Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration

Authored, coauthored, edited, or coedited by Harold Holzer

The Presidents vs. the Press

Monument Man

The Annotated Lincoln

A Just and Generous Nation: Abraham Lincoln and the Fight for American Opportunity

1865: America Makes War and Peace in Lincoln’s Final Year

Lincoln and the Power of the Press

The Civil War in 50 Objects

1863: Lincoln’s Pivotal Year

Lincoln: How Abraham Lincoln Ended Slavery in America

Emancipating Lincoln

Hearts Touched by Fire

Lincoln on War

The New York Times Complete Civil War

Lincoln and New York

Lincoln President-Elect

The Lincoln Assassination Conspirators

The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now

In Lincoln’s Hand

The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views

The Battle of Hampton Roads

Lincoln in the Times

Lincoln at Cooper Union

Prang’s Civil War Pictures

Lincoln Seen and Heard

The Union Image: Popular Prints of the Civil War North

Lincoln as I Knew Him

The Lincoln Mailbag

Dear Mr. Lincoln: Letters to the President

Washington and Lincoln Portrayed

Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: The Civil War in Art

The Lincoln–Douglas Debates: The First Complete, Unexpurgated Text

Lincoln on Democracy

The Lincoln Family Album

The Confederate Image: Prints of the Lost Cause

The Lincoln Image: Abraham Lincoln and the Popular Print

DUTTON

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Copyright © 2024 by Harold Holzer

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In loving memory of the immigrant grandparents who made me American

Eva Goodman Holzer, Romania (ca. 1880–1965)

David Holzer, Austria, now Ukraine (1876–1952)

Fannie Eder Last, Galicia, now Poland (1874–1927)

Harry Last, Austria, now Ukraine (1873–1947)

Contents

Introduction    For the Encouragement of Immigration

Chapter One   A World in Miniature

Chapter Two    So Much Savage Feeling

Chapter Three    No Objection to Fuse with Any Body

Chapter Four    Our Equals in All Things

Chapter Five    A Vital Part of Freedom

Chapter Six    Teutonic Expectants

Chapter Seven    I Fights Mit Sigel

Chapter Eight    God Bless the Irish Flag

Chapter Nine    More of the Quarrel

Chapter Ten    This Noble Effort

Epilogue    Scattered to the Winds

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Notes

Illustration Credits

Index

_148347071_

INTRODUCTION

For the Encouragement of Immigration

I regard our emigrants as one of the principal replenishing streams appointed by Providence to repair the ravages of internal war, and its wastes of national strength and health.

—Abraham Lincoln, Annual Message to Congress, December 6, 1864[1]

Even under ideal circumstances, it would have been difficult for Abraham Lincoln to surpass his recent masterpiece at Gettysburg. And now, with a fresh rhetorical challenge awaiting him, he fell ill. Lincoln arrived back in Washington from Pennsylvania late on November 19, 1863, suffering from variola, a supposedly mild form of smallpox that proved severe enough to send the exhausted orator to his sickbed for weeks. By some accounts, Lincoln did not return to his White House desk until mid-December.[2] Tellingly, the valet who tended him during his convalescence, a Black man, caught smallpox, too—and died.

Debility notwithstanding, Lincoln faced an unavoidable deadline for not only a new manuscript but also a much lengthier one. With the thirty-eighth session of the House and Senate set to convene on December 7, the President was expected to present his Annual Message to Congress—the equivalent of today’s State of the Union address—the following day. This would be his third such message, and the first to a Congress whose Republican strength had shriveled following setbacks in the most recent midterm elections.[3]

Nonetheless, Lincoln intended the message to include something dramatic: a historic proposal to encourage—and perhaps even financially underwrite—foreign immigration to the United States. By some accounts, Lincoln composed the entire message in bed.

