A True American: William Walcutt, Nativism, and Nineteenth-Century Art

By Wendy Jean Katz

This book argues that nativism, the hostility especially to Catholic immigrants that led to the organization of political parties like the Know-Nothings, affected the meaning of nineteenthcentury American art in ways that have gone unrecognized. In an era of industrialization, nativism’s erection of barriers to immigration appealed to artisans, a category that included most male artists at some stage in their careers. But as importantly, its patriotic message about the nature of the American republic also overlapped with widely shared convictions about the necessity of democratic reform. Movements directed toward improving the human condition, including anti-slavery and temperance, often consigned Catholicism, along with monarchies and slavery, to a repressive past, not the republican American future. To demonstrate the impact of this political effort by humanitarian reformers and nativists to define a Protestant character for the country, this book tracks the work and practice of artist William Walcutt. Though he is little known today, in his own time his efforts as a painter, illustrator and sculptor were acclaimed as masterly, and his art is worth reconsidering in its own right. But this book examines him as a case study of an artist whose economic and personal ties to artisanal print culture and cultural nationalists ensured that he was surrounded by and contributed to anti-Catholic publications and organizations. Walcutt was not anti immigrant himself, nor a member of a nativist party, but his kin, friends, and patrons publicly expressed warnings about Catholic and foreign political influence. And that has implications for better-known nineteenth-century historical and narrative art. Precisely because Walcutt’s profile and milieu were so typical for artists in this period, this book is able to demonstrate how central this supposedly fringe movement was to viewers and makers of American art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9780823298587

Wendy Jean Katz

Wendy Katz is Professor of Art History at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. The most recent of her books are Humbug! The Politics of Art Criticism in New York City’s Penny Press (Fordham University Press) and The Trans Mississippi and International Exposition of 1898: Art, Anthropology, and Popular Culture at the Fin de Siècle.

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Cover: A True American, William Walcutt, Nativism, and Nineteenth-Century Art by Wendy Jean Katz

A True American

WILLIAM WALCUTT, NATIVISM,

AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY ART

Wendy Jean Katz

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK 2022

Copyright © 2022 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Katz, Wendy Jean, author.

Title: A true American: William Walcutt, nativism, and nineteenth-century art / Wendy Jean Katz.

Description: First edition. | New York: Fordham University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021054448 | ISBN 9780823298570 (paperback) | ISBN 9780823298563 (hardback) | ISBN 9780823298587 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Walcutt, William, 1819–1882—Criticism and interpretation. | Art and society—United States—History—19th century. | Nativism—Case studies.

Classification: LCC N6537.W234 K38 2022 | DDC 709.2—dc23/eng/20211206

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021054448

Printed in the United States of America

24 23 22 5 4 3 2 1

First edition

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE: WHY WILLIAM WALCUTT?

Introduction: Fraternalism and True American Iconography

1 A Native-Born Artist

2 A Cooperative Model for Art

3 Native Americans and the West

4 Fairies, Allegory, and the Spiritualists

5 The Young Americans at Home and Abroad

6 More Lasting Monuments

Conclusion: Walcutt’s Revival

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

INDEX

Illustrations

Introduction

1N. Currier, The United American, c. 1849

2Sarony & Co., Uncle Sam’s Youngest Son: Citizen Know Nothing, 1854; Cleveland Plain Dealer, 1860

3George P. Morris, Few Days, or The United Americans, 1854

4John McRae after Frederick A. Chapman, Perils of Our Forefathers, 1850

5John Chester Buttre after Tompkins H. Matteson, Spirit of 76, Wide-Awake Gift, 1855

6Grant Wood, Daughters of Revolution, 1932

7Henry Brueckner, Washington Crossing the Delaware, American Odd-Fellows’ Museum, 1856

8Thomas Butler Gunn, Tableaux of American History, Lantern, 1852

9Columbus Aroused by the Cry of ‘Land,’ Vanity Fair, 1860

Chapter 1

10William Howland after Thomas R. Whitney, frontispiece, Republic, 1851

11Lossing & Barrett, Kissing the Pope’s Toe, Republic, 1851

12Thure de Thulstrup, The Ministerial Reception, Scribner’s Popular History of the United States, 1897

13J. H. Byram after William Walcutt, Monument to Young Tindale, America’s Own, 1850

14America’s Own mastheads, 1849–54

15Photograph of the ten Walcutt children, n.d.

