influence of the third degree of this Know-Nothing order, if that time shall ever come, then, indeed may the days of this Republic, too, be considered as numbered.
“I wish to say something to you about this third degree, the union degree, as it is called. For under this specious title, name or guise, the arch-tempter again approaches us, quite as subtly as under the other of ‘Americans shall rule America.’ The obligation taken in this degree is ‘to uphold, maintain and defend’ the Union, without one word being said about the Constitution. Now, as much as we all, I trust, are devoted to the Union, who would have it without the Constitution? This is the life and soul of it—this is its animating spirit. It is this that gives it vitality, health, vigor, strength, growth, development and power. Without it the Union could never have been formed, and without it it cannot be maintained or held together. Where the animating principle of any living organism is extinguished, this is death, and dissolution is inevitable. You might just as well expect that the component parts of your bodies could be held together by some senseless incantations after the vital spark has departed, as that this Union can be held together by any Know-Nothing oaths when the Constitution is gone. Congress is to be done away with, except in so far as its members may be necessary, as the dumb instruments for registering the edicts of an invisible but all-powerful oligarchy. Our present Government is to be paralyzed by this boa-constrictor, which is now entwining its coils around it. It is to be supplanted and displaced by another self-constituted and secretly organized body to rise up in its stead, a political ‘monster,’ more terrible to contemplate than the seven-headed beast spoken of in the Apocalypse.
“I have seen it stated in the newspapers by some unknown writer, that my letter to Col. Thomas will be my political winding-sheet. If you and the other voters of the Eighth Congressional District so will it, so let it be; there is but one other I should prefer—and that is the Constitution of my country; let me be first wrapped in this, and then covered over with that letter, and the principles I have announced this night; and thus shrouded I shall be content to be laid away, when the time comes, in my last resting-place without asking any other epitaph but the simple inscription carved upon the headstone that marks the spot—‘Here sleep the remains of one who dared to tell the people they were wrong when he believed so, and who never intentionally deceived a friend, or betrayed even an enemy.’”[8]
Thus spoke Alexander H. Stephens, Georgia’s greatest statesman, of the pernicious tendencies of the Know-Nothing party. On that speech he ran for Congress and was elected by three thousand majority. Know-Nothingism was thus slain in Georgia. Since the death of Mr. Stephens some scribbler with a talent for forgery has taken the quotation marks from the paragraph about the Jesuits in the foregoing speech, affixed Mr. Stephens’s name to it, and sent it on its rounds through the press as the declared opinion of the dead statesman concerning the followers of Loyola. Mr. Stephens quoted the paragraph from a Know-Nothing writer, not to approve the attack on the Jesuits, but for the opposite purpose of showing it applied to the Know-Nothings themselves. No man in this country could use the weapon of retort with more effect than Alexander H. Stephens, and his remarks on the paragraph in question afford a favorable instance of his power in that line. That this stupid calumny on the great man who battled so nobly for the equal rights of Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Gentiles, foreign born and native Americans, should have been palmed off on the public, is less surprising than that it should have found its way into certain Catholic newspapers, in the columns of at least one of which the present writer read it shortly after the death of Mr. Stephens.
The ever memorable conflict in Virginia of 1855, between the Know-Nothings and Democrats, was led on the part of the latter by the gallant Henry A. Wise. That conflict was one of great national magnitude. If the Know-Nothings, theretofore victorious, had then succeeded, it is likely a civil war precipitated by religious fanaticism would have followed, not to be conducted between the States, as later unfortunately occurred, but between citizens of the same cities, and towns and neighborhoods throughout the Union, with a fury to make humanity shudder—in every sense of the word a civil war. The Virginia election of that year was, therefore, watched with intense interest by the whole American people, and a feeling of feverish excitement was everywhere visible. Henry A. Wise, the uncompromising enemy of the Know-Nothings, was named as the Democratic candidate for Governor of Virginia. Never was such a canvass before. He went everywhere, pouring out fiery eloquence in the Western Mountains, in the Blue Ridge that milks the clouds, upon the Potomac, lovely River of Swans, on the Rappahannock, the Piankatank, Mob Jack Bay, James River, Elizabeth River, down to the North Carolina line; and wherever he went this second Patrick Henry stirred the people’s hearts as they had not been stirred before. One of the best stump speeches ever heard in this country was made by Mr. Wise at Alexandria. He had declared hostility to the Know-Nothings in a letter to a citizen of Virginia, written September 18, 1854.