The remarks for Gettysburg had been, in Lincoln’s folksy description, short, short, short: barely 270 words.[4] No such brevity ever satisfied Congress. By custom, the House and Senate anticipated a detailed summary on both foreign and domestic affairs. To be expected was a full accounting of federal spending as well as an update on the ongoing war against the Rebels. Congress would particularly desire reports on the enforcement of the President’s Emancipation Proclamation (I shall not attempt to retract or modify it, he would pledge) and on the first months of African American military recruitment (which, he would report, gave to the future a new aspect).[5]

Tradition also called for the President to use this yearly opportunity to specify his legislative priorities. Here is where the bedridden Lincoln summoned what strength he could muster to craft a historically bold proposal. I again submit to your consideration, he declared twenty paragraphs into his text, the expediency of establishing a system for the encouragement of immigration.[6]

From 1830 through the outbreak of the American Civil War, nearly ten million Europeans had migrated to the United States, North as well as South, forever upending the demography, culture, and voting patterns of the nation, especially in its teeming urban centers. In the wake of such overwhelming change, resistance to immigration and immigrants metastasized until forces arose that were determined not only to restrict foreigners from entering the country but to disenfranchise, demonize, and, occasionally, terrorize those who had already arrived, settled, and earned citizenship here. And still the refugees poured across oceans and borders to reach our shores, their growing numbers inevitably challenging, and ultimately redefining, what it meant to be American.

Only when civil war broke out in 1861 did foreign migration to the United States slow significantly. Prospective immigrants understandably shrank from the notion of abandoning one troubled country to relocate to another. To some Americans, the reduction in new foreign arrivals came as an answered prayer. For decades, immigration, particularly by Catholics, had stirred resistance, resentment, and, in some cases, violence, destruction, and death. Politically, these tensions split and ultimately destroyed the old Whig Party, in which Lincoln had spent most of his political career, inspiring anti-immigration nativists to form a political organization of their own. The realignment had driven many immigrants into the ranks of the Democrats, who welcomed new arrivals with a warm embrace and a swift path to citizenship and voter registration. The issue roiled the country and exposed an ugly vein of bigotry in the American body politic. And its intractability deflected mainstream attention from the country’s original sin: slavery.

Now President Lincoln looked beyond the longtime national divide over immigration to propose his revolutionary idea. Although he reported in his message that refugees were again flowing with greater freedom into America, their numbers had yet to reach their robust, if bitterly contested, prewar levels. And the reduction was causing what Lincoln called a great deficiency of laborers in every field of industry, especially in agriculture and in our mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals. In other words, America could no longer rely on American workers to fill American jobs. Employers needed to look elsewhere—namely overseas—for manpower.

True enough, the Lincoln administration had in a sense contributed to this crisis-level deficiency. There were now as many as a million men enrolled in the Union armed forces to fight the Confederacy, and since spring, the newly introduced military draft had been wresting laborers from farms and factories and redeploying them into the army. As Lincoln saw matters, their necessary absence from the home front now threatened national productivity—of civilian goods as well as war matériel. Whether the situation might ease longtime hostility to foreign laborers would be left for another day. First, Lincoln urgently wanted robust immigration to resume—even if the government had to provide the means to accelerate it.

As Lincoln forcibly argued in his message, the time had come to regard immigrants not as interlopers but as assets; not as a drain on public resources but as a source of national wealth and strength. He expressed it this way: While the demand for labor is thus increased here, tens of thousands of persons, destitute of remunerative occupation, are thronging our foreign consulates, and offering to emigrate to the United States if essential, but very cheap, assistance can be afforded them. It is easy to see that, under the sharp discipline of civil war, the nation is beginning a new life. This noble effort demands the aid, and ought to receive the attention and support of the government.[7]

•   •   •

Lincoln might not have realized it, but, in making his appeal, the sixteenth president echoed sentiments that the first president had expressed generations before. As George Washington once declared, The bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent & respectable Stranger, but the oppressed & persecuted of all Nations and Religions; whom we shall welcome to participation of all our rights & previleges, if by decency & propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment.[8]