16William Walcutt, Eagle Coffee House, 1840(?)

17William Walcutt, Thomas D. Jones, and Caleb C. Wright, Henry Clay Medal, 1852

18William Walcutt, Improvement in Sofa-Bedsteads, Patented March 26, 1872

Chapter 2

19Johann Hasenclever, Studio Scene, 1836

20Charles Blauvelt, A German Immigrant Inquiring His Way, 1855

Chapter 3

21William Walcutt, Joel Wetsel, American Odd-Fellows’ Museum, 1856

22Jean-François Millet, Mazeppa Americain, 1851

23Karl Bodmer, Simon Butler, The American Mazeppa, 1851

24Eugène Delacroix, Mazeppa on the Dying Horse, 1824

25Horace Vernet, Mazeppa and the Wolves, 1826

26William Walcutt, Simon Kenton’s Death-Ride, 1859

27William Walcutt, Jardin des Plantes, Bell Smith Abroad, 1854

28Tompkins H. Matteson, The Last of Their Race, American Odd-Fellows’ Museum, 1856

29William Walcutt, Turkey Shooting, 1855

30Charles Deas, Turkey Shooting, by 1838

31William Walcutt, Deerslayer at the Shooting Match, circa 1850

32John W. Orr, after William Walcutt, frontispiece, Campfires of the Red Men, 1855

33Tompkins H. Matteson, The Turkey Shoot, 1857

Chapter 4

34William N. Dunnel after William Walcutt, frontispiece, Proverbial Philosophy, 1849

35William Walcutt, cover, The Lilac at the Door, 1857

36William N. Dunnel after William Walcutt, Portrait of Carlos D. Stuart, 1849

37Duganne’s Iron Man and Here’s More of Them Furreners," Yankee Notions, 1852

38Augustus Morand, William Walcutt, Sculptor, c. 1860–68

39John Cole Hagen, Snow Scene (Labor’s End), 1847

40John McRae after Frederick A. Chapman, Opening Scene, and William Walcutt, Closing Scene, Foot-Prints of Truth; Or, Voice of Humanity, 1853

41John McRae after Frederick A. Chapman, Infidelity and Fanaticism, Foot-Prints of Truth; Or, Voice of Humanity, 1853

42Whitney & Jocelyn after Jacob Dallas, illustrations, Ariel, 1855

43Frontispiece, Fairy Tales of Many Nations, 1850; Frontispiece, Vala, 1851

44William N. Dunnel after James Cafferty, The Picture of the Lord, and William Walcutt?, Dom Pedro Commits a Double Murder, Fairy Tales of Many Nations, 1850

45Thomas P. Rossiter, Studio Reception, Paris, 1841

46John McRae after Christopher P. Cranch, Graphic Muse, Hagen, Foot-Prints of Truth; Or, Voice of Humanity, 1853; John W. Orr after Thomas P. Rossiter, Glory Forever to Art, Vala, 1851

47John W. Orr after William Walcutt, illustrations, Vala, 1851

48William Walcutt, illustration, Vala, 1851

49Bobbett and Edmonds after William Walcutt, Vala, 1851

50William Howland after Thomas W. Whitley, illustration, Vala, 1851

51Thomas Hicks, illustration, Vala, 1851

Chapter 5

52John W. Orr after F. O. C. Darley, The Thanksgiving Dinner, Chanticleer, 1853

53John W. Orr after William Walcutt, Mopsey Putting the Pies in the Oven, Chanticleer, 1853

