> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.sweatyspice.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# The Bloody Hand of the Pope
- URL: https://www.sweatyspice.com/the-bloody-hand-of-the-pope/
- Published: 2026-09-17T15:00:16.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-17T15:00:20.000Z
- Description: Every time one exclusion fell in nineteenth-century America, another one rose to take its place, usually enacted by the people who had just finished climbing out from under the last one.
- Author: Geoff Anderson
- Tags: The Long Arc, a journey of political weight, Political Musing

> Researching for the last post, "[The Escape Hatches are Painted On](https://www.sweatyspice.com/the-escape-hatches-are-all-painted-on/)" I dug into the Funding Fathers and the Federalist Papers, and that caused my ADHD addled mind to stray to what sort of a country they wanted to creat. That led to me thinking more on immigration. Our current manic gyrations are not novel nor are they unprecedented. Let's dig into our un-exceptional past. 

At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, delegate Gouverneur Morris argued for a property qualification on the right to vote, on the theory that men without property had no real stake in society and could be too easily bought. Benjamin Franklin, according to James Madison's notes on the debate, argued the opposite, in defense of ordinary men without land or wealth. The Convention left the question to the states, and most states answered it the way Morris wanted (no surprise there). In some states at the founding, as much as 90 percent of white men were excluded from voting for lack of sufficient property. The republic did not begin with a franchise that excluded a few people at the margins. It began with one that excluded almost everyone, and the story of the next seventy-five years is the story of what filled the space each time that exclusion partially receded.

#### Property Falls, Race Rises

*One barrier came down. Another one, more explicit, went up in its place.*

The property qualification eroded gradually rather than all at once, and it did not erode evenly. New Jersey dropped its property requirement in 1807, and in the same constitutional revision stripped the vote from women and free Black men, both of whom had been eligible to vote under the state's 1776 constitution. Connecticut did the same to its free Black voters in 1814\. New York expanded white male suffrage to roughly 80 percent of white men through the 1820s while simultaneously imposing, in 1822, a $250 property requirement that applied specifically to what the law called "men of color," a bar high enough to exclude nearly all of the state's free Black population even as it excluded almost none of its white one. North Carolina was the last state to fully eliminate property qualifications for white men, in 1856\. Rhode Island held out on its own version long enough to produce an actual armed uprising, the 1841 Dorr Rebellion, when reformers organized an extralegal government and briefly took up arms over the state's continued refusal to extend the vote to men without land.

None of this reads as one trend expanding democracy and a separate trend restricting it. It is a single trend, one qualification for the franchise being traded for another, frequently in the same legislative session and occasionally in the same clause. The document that emerges from this period is not the story of America extending the vote outward from an initial center. It is the story of America continuously deciding who the center was.

#### The Next Wave Arrives

*Immigration ran higher, proportionally, in the 1840s and 1850s than at any other point in American history, including now.*

Irish immigration climbed from roughly 30,000 people a year before the famine to something closer to 300,000 a year at its peak in the late 1840s, with nearly 2 million Irish arrivals by 1855\. German immigration ran alongside it at comparable scale. The existing foreign-born population of the United States stood at around 1.7 million in 1848\. Over the following six years, the country absorbed roughly 3.2 million new immigrants, nearly doubling the entire foreign-born population in half a decade, with Ireland and Germany together accounting for about half of that total. By the most rigorous historical measure available, the net rate of immigration relative to total population, this period was the highest in all of American history, running at roughly 8 to 9 new immigrants per 1,000 residents each year, a rate the country would not match again even during the more heavily mythologized Ellis Island era that followed it.

This wave of arrivals landed in a country that had just spent four decades legally redefining full political citizenship as a specifically white inheritance. The standard path to full political rights, naturalization after five years of residency, was about to become the exact mechanism nativists organized against.

Sweaty's Corner doesn't have a marketing budget or an algorithm pushing it into anyone's feed. It has readers who share it. If this one landed, sending it to someone who'd get something out of it — or subscribing so the next one finds you directly — genuinely moves the needle. 

[ Subscribe ](#/portal/signup) Share this post 

#### The Bloody Hand of the Pope

*The animus wasn't new. It was already written into half the state constitutions in the country.*

Anti-Catholic exclusion did not begin with Irish immigration. It predated the republic itself. New Jersey's 1776 constitution barred Catholics from holding office, a restriction that stood until 1844\. North Carolina restricted officeholding to Protestants from 1776 until 1835\. South Carolina did the same from 1778 to 1790\. Georgia kept anti-Catholic statutes on its books until 1798\. John Jay, later the first Chief Justice of the United States, tried and failed to write an explicit ban on Catholic officeholding into New York's 1777 constitution, and New York's own 1700 law barring Catholic priests from entering the state at all remained on the books well into the founding era. When the federal Constitution was drafted in 1787, ten of the thirteen states still had some form of religious test for officeholding, which makes Article VI's ban on religious tests for federal office a genuine outlier relative to the states, not a reflection of where the country actually stood.