Of course, Washington later backtracked and advised his successor, John Adams, that with respect to emigration . . . except of useful mechanic’s . . . there is no need of extra encouragement—an emphasis not all that different from Lincoln’s new focus on laborers in every field of industry.[9] Washington’s revised views reflected a growing discord over immigration, with some fearing that foreigners might flock here en masse and spread both revolutionary doctrine and Roman Catholic dogma to a people struggling to form a stable national identity. The rising xenophobia was given full voice by Washington’s Federalist congressional ally Harrison Gray Otis of Massachusetts, who made clear that he did "not wish to invite hoards [sic] of wild Irishmen, nor the turbulent and disorderly of all parts of the world, [to] come here with a view to disturb our tranquility."[10]

President Adams went on to sign the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts, giving him power to deport unwelcome (or merely unsupportive) foreigners, and increasing from five to a discouraging fourteen years the residency required to qualify immigrants for naturalized American citizenship. In addition to its inflated concerns about foreign influence, the Adams administration worried that an influx of French and Irish immigrants would support and strengthen Jefferson’s Democrats, reducing the voting power of the Federalists.[11] Only after Thomas Jefferson entered the White House did the citizenship threshold return to five years.

In other words, the immigration debate had been raging since the beginnings of the republic.[12] Lincoln’s midcentury Whigs merely inherited the distrust of foreigners initially expressed by Adams’s Federalists, while Andrew Jackson’s Democrats emulated the Jeffersonians by welcoming the foreign-born and registering them as voters. The argument continued without consensus until secession and the outbreak of war put the age-old debate on hold. That is, until Lincoln made revived immigration a policy priority.

•   •   •

Summoning his full rhetorical power, Lincoln concluded his 1863 Annual Message with a resounding salute to the army and navy, the gallant men, from commander to sentinel, who compose them—many of them, he might have mentioned, foreign-born—and to whom, more than to others, the world must stand indebted for the home of freedom disenthralled, regenerated, enlarged and perpetuated.[13] The key words were regenerated and enlarged. At Gettysburg in November, Lincoln had spoken of the fathers who had brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty. Now, addressing Congress in December, he proclaimed, more directly than had any previous chief magistrate, that a new generation conceived elsewhere might also enjoy a new birth of freedom in a land other than their birthplace.

It was a strong message, especially given Lincoln’s reduced physical vitality. Still, the result evoked the usual partisan press response. To the pro-administration New York Tribune, the message showed wide humanity and generous impulses. But to the hostile Richmond Examiner, its author remained a Yankee monster of inhumanity and falsehood.[14] From whatever political viewpoint, nearly all the coverage focused on Lincoln’s new plan for amnesty and reconstruction, a generous move to end the rebellion with the Emancipation Proclamation intact. Largely escaping notice was the landmark proposal on immigration, just as the entire subject of Lincoln and immigration policy has been largely overlooked by generations of historians and biographers.[*] Coming as it did less than a month after Lincoln’s oratorical zenith at Gettysburg, Lincoln’s message was quickly forgotten—and largely remains so.

Yet Lincoln’s proposal did spur prompt and consequential action on what became the first piece of proactive federal legislation to encourage, rather than discourage, immigration to the United States. Congress made sure An Act to Encourage Immigration reached the President for his signature by a doubly symbolic date: July 4, 1864. It was not only Independence Day but the third anniversary of an earlier message Lincoln had sent to a special session of Congress at the start of the war in 1861. In words that would have fit well into his new argument for immigration reform, Lincoln had urged loyalty to the government, pledged, as he put it, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all.[15] Now, for the first time, the government would openly encourage natives of the Old World to pursue such opportunity in the New.

•   •   •

It must be noted that Lincoln received no ovations from Congress the day he delivered his 1863 message, for the simple reason that he did not deliver it in person. Ever since Jefferson’s day, and until Woodrow Wilson reintroduced the original tradition of declaiming Annual Messages in person, nineteenth-century presidents merely conveyed their yearly reports to Capitol Hill via messenger, there to be read aloud to legislators by Senate and House clerks.