54John W. Orr after Tompkins H. Matteson, Wilfred Montressor, Golden Rule, 1846

55Frontispiece, Chanticleer, 1853; This is the Cock that Crowed, Cleveland Plain Dealer, 1859

56Thomas W. Strong, frontispiece, Young America, 1856

57John McLenan, Art and Artists, Young America, 1856

58Adolphe Yvon, The Genius of America, 1858

59William Walcutt, Initial A, Bell Smith Abroad, 1854

60William Walcutt, illustration, Bell Smith Abroad, 1854; William Walcutt, Young Frenchman, 1852–54

61William Walcutt, Toppling the Statue of George III at Bowling Green, New York, 1854

62William Walcutt, Pulling Down the Statue of King George III at Bowling Green, 1857

63Johannes Adam Simon Oertel, Pulling Down the Statue of King George III, New York City, 1852–53

64William Walcutt, Molly Pitcher at the Battle of Monmouth, 1845/49

65Currier & Ives after Jacob Dallas, The Women of ’76: Molly Pitcher, The Heroine of Monmouth, before 1872; John McRae after Tompkins H. Matteson, Elizabeth Zane, American Odd-Fellows’ Museum, 1856

66The Happiest Day of My Life, Odd-Fellows’ Offering for 1853; V. Balch after Junius Brutus Stearns, Marriage of Washington, Odd-Fellows Offering for 1851

Chapter 6

67William N. Dunnel, The Engraving of the Washington Monument after Walcutt’s Design, 1848

68Nathaniel Currier, View of the Great Conflagration at New York, ca. 1845

69Benson Lossing, Perry’s Statue, Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812, 1868; Public Square at Cleveland, Harper’s Weekly, 1860

70William Dressler, Perry’s Victory March, 1860

71William Walcutt, William Elmore Ide Monument, 1880; William Walcutt, Myrilla, 1870

72William Walcutt, Musadora, 1868

Conclusion

73John W. Orr after William Ross Wallace, The Washington Memorial, 1860

74The Unveiling of the Statue of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, 1928

75William Walcutt, Portrait of Peter Rawson Taft, 1859

Preface

Why William Walcutt?

At age twenty-nine, a small-town Ohio artist named William Walcutt moved to New York City.¹ He was one of a flood of artists pouring into Manhattan from around the country, attracted not only by the city’s art market but by its booming publishing industry and the opportunities for illustrating books and magazines. He arrived in 1847, in time to be swept up in the city’s fervor for democratic movements at home and abroad. Young America, as this support for the expansion of suffrage, especially for the uprisings in Europe, was branded, was an enthusiasm that crossed party, ethnic, and religious lines. It was a mood enhanced by New York’s increasingly cosmopolitan character. More than three million immigrants came from Europe to New York between 1846 and 1855, a period when U.S. territorial expansion also meant, controversially, expanding republican government (and slavery) to new peoples. Walcutt joined the native-born and foreign writers, politicians, and artists who wanted to liberate the oppressed in the Americas, Italy, France, Ireland, Austria, Hungary, and Poland. Walcutt’s art in these years, however, heroized the past. The colonial Americans who fought the British or the Indians, who won their independence and extended their domain, were models for the citizens of the present. But they became more than that. His effort to revive the past in order to topple modern tyrants was undermined when anti-immigrant forces co-opted his working-class message, embedding nativism in the period’s patriotic images of liberty.

