Conservative Americanism: Nativism, Unionism, and Slavery in Border South Politics, 1854–1861

Conservative Americanism: Nativism, Unionism, and Slavery in Border South Politics, 1854-1861 explores the history of Conservative Americanist ideology through the lens of six Border Southerners in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia from the collapse of the Whig Party through the start of the Civil War. Jesse George-Nichol challenges the prevailing wisdom that Unionism, rather than genuine nativism, drove these Southerners to join the nativist American or Know Nothing Party. She argues that Southern nativism and Unionism were inextricably linked—bound by a conviction that foreigners and foreign ideas posed a threat to slavery. Southern moderates understood that immigrants were responsible for the growing political imbalance between the free and slave states, and after the Kansas-Nebraska crisis, they came to believe that foreign radicalism was central to the mounting animus against slavery in the North and West. These Southerners increasingly saw the sectional conflict as one that not only pitted Northerners against Southerners and freedom against slavery, but also as a collision between native American moderation and foreign fanaticism. This perception continued to motivate Southern Know Nothings through the election of 1860, the secession crisis, and beyond. This book is a step forward into a broader conversation about conservatism, nativism, Unionism, and slavery in Border South politics before the Civil War. George-Nichol thus argues that understanding Southern nativism is essential to understanding Southern Unionism in the Civil War-era.