Lincoln, still fatigued and now nursing a nasty facial rash—something he can give them all, he joked to the office seekers still lining up for favors—could not have appeared on Capitol Hill that December had he wished to. Instead, he dispatched his private secretary, John George Nicolay, to Capitol Hill bearing copies of his manuscript.[16] After handing the document to the clerks, Nicolay took a seat in the chamber to bear witness to the recitation and response. Perhaps, when the senators and congressmen heard the opening words of Lincoln’s immigration proposal that day, they craned their necks for a glance in Nicolay’s direction, remembering that the presidential emissary was himself an immigrant—German by birth, as Nicolay’s daughter put it, American by inclination and adoption.[17]

Born Johann Georg Nicolai in 1832 in the Bavarian village of Essingen, Nicolay had immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1838 and attended school in Cincinnati. Like Lincoln a former Whig, he went on to edit the Pike County Free Press, an Illinois newspaper friendly to the embryonic Republican Party, and became an early and enthusiastic supporter of Lincoln’s candidacy for the White House. Reportedly, Nicolay still spoke English with a German accent. If nothing else, his wispy mustache and goatee made the slightly built chief of staff look vaguely European.

Now this foreign-born American—whom one journalist dubbed the grim Cerberus of Teutonic descent who guards the President’s gate—had borne to Capitol Hill a bold presidential proposal to expand immigration rights to others.[18] What Congress—and perhaps Lincoln himself—did not know is that, for some unexplained reason, Nicolay had neglected to obtain his own American citizenship papers. Back in 1860, he had likely, even fraudulently, cast a vote for Lincoln for president, one hopes in the belief that his naturalization had been processed.[19] And now Nicolay proudly reported to Lincoln that legislators had cheered his message—one of the most consequential speeches Lincoln never gave—as if the millennium had come.[20]

In his magisterial Second Inaugural Address fifteen months later, outside this same Capitol building, Lincoln would invoke God to sanctify the country’s bloody war to destroy slavery. History has largely forgotten that in his recent Annual Message, he had invoked Providence to bless the overseas replenishment of the war-shattered American generation.

•   •   •

This is the story of the seismic political realignment, cultural upheaval, and personal growth that led Lincoln to introduce this remarkable immigration initiative. It is also the story of what contemporaries often referred to as the first American civil war: the battle over ethnic and religious diversity that unfolded decades before the rebellion that erupted in 1861 over slavery. And it is the story of Lincoln’s foreign-born contemporaries—some of whom became important friends (and foes) of the rising politician and then wartime president—and how they fought for acceptance and equal rights in the face of relentless discrimination.

As this book will endeavor to show, in dealing with the immigration issue for more than twenty years of his political career, Lincoln revealed himself as an increasingly progressive, sometimes inconsistent, but ultimately history-making leader. All too often maddeningly torn between welcoming the foreign-born and befriending those who despised them, he balanced a natural desire to expand the American dream and an understandable political reluctance to offend his less enlightened supporters. Ultimately—though the word has become a cliché too often deployed to excuse moral failure—Lincoln evolved on immigration, just as he would evolve on the issue of Black freedom and rights.

As a young, emerging leader, Lincoln raised no objections to immigrants, and the inveterate storyteller only occasionally made jokes at their expense. Yet for a long time, he found it difficult to condemn xenophobes if there was a chance they might help him reach his priority goals of funding vital infrastructure and, later, putting slavery on the course of ultimate extinction.[21] Ever the strategic politician, Lincoln remained open to forging questionable alliances—to fuse, as he often put it—with men who rejected foreigners and Catholics but also hated slavery. In much the same vein, he welcomed political support from those who believed liberated Black slaves could never be the equals of whites and, indeed, should be encouraged to become immigrants themselves—back to Africa.