Nativism, which in this period consisted primarily of hostility to Catholics, especially Irish Catholic immigrants, was able to take such a stranglehold not only on politics (the Know-Nothing Party reached its peak in terms of membership and electoral success in 1855) but on art and culture in this period, precisely because it was an age of reform. The spirit of the age was progress, as the newspapers proclaimed, and America, the model republic, was in the vanguard of mechanical, industrial, and social change. But the same movements that defined that progress for contemporaries—movements toward improving the human condition, antislavery movements, pro-democracy movements, temperance movements, even land reform—got much of their impetus from Protestant evangelicals. These same thinkers, often joined by more secular revolutionaries, almost always consigned the Catholic Church and its hierarchies to a repressive past, part and parcel of the feudal, monarchical, and exploitative systems that they were trying to end.²

And it was this idea of an America free from the tyranny of kings and popes that reformers shared with the men who were reconstituting the Native American Party as, first, a benevolent fraternal order designed to protect the young men who were its members, and then as the American, or Know-Nothing, Party. The Brotherhood of the Union, for example, founded by a popular writer and Odd Fellow who dabbled in nativism, was dedicated to protecting labor and land reform.³ Reformers and nativist organizers, even though they were not by any means always one and the same, often wielded the same rhetoric of anti-Romanism and aimed it at skilled native-born artisans, including artists, who were bearing the brunt of industrialization, and who themselves were seeking ways to reform it. Their appeal to these men to protect the nation was often successful. As one of the great historians of nativism put it, Whether the nativist was a workingman or a Protestant evangelist, a southern conservative or a northern reformer, he stood for a certain kind of nationalism … that some influence originating abroad threatened the very life of the nation from within. Opposition to an internal minority, which again in this period was mostly Irish Catholic immigrants, was expressed as opposition to their foreign, so unAmerican, character.⁴

In this book I focus on one artist, William Walcutt, as a case study of this milieu. Walcutt was not a member of any of the nativist political parties, but he contributed significantly to publications by leading true American politicians and writers. Because of his status as someone who was not himself an ideologue, but only what might be called nativist adjacent, his artwork testifies to how pervasive the equation of American liberty with Protestant beliefs about citizenship really was. Most books that concentrate on an individual artist aim to validate the artist’s genius and originality. My goal in this study is not to insert Walcutt into an art historical canon by validating his exceptionalism, even though on aesthetic grounds he absolutely deserves a second look. He was well trained as a painter and sculptor—his accomplishments included winning a medal in Paris—and his historical compositions were carefully researched. In his own day, his outline illustrations were called masterly, and his public sculpture was said to be the best in the country.

Instead, the book illuminates how Walcutt, like even the most canonical artists, was economically and socially grounded in certain forms of art production. Print culture in particular was an important source of revenue for most artists, and, at the same time, it was an important nativist outlet. Nativism arose not just from religious prejudice, but from economic dislocations and fears of waning political influence on the part of the middling classes, who did not often buy oil paintings. Engravers and printers were the kind of white Protestant artisans who felt pressure from industrialization’s erosion of their independence and who were attracted to reform movements and Native American parties. They joined cross-class brotherhoods like the Odd Fellows and early iterations of the Know-Nothings, and they disseminated its ideas in myriad illustrated publications, including sheet music, gift books, newspapers, and novels. Walcutt, who had lifelong ties to artisan culture, was involved not only in illustration for fraternal associations but in organizing cooperative or benevolent associations in the art world, endeavors that promoted true Americanism in the fine arts as well. To the extent then that Walcutt’s profile was not exceptional but the norm for nineteenth-century artists, his art and career show how this norm was infused with nativist ideas of true Americanism.⁵

Many scholars in fact have recognized the specifically Protestant and millennialist worldview of American artists and patrons of the period, as well as the influence of nationalist sentiment. ⁶ But what is less often acknowledged is that at mid-century, that worldview contained a good dose of anti-Catholicism. The cultural nationalism that envisioned a distinctively egalitarian American art and culture that would spread across the globe often coincided with the belief that only certain groups of people were really American. As critics, patrons, and artists promoted native American artists and encouraged the creation of artworks that by expressing certain behaviors or conflicts appeared uniquely American, they often chose the same images as anti-Catholic and nativist groups did. The most patriotic art of the nineteenth century, the art that spoke most strongly about egalitarian democracy, was often the art most colored by exclusionary beliefs about citizenship.⁷ But narratives of American art that cover the antebellum period tend to downplay the role of nativism, just as the Know-Nothing Party, seemingly so short-lived, disappeared into the Republican mainstream after the Civil War with few legislative successes to its name.