In that letter he said: “I am a native Virginian; my ancestors on both sides for two hundred years were citizens of this country and this State—half English, half Scotch. I am a Protestant by birth, by baptism, by intellectual belief, and by education and by adoption. I am an American, in every fibre and in every feeling an American; yet in every character, in every relation, in every sense, with all my head and all my heart, and all my might, I protest against this secret organization of native Americans and of Protestants to proscribe Roman Catholic and naturalized citizens. As early as 1787 we established a great land ordinance, the most perfect system of eminent domain, of proprietary titles, and of territorial settlements, which the world had ever beheld to bless the homeless children of men. It had the very house-warming of hospitality in it. It wielded the logwood axe, and cleared a continent of forests. It made an exodus in the old world, and dotted the new with log-cabins, around the hearths of which the tears of the aged and the oppressed were wiped away, and cherub children were born to liberty, and sang its songs, and have grown up in its strength and might and majesty. It brought together foreigners of every country and clime—immigrants from Europe of every language and religion, and its most wonderful effect has been to assimilate all races. Irish and German, English and French, Scotch and Spaniard, have met on the Western prairies, in the Western woods, and have peopled villages and towns and cities—queen cities, rivalling the marts of Eastern commerce; and the Teutonic and Celtic and Anglo-Saxon races have in a day mingled into one undistinguishable mass—and that one is American. The children of all are crossed in blood in the first generation, so that ethnology can’t tell of what parentage they are—they all become brother and sister Jonathans. As in the colonies, as in the revolution, as in the last war, so have foreigners and immigrants of every religion and tongue contributed to build up the temple of American law and liberty until its spire reaches to heaven, whilst its shadow rests on earth. If there has been a turnpike road to be beaten out of the rocky metal, or a canal to be dug, foreigners and immigrants have been armed with the mattock and the spade and if a battle on sea and land had to be fought, foreigners and immigrants have been armed with the musket and the blade.
“We can name the very hour of our birth as a people. We need recur to no fable of a wolf to whelp us into existence. As a nation we are but seventy-eight years of age. Many persons are now living who were alive before this nation was born. And the ancestors of this people about two centuries only ago were foreigners, every one of them coming to the shores of this country to take it away from the aborigines, and to take possession of it by authority either directly or derivatively of Papal Power. His Holiness the Pope was the great grantor of all the new countries of North America. Foreigners in the name of the Pope and Mother Church took possession of North America, to have and to hold the same to their heirs against the heathen forever. And now already their descendants are for excluding foreigners, and the Pope’s followers from an equal enjoyment of this same possession. So strange is human history. Christopher Columbus! Ferdinand and Isabella! What would they have thought of this had they foreseen it when they touched a continent and called it theirs in the name of the Holy Trinity, by authority of the keeper of the keys of Heaven, and of the great grantor of the empire and domain of earth? What would have become of our national titles to northeastern and northwestern boundaries, but for the plea of this authority, valid of old among all Christian powers?”