Lincoln did not at first lead the movement to expand immigration, but he did not resist it, either. Just as he was neither an apologist for slavery nor a supporter of abolition bent on eradicating it immediately, he was initially neither as bigoted as the nativists of his era nor as devoted to broader diversity as those who worked actively to encourage it. Like most successful politicians then and now, Lincoln had aspirations that were too broad for some, and too narrow for others. Lincoln’s vision of immigration always remained limited to those who sought refuge here from Europe—not Asia or the Spanish Americas. And he lacked sympathy for the claims of Native people who had dwelled on American soil long before his own ancestors had arrived here. Yet Lincoln’s powerful leadership in time proved critical to effecting change that widened the definition of American citizenship. Ultimately, Lincoln became an immigration champion.

In navigating early disputes over the foreign-born, Lincoln was compelled to confront and sometimes straddle a genuine xenophobic streak among even his own antislavery allies. Even as the rising Western political leader built a freedom coalition designed principally to restrict slavery and, we often forget, to broaden opportunity for free white men, Lincoln faced an alarming resistance to the notion of sharing the American dream with Americans from overseas. How he maneuvered both pro- and anti-immigration forces, not to mention immigrants themselves, into his own broad political tent tells us much about Lincoln’s breathtaking political acumen while illumining the neglected story of poisonous ethnic politics in the years leading up to the Civil War.

While this book will fault Lincoln for too often, and for too long, dallying with deplorable nativists for political advantage, it will also acknowledge one of his signal moral achievements: maintaining and expressing consistent revulsion for the hatred of Catholics and foreigners, even those who did not support him politically. And it will recognize one of his most neglected but extraordinary policy accomplishments, moving a suspicious citizenry toward acceptance of meaningful immigration reform almost unimaginable today: wide-open borders that replenished an American population diminished by wartime death. Finally, it will endeavor to trace Lincoln’s personal and political growth, not alone through statements and statutes but as seen through the eyes and words of some of the foreign-born contemporaries who interacted with him over the years: Germans like Carl Schurz, Gustave Koerner, and Franz Sigel; and Irishmen like James Shields, Archbishop John Hughes, and war hero Thomas Francis Meagher.

That Lincoln ultimately summoned the better angels of his nature when it came to so-called hyphenated Americans has long merited historical attention. As this book hopes to demonstrate, he deserves enormous credit for staving off the forces of fear and bigotry and envisioning a government of, by, and for the people, regardless of their national origin. Lincoln believed in borders, but he encouraged access. Yet it took him time to grow into an immigration advocate, just as it required time for him to refine his views on abolition and Black citizenship.

In the end, Lincoln not only won the Civil War fought over slavery, but he beat back the even longer rebellion against immigration, and it took significant political skill and enormous personal self-confidence to achieve both. Bravery would be shown not only by the commander in chief but by the thousands of immigrants who fought for the Union (and the Confederacy!) and made their own sacrifices, to paraphrase Lincoln, on the altar of Freedom. The Civil War could not have been won without Lincoln’s leadership, but it could not have been fought without the immigrant soldiers who served and, by the tens of thousands, died that the nation might live.[22] This largely untold, deeply complicated American story of bias and bravery deserves to be better known.

In this accounting of Lincoln’s part in this saga, readers may note startling parallels between the immigration debates of the nineteenth century and those of the twenty-first. That is because the still-frustrating, unendingly divisive issue remains with us even now. Thus, the book abounds with stories of religious prejudice, fear of refugees, riot and insurrection, controversies over government support for parochial schools, anxiety about the changing demographics in neighborhoods and cities, hostility to the speaking of foreign languages, competition (real and imagined) between domestic and foreign workers, and fevered complaints about partisan media coverage and election fraud.

Yet in pursuing the unfinished work of forging national consensus on immigration and citizenship, along with the other unfulfilled promises of the American dream, Abraham Lincoln emerged as a historical figure worthy of appreciation as well as a mythic one capable of inspiring new generations. After more than a century and a half, his life and leadership continue to provide insight into how best to explore issues and attitudes that characterized society in his own time while continuing to reverberate in our own. In a way, Lincoln was an architect of modernity—pro-freedom, pro-education, pro-infrastructure, and, perhaps least appreciated of all, pro-immigration—and willing to use the federal government to widen economic opportunity for all, regardless of national origin.