For example, in Hudson River School landscape painting, despite or even because of the supposed universality of the sublime experience of nature that its pictures of the wilderness captured, it’s not often noted that that experience was designed to exclude certain people.⁸ Views of the Hudson River and the Catskills in New York, first described by Leatherstocking in James Fenimore Cooper’s Pioneers, were then visualized by painter Thomas Cole in the 1820s. Cole’s patron, the owner of the Catskill Mountain House hotel, developed mountain trails to encourage tourists to stay longer in order to ascend to proper viewing points. These views from the hotel porch and trails, as well as pictures of the hotel itself, were subsequently painted by almost every major landscape artist. Such views were literally as well as metaphorically (in the sense of compositions constructed in the mode of a pilgrimage to high places) designed for the Elect.⁹ The Mountain House, in order to exclude Jews and Catholics, held mandatory Sunday services for hotel guests.¹⁰ In considering, then, the celebration of these tourist views of the Catskills as a distinctive American school of art, as regularly centerpieces of the exhibitions of New York’s National Academy of Design, one might note that Samuel F. B. Morse was president of the National Academy of Design from 1826 to 1845. Morse was also a leader of the nativist political party that emerged in New York in the 1830s, and when he was again made president of the Academy in 1861 (followed by his student, Daniel Huntington, an artist known for his religious paintings, in 1862), he was still organizing nativist political societies.¹¹ For the Hudson River School, the American republic was nature’s nation, which underscored its democratic character. But ideas about the republic’s origins in nature, whether that nature was envisioned in the Catskills or Walcutt’s western home, often drew from a well closed to strangers.

Walcutt and the wide range of artists, musicians, and writers in his circle who contributed to nativist media, precisely because most of them were not members of nativist political parties, demonstrate how this Protestant idealism—the belief that the future of the U.S. was as a Protestant nation—was inextricably part of how considerable numbers of nineteenth-century viewers and makers understood American art. The very diversity of Walcutt’s practice as an artist, from sculptural monuments to fairy illustrations, to frontiersmen, to battle pictures, only underscores how nativist sentiments pervaded forms seemingly remote from the subject of immigration or religion. In reconstructing these connections between Walcutt and the beliefs of his friends and patrons, I was aided by the survival of a number of his records. Walcutt was a published poet and a writer, and his contributions to the nativist journal the Republic offer a wealth of material. Equally useful were his notebooks, which contain records of pictures painted or planned, and his several sketchbooks, which, like his wife’s memory book, included portraits and mementos of friends and family. His many friendships with politicians and writers, from humorist Artemus Ward to ambassador Donn Piatt to Know-Nothing Congressman Thomas R. Whitney, meant that they, too, recorded his activities.¹² Together, these documents describe a milieu in which spiritualists, evangelical ministers, poets, politicians, satirists, engravers, and painters—both men and women—advocated for antislavery, temperance, and workingmen’s rights, as well as nativism.

The career of William Walcutt, then, tying together as it does Ohio and New York, Democrats and Republicans, working-class artisans and wealthy politicians, nativism and international solidarity, even painting and sculpture, offers a way to rethink nineteenth-century American art. Each chapter of this book traces how Walcutt’s diverse output—fairy art, Western heroes, public sculpture, revolutionary-era paintings, book illustration—was supported by circles hostile to foreign influence, whether for religious or political reasons or both. The introduction describes a nativist iconography: how nativist groups like the Order of United Americans adopted visual cues—youthful ardor, brotherhood, Stars and Stripes—that evoked not just patriotism, but an ethic of mutualism. This ethic stemmed from artisan culture’s resistance to capitalist individualism, and it manifested itself in fraternal orders like the Odd Fellows. It was co-opted by the Know-Nothings to support their positions favoring Compromise (with slavery and the South) for the Union and restricted citizenship, and it emerged in historical pictures by Walcutt and others that demonstrated that the spirit of ’76 was one of Protestant brotherhood.