Writing thus in September, 1854, Mr. Wise, although he had been a Whig years before, was nominated for Governor by the Democrats in December of the same year. In his famous Alexandria speech, before discussing Know-Nothingism, he told the people some practical truths explanatory of the decadence of the prosperity of Virginia, of the causes producing it, and the remedies to be applied. “You have,” he said, “the bowels of your Western mountains rich in iron, in copper, in coal, in salt, in gypsum, and the very earth is so rich in oil that it sets the rivers in flame. You have the line of the Alleghany, that beautiful Blue Ridge which stands placed there by the Almighty, not to obstruct the way of the people to market, but placed there in the very bounty of Providence to milk the clouds, to make the sweet springs which are the sources of your rivers. And at the head of every stream is the waterfall murmuring the very music of your power to put spindles in motion. And yet commerce has long ago spread her sails and sailed away from you; you have not as yet dug more than coal enough to warm yourselves at your own hearths; you have set no tilt-hammer of Vulcan to strike blows worthy of gods in the iron foundries. You have not yet spun more than coarse cotton enough, in the way of manufacture, to clothe your own slaves. You have had no commerce, no mining, no manufactures. You have relied alone on the single power of agriculture; and such agriculture! Your sedge patches outshine the sun. Your inattention to your only source of wealth has scarred the very bosom of mother earth. Instead of having to feed cattle on a thousand hills, you have had to chase the stump-tailed steer through the sedge patches to procure a tough beef-steak. You are in the habit of discussing Federal politics; and permit me to say to you, very honestly and very openly, that next to brandy, next to card playing, next to horse-racing, the thing that has done more harm to Virginia than any other in the course of her past history, has been her insatiable appetite for Federal politics. She has given all her great men to the Union. Her Washington, her Jefferson, her Madison, her Marshall, her galaxy of great men she has given to the Union. Richmond, instead of attending to Richmond’s business, has been too much in the habit of attending to the affairs of Washington city, when there are plenty there, God knows, to attend to them themselves. * * “Puritanism,” said Mr. Wise, has disappeared, and we have in place of it Unitarianism, Universalism, Fourierism, Millerism, Mormonism—all the odds and ends of isms—until at last you have a grand fusion of all those odds and ends of isms in the omnium gatherum of isms called Know-Nothingism. Having swept the North, the question was: How can this ism be wedged in in the South? And the devil was at the elbow of these preachers of ‘Christian politics’ to tell them precisely how.” [At this point Mr. Wise was interrupted by cat-calls, derisive cheers and other manifestations of the Know-Nothing element of the meeting.] “There were three elements in the South,” continued the speaker, “and in Virginia particularly, to which they might apply themselves. There is the religious element, the 103,000 Presbyterians, the 300,000 Baptists, the 300,000 Methodists of Virginia. Well, how were they to reach them? Why, just by raising a hell of a fuss about the Pope!
“Cæsar’s kingdom is political, is a carnal kingdom. And I tell you that if I stood alone in the State of Virginia, and if priestcraft—if the priests of my own Mother Church dared to lay their hands on the political power of our people, or to use their churches to wield political influence, I would stand, in feeble imitation it may be, but I would stand, even if I stood alone, as Patrick Henry stood in the Revolution, between the parsons and the people. These men, many of whom are neither Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, Lutherans, nor what not—who are men of no religion, who have no church, who do not say their prayers, who do not read their Bible, who live God-defying lives every day of their existence, are now seen with faces as long as their dark-lanterns, with the whites of their eyes turned up in holy fear lest the Bible should be shut up by the Pope! You tell the people that Catholics never gave aid to civil liberty; that they never yet struck a blow for the freedom of mankind. Who gave you alliance against the crown of England? Who but that Catholic king, Louis XVI. He sent you from the Court of Versailles Lafayette, the boy of Washington’s camp, a foreigner who never was naturalized, but who bled at the redoubt of Yorktown, when Arnold, a native, like Absalom proved traitor.
“And, Sir, before George Washington was born, before Lafayette wielded the sword, or Charles Carroll the pen for his country, six hundred and forty years ago, on the 16th of June, 1214, there was another scene enacted on the face of the globe, when the general charter of all charters of freedom was gained, when one man, a man called Stephen Langton, swore the Barons of England for the people against the power of the King—swore the Barons on the high altar of the Catholic Church at St. Edmundsbury, that they would have Magna Charta or die for it. The charter which secures to every one of you to-day trial by jury, freedom of the press, freedom of the pen, the confronting of witnesses with the accused, and the opening of secret dungeons—that charter was obtained by Stephen Langton against the King of England, and if you Know-Nothings don’t know who Stephen Langton was, you know nothing sure enough. He was a Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury. I come here not to praise the Catholics, but I come here to acknowledge historical truths, and to ask of Protestants—what has heretofore been the pride and boast of Protestants—tolerance of opinion in religious faith.