As the great Lincoln scholar Richard Nelson Current once observed, Lincoln’s rare combination of effectiveness and eloquence made him both a symbol and exponent of the Democratic dilemma and thus gives him a perpetual timeliness, an external relevance to the problems of popular government.[23]

That is why this complicated chapter of the Lincoln story—and the American story—needs to be fully explored, better understood, and more usefully remembered.

CHAPTER ONE

A World in Miniature

Like all Americans of European descent, Abraham Lincoln’s ancestors were immigrants. Most of Lincoln’s distant forebears are lost to history, with the notable exception of one great-great-great-great-grandfather: Samuel Lincoln. In 1637, the teenage weaver’s apprentice left the East Anglian village of Hingham in the county of Norfolk, England, and headed across the sea to America.

We cannot know for certain why Samuel emigrated, but a number of his Puritan neighbors, as well as his brother Thomas, had preceded him to the New World earlier in the decade in search of economic opportunity or religious freedom, or both. Samuel’s father had been disinherited, reducing the family’s circumstances, so the young man most likely set out for the colonies to escape poverty.[1]

No hard evidence exists to support periodic speculation that earlier ancestors, perhaps named Linkhorn, may have been Melungeon Jews who had earlier fled thirteenth-century antisemitic persecution in the English village of Lincoln, in the East Midlands.[2] Yet, after Lincoln’s death, the prominent Cincinnati rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise stoked this legend by claiming that the President supposed himself to be a descendant of Hebrew parentage . . . bone from our bone and flesh from our flesh, adding, He said so in my presence.[3] Other legends trace the family roots to Lindum Colonia, a Roman outpost established near the western coast of England in AD 58, or to a Thomas de Lingcole who lived in Norfolk in the thirteenth century during the reign of King Edward I.

We can be sure only that Samuel Lincoln, then barely fifteen years old, set sail from the port of Yarmouth aboard the ship John & Dorothy, along with the weaver to whom he was indentured, and arrived at Plymouth in the Massachusetts Bay Colony after a perilous three-thousand-mile journey that lasted more than two months.[4] Eventually, Samuel moved to a tiny Massachusetts village whose settlers had named it New Hingham after the English hamlet many of them had left behind.

It is worth noting that Samuel Lincoln’s 1637 ocean crossing commenced only a few decades after the first slave ships from Africa deposited their abducted human cargo on North American soil. Unlike Samuel, these Black immigrants neither consented to their passage nor harbored hope for opportunity in the Western Hemisphere. They did not flee oppression at home; they found it here. They enjoyed no liberty of movement once in America, because slave traders sold them as property to white owners who kept their children in bondage, too, while Samuel Lincoln’s descendants would migrate freely, south to Virginia, into Pennsylvania, then west to Kentucky.

Abraham Lincoln knew next to nothing about his origin story: only that he had come from a line of what he self-consciously termed undistinguished families—second families, perhaps I should say.[5] In an autobiographical sketch submitted to the Chicago Tribune in 1860, he said little at all about his maternal ancestry, mapping his paternal side only as far as Berks County, Pennsylvania, a few generations earlier. His lineage has been traced no farther back than this, he wrote (in the third person), even though several correspondents had recently alerted him to a vague tradition that earlier Lincolns might have lived elsewhere. Further back than this, he nonetheless reiterated to a distant relative, I have never heard any thing. He did admit that some of his forebears were originally quakers, but hastened to add that in later times they have fallen away from the peculiar habits of that people.[6]

He did know that in 1786, Native Americans had ambushed and killed his paternal grandfather and namesake, an earlier Abraham Lincoln, on the farm the pioneer was hewing out of the thick Kentucky forest. The story of his death by the Indians, he later recalled, . . . is the legend more strongly than all others imprinted upon my mind and memory.[7] The stealth murder left Lincoln’s six-year-old father orphaned—in poverty, and in a new country, Lincoln noted—and thus he became a wholly uneducated man; which I suppose is the reason why I know so little of our family history.[8]