Chapter 1 offers an overview of Walcutt’s biography with the goal of explaining what Walcutt and the nativists had in common: a lineage that stretched to the Mayflower, an artisanal upbringing, and a family commitment to Protestant reforms. Chapter 2 considers how those values on native birth, artisan modes of cooperation, and reform were expressed in the groups that Walcutt founded in New York, the cooperative American Artists Association and the New York Sketch Club, both of which offered members social and trade benefits and fostered a fraternal culture. Though these were not political societies, in the very process of resisting capitalist art markets (trying to establish alternatives to them), the artists involved aligned themselves with the nativist wing of Young America and its belief that the white Protestant working class (not foreigners or merchants) would create an egalitarian democracy.¹³

Subsequent chapters turn to specific genres of art. In Chapter 3, I tackle Walcutt’s pictures of the West, which heroized pioneers, whether legendary but real ones like Simon Kenton or fictional ones like Cooper’s Leatherstocking. In constructing his natural nobleman, a man shaped by Western nature and who because of that is kin to his rivals, American Indians, Walcutt drew on working-class and French Realist consciousness of the value of the ordinary man.¹⁴ But his pictures also corresponded to nativist sympathy for policies of assimilating their fellow native Americans and their simultaneous effort to sideline slavery because of its threat to the Union. In Chapter 4, I point out that despite the influence of Realism, Walcutt and several Sketch Club artists produced fantastic art, elaborate allegories with devils and angels, fairies and nature spirits. Behind these lay a transcendentalist or idealist belief in the spirit—the spirit of the age was a constant theme for believers in progress—that was aligned with Protestant humanitarian reform, and more generally the belief of nativists in ethnic or cultural essentialism.

Chapter 5 appraises the influence of Young America, a movement that supported literary and artistic demands for a national school of art and in politics voiced a critique of the Catholic Church’s alliance with tyrannical governments as part of supporting international democratic revolts. The men and women who espoused the ideas of Young America, a number of whom joined Walcutt’s Sketch Club, were often supportive of Irish immigrants, even as they characterized the church and the pope as repressive. Indeed, most of them were Democrats, the party that provided the Irish with a powerful political base. Their cultural nationalism was not nativist, then, in the sense that they shared the goal of disenfranchising immigrants, but their hostility to foreign cultural imports extended to the influence of the pope on susceptible American citizens, along with the promotion of an alternate, more democratically American, style, and this influenced the energetic comic illustrations of nativist themes by Walcutt and the Sketch Club artists. Though not comic—their seriousness moved Walcutt toward a style of more classical restraint—Walcutt’s historical paintings of the American Revolution were among the subjects advocated for by both Young America and nativists. Few of these paintings have been located today, but among them are his best-known works—even at the time, one newspaper called his battle scenes especially effective. In them, he foregrounds the action of white and some Black men and women, acting in unison. Walcutt’s creation of a unified people as a symbol for the U.S. was not just a response to the imminent Civil War, though. It inserted the elements of nationality as envisioned by antislavery nativists into the Republican creed.

In Chapter 6 and the Conclusion, I focus on the artwork that made Walcutt nationally known in his own day: his monument to War of 1812 hero Oliver Perry in Cleveland, Ohio. It demonstrates how Walcutt’s style, while drawing on nativist rhetoric about Anglo-American greatness, was able to win over both Democrats and Republicans on the eve of the Civil War. The Conclusion considers the fate of the same statue during the Colonial Revival of the early twentieth century, when Progressive-era elites turned to the colonial past to reassert their cultural control. The 1928 reproduction of Walcutt’s statue of Commodore Perry for the Capitol of Rhode Island was a sign of the recurrence of nativism in the twentieth century. But Walcutt’s fiery portrait style continued to carry Young America’s message of expanded rights for ordinary people. Rhode Island, a bastion of old stock rule, was transitioning to less restricted voting requirements, which for the first time permitted its Catholic majority to have a voice.