That background is what the Irish famine migration walked into. An Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts was burned by a mob in 1834 over rumors that the nuns inside were being held against their will. A decade later, in Philadelphia, a genuine dispute over Bible readings in public schools, Catholic Bishop Francis Kenrick had objected to Protestant teachers requiring Catholic children to read from the King James Bible and sing Protestant hymns, was twisted by nativist organizers into a rumor that the Bible itself was being banned from schools entirely. Three days of rioting in May 1844, followed by a second round that July, killed at least twenty people, burned two Catholic churches and a seminary to the ground, and left the Irish neighborhood of Kensington substantially destroyed, while mobs marched calling on their fellow citizens to throw off "the bloody hand of the Pope." The same nativist organizing that produced the riot also produced its own racial vocabulary. Cartoons of the period regularly gave Irish immigrants exaggerated, ape-like features and compared them directly to Black Americans, a visual argument that the boundary of whiteness itself was still, in the 1840s, something actively being drawn and redrawn rather than a settled fact.

It is worth noting the coincidence directly rather than passing over it: New Jersey finally removed its 1776 ban on Catholic officeholders in 1844, the same year Philadelphia's Bible Riots were burning Catholic churches over the same underlying animus. The legal exclusion and the mob violence were not sequential chapters. They were the same current, running through different channels in the same year.

#### Twenty-One Years

*The demand was never to stop immigration. It was to delay what immigrants could do once they arrived.*

In 1849, a secret society called the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner formed in New York City, its members instructed to answer any question about the organization with the same phrase, "I know nothing." By 1854, it had shed its secrecy and gone public as the American Party, and the results were immediate: more than 100 seats in Congress, eight governorships, and control of multiple state legislatures across the Northeast, an extraordinary result for an organization that had barely existed the year before. Its central legislative demand was not a restriction on immigration itself. It was an extension of the naturalization period from five years to twenty-one, long enough to keep an entire generation of immigrants from ever reaching the ballot box. Historian Tyler Anbinder's account of the movement makes the actual goal explicit: the Know-Nothings, as the party became popularly known, "just don't want them to have political power." The naturalization pathway, the same mechanism that had let white male suffrage consolidate around race a generation earlier, was now the exact target.

#### The Collapse

*The same year the Know-Nothings broke through, the issue that would actually define the decade arrived and buried them.*

The Know-Nothings' national breakthrough came in 1854, the same year Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act and reopened the question of slavery in the western territories. The slavery crisis that followed overtook nativism as the country's dominant political question within two years, splitting the Know-Nothing movement along the same sectional line that was splitting everything else in American politics. Its northern wing flowed directly into the newly formed Republican Party, the same absorption that ended the Whigs in the same period. Nativism did not disappear. It lost the argument over which crisis mattered more, and it would not regain that argument until long after the war that followed.

#### 1863

*The group that had spent thirty years absorbing nativist violence turned its own worst violence on the group still excluded beneath it.*

The Enrollment Act of 1863 authorized the first federal military draft in American history, and it included a provision letting any draftee avoid service entirely by paying a $300 commutation fee, a sum well beyond the reach of most working-class families and well within reach of most wealthy ones. In New York City that July, four days of rioting broke out in response, largely among Irish residents of the city. The mob burned the Colored Orphan Asylum to the ground. Black New Yorkers were beaten and lynched in the streets over the course of the riot, which left at least 119 people confirmed dead, with some estimates considerably higher.

The uncomfortable fact worth stating plainly rather than softening: this was substantially the same population that had spent the previous three decades on the receiving end of nativist violence, exclusion from office, and a proposed twenty-one-year wait for full citizenship, turning its own capacity for organized violence on a population with even less power than it had. Shared experience of exclusion did not produce solidarity between the two groups. It produced, in this specific and well-documented instance, the opposite.

#### The Chain

Property gave way to race between 1807 and 1856\. Race gave way to religion and ethnicity through the 1830s and into 1844\. The naturalization pathway tied those two exclusions directly together, the same mechanism used first to consolidate the franchise around whiteness and then to try to keep new arrivals from reaching it at all. The Know-Nothings rose and fell within two years, not because the animus behind them disappeared, but because a larger crisis temporarily eclipsed it. And in 1863, all of it arrived at once, in a single city, over a single week. The mechanism repeats across this period not because any one group involved was uniquely capable of cruelty, but because each rung of the ladder tends to get defended most fiercely by whoever just finished climbing onto it.

Keep the lights on

Like what you've read, but not able to switch to paid? Why not buy me a coffee instead! All money goes to help defray the expense of running the site.

[ ![Buy me a coffee](https://img.buymeacoffee.com/button-api/?text=Buy me a coffee&emoji=&slug=sweatyspice&button_colour=FFDD00&font_colour=000000&font_family=Cookie&outline_colour=000000&coffee_colour=ffffff) ](https://www.buymeacoffee.com/sweatyspice?ref=sweatyspice.com)