Of his mother’s roots, Lincoln knew even less, and historians have learned little since. Nancy Hanks Lincoln, who gave birth to Abraham on February 12, 1809, died when the boy was nine, and the truth of her ancestry died with her. Rumors abounded—then and now—that she had been born to unmarried parents, complicating Lincoln’s family history even more. The future president’s law partner and biographer, William H. Herndon, claimed that Lincoln had revealed the alleged truth about his mother’s background just once, during an 1850 buggy ride, supposedly confiding that Nancy’s father was a well-bred Virginia farmer or planter. He consoled himself by theorizing that illegitimate children are oftentimes sturdier and brighter than those born in lawful wedlock; and in his case, he believed that his better nature and finer qualities came from this unknown Virginian. Not that he did not credit the mother he had lost in early boyhood. According to Herndon, Lincoln believed that all that I am or ever hope to be I owe to her.[9]

Of course, had he been more curious about his ancestry, Lincoln might have investigated his family tree more thoroughly, especially once various cousins began corresponding with him after he became a presidential contender. As a general rule, however, Lincoln preferred not to look back. From an early age, he focused exclusively on the future. I don’t know who my grandfather was, he once remarked, and I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.[10]

It apparently never occurred to him that Grandfather Lincoln had died at the hands of Indigenous people whose own forebears had been forced away or killed off by settlers of European descent. The otherwise inspiring story of American immigration typically omits the parallel displacement and enslavement of nonwhites. European Americans of Lincoln’s generation seldom viewed these phenomena as part of an interconnected ethnic and national realignment with ugly human consequences. The overlooked and inescapable impact of displacement, containment, and deportation deserves to be considered alongside European settlement in American history, even if Lincoln himself disregarded the ironies and inequities baked into the legacy of which he was a product.

•   •   •

Lincoln’s own interactions with the foreign-born did not begin until he was nineteen years old, and only after a childhood spent in rural isolation on the prairies of Kentucky and Indiana. In his early youth, his closest exposure to this new breed of Americans came from his first teacher, an old Irish schoolmaster named Zachariah Riney.[11] The middle-aged settler, who actually hailed from Maryland, was described by Lincoln’s future law associate Henry Clay Whitney as a man of excellent character, deep piety, and a fair education. He had been born a Catholic, added Whitney, but made no attempt to proselyte.[12] Apparently, Catholic educators of the day were all but expected to try to convert innocent students, and exceptions earned praise. (Riney would spend his final years of life as a Trappist monk at the Gethsemani monastery in Kentucky.)

Bird’s-eye view of New Orleans—the first multicultural metropolis Abraham Lincoln ever saw—as the city appeared around 1830, the time of his visit.

Lincoln first came face-to-face with actual Europeans and other foreigners during his now-fabled flatboat voyages down the Mississippi River to New Orleans in 1828 and 1831. There, in the most cosmopolitan of antebellum American cities, the wide-eyed visitor first heard the sounds of French and Spanish, two of the languages its diverse residents, tourists, and tradesmen routinely spoke on the streets and in the marketplaces. Visiting this patch-work of peoples at around the same time, even the more worldly Basil Hall of the British Royal Navy marveled, my ears were struck with the curious mixture of languages.[13] As a recently issued multilingual city directory boasted: "The population is much mixed. [T]here is a great ‘confusion of tongues,’ and on the Levée, during a busy day, can be seen people of every grade, colour, and condition: in short it is a world in miniature."[14] Lincoln’s milestone experience vastly widened his horizons—New Orleans was as close as Lincoln would ever get to a foreign destination (except for a brief visit to Niagara Falls, Canada)—but unlike Captain Hall, he recorded no impressions of his exposure there to alien cultures and tongues.

Only in 1860 did he approve a description of the metropolis as he had seen it, as drafted by writer William Dean Howells for an authorized campaign biography. In Howells’s ornate, un-Lincolnesque retelling, the young man had discovered in New Orleans a port where the French voyageur and the rude hunter that trapped the beaver on the Osage and the Missouri, met the polished old-world exile, and the tongues of France, Spain, and England made babel in the streets.[15] In truth, what struck Lincoln most indelibly in the Crescent City was the repulsive omnipresence of slavery—Negroes Chained—maltreated—whipt & scourged, remembered his cousin and traveling companion, John Hanks. Lincoln Saw it—his heart bled.[16]

Lincoln also encountered free Blacks of Creole extraction on his visit to New Orleans. As historian Jason H. Silverman has speculated, that eye-opening experience likely laid the foundation for his future friendship with Springfield, Illinois, barber William Florville (originally de Fleurville), a Haitian immigrant who had lived in New Orleans for a time and had also observed slaves there bought whipped, and sold.[17] Years later, Lincoln would become both a customer of and an attorney for the Black entrepreneur, and the two developed a cordial relationship. After Lincoln moved to the White House, Billy the Barber sent the President one of the few letters he ever received from his hometown unencumbered by pleas for money, favors, or government jobs. May God grant you health, and strength, Florville wrote in late 1863 to the truly great Man who by then had broken the Shackels [sic] of slavery. Tell Taddy—Lincoln’s youngest son—that his (and Willys) Dog is alive and Kicking. . . . Your Residence here is Kept in good order. . . . Please accept my best wishes for yourself and family.[18]

•   •   •

Only after returning from his second journey to New Orleans did Lincoln strike out on his own in life. In July 1831, the twenty-two-year-old emigrated from his father’s newly built log cabin in Coles County, Illinois, to a small mill town he had encountered on his most recent flatboat adventure: New Salem. To call New Salem a village amounted to a civic exaggeration; more accurately, it was a pioneer settlement, a cluster of two dozen small log buildings above a barely navigable stream known optimistically as the Sangamon River.

No one could have described the area as multicultural. Its residents or their parents had moved there from the South and the East, but not from other countries. Still, New Salem was more diverse than any place Lincoln had ever lived. The rowdy community included Baptists, Methodists, and a few freethinkers; the different religious beliefs led to many heated arguments about Sabbath observance and Bible reading, among other issues.[19] His neighbors later recalled that at one point Lincoln ventured into the religion debate by preparing a pamphlet attacking the divinity of christ.[20] Admirers who quickly saw it as a threat to the already ambitious Lincoln’s political future threw the text into a hot stove so that no one else would ever read it.

Standing out from the crowd in New Salem, Lincoln made friends, read books, honed his natural leadership skills, and cemented his Whig political leanings. Above all, he fervently embraced the party’s core belief in internal improvements—infrastructure investments vital to transforming New Salem into an accessible destination. In his maiden political message to voters, the twenty-three-year-old enumerated these goals in terms any villager could understand: good roads, the clearing of navigable streams, and the introduction of the rail road.[21]

Lincoln actually secured his first government position not from the Whigs but from the rival Democrats. He became town postmaster, a federal job so insignificant that no local Democrat asked the Jackson administration for the position. The assignment paid next to nothing but did afford Lincoln access to a regular flow of incoming newspapers from other regions. These he habitually perused before their subscribers came to call for them. On their pages he likely first read about the initial influx of Europeans seeking fortune and freedom, and stirring early resentments, in the still-young American nation.

A highlight of his New Salem years came in April 1832. Flush with war fever, Lincoln and several of his neighbors joined the Illinois Volunteers to fend off an Indian incursion led by the Sauk chief Black Hawk in violation of a harsh treaty banning the tribe from the state. Lincoln’s company promptly elected him captain, and three decades later he asserted that he has not since had any success in life which gave him so much satisfaction.[22] Lincoln would later make sport of his brief experience in uniform, declaring that the only blood he shed