This book tries to show that even such ordinary, accepted aspects of nineteenth-century art—the seeming ubiquitous worship of George Washington, the popularity of paintings of eighteenth-century revolutionary events—when examined through the lens of Walcutt’s career, emerge as intertwined with nativist politics. His experience especially points to the nativist strain detectable in commercial art and engraving in the nineteenth century. This was not just the product of popular taste but, as the benevolent fraternities that turned into the Know-Nothing Party desired, of a union of artisan culture with more elite patronage. Walcutt’s work and practice provide insight into this underexplored aspect of antebellum visual culture.

Introduction

Fraternalism and True American Iconography

A Currier lithograph, published not long after William Walcutt arrived in New York, points to the intertwining of nativism with common American ideals (fig. 1). The artist shows a gentlemanly and youthful United American, a member of an anti-immigrant fraternal order active in New York. There were several such orders just in New York, especially during years when nativist political parties were relatively quiescent. New York’s Know-Nothing Party (in the 1840s, the American Republican Party) of the 1850s would mostly emerge from this Order of United Americans. In the sketch, the man’s youth and genteel economic status may express wishful thinking on the part of the nativists, or even a kind of counter-propaganda. Most organized, political nativism of the period was composed of older, wealthy Whigs. These conservative old fogies, or silver gray Whigs (nicknames themselves suggesting elderliness), disapproved of how the head of the Whig Party in New York, William Seward, courted immigrants, Catholics, and abolitionists.¹ However, these disaffected Whigs, mostly professionals and merchants, did try to attract younger, white, Protestant, native-born artisans to a shared, cross-class identity. They valued skilled labor as a significant voting bloc, but also as a sign that their version of Americanism had broad appeal to the masses. It probably did. Many historians argue that native-born mechanics felt threatened by the Irish and German immigrants who arrived in the 1840s and ’50s. Wages were undermined by their influx, and as taxpayers who had to struggle to stay out of poverty themselves, skilled workers were also wary of being taxed to support the often desperately poor immigrants.² So they joined fraternities like the Order of United Americans and, later, political parties, that promised protection. The Order of United Americans had an age limit of eighteen to fifty-five, but most members were under thirty-five.

Figure 1. Nathaniel Currier, The United American, c. 1849, lithograph. Published by N. Currier. Public domain; image provided by the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Nathaniel Currier also published campaign material for Millard Fillmore’s Know-Nothing presidential candidacy of 1856. Louis Maurer, a German immigrant who also worked for engraver Thomas W. Strong (in 1851), another occasional publisher of nativist materials, did some of the firm’s anti-Catholic cartoons.

Currier’s portrait might thus be considered aspirational in suggesting that a member of the Order of United Americans was not only youthful, but prosperous, with a desk job and kid gloves. If the effect of his checkered pants and frock coat amid all the stars and stripes is to suggest a beardless Uncle Sam, well, the United Americans often called themselves Sam, or Sam’s youngest son. They practiced a demonstrative patriotism, as here with the eagle desk, banner (the Order of the Star Spangled Banner was a nativist fraternal order, too), and Revolutionary War picture on the wall. But Young Sam—Young Sam was the name of a Know-Nothing periodical—is slender, with long hair, no beard, and big, dreamy eyes.³ This quality, of romantic ardor for country, for something greater than himself, speaks not just to the idealizations of art, but to the ostensible reason for being a member of the Orders of United Americans, or Star Spangled Banner, or United American Mechanics. These were benevolent or friendly fraternities, which meant they pooled resources to pay benefits to members and their families in times of need. The premise was mutual aid to one’s brothers. As such, they were nonpartisan or even anti-partisan, a stance that actually helped a third party like the Know-Nothings colonize them; the Know-Nothings presented themselves as an alternative to the existing parties.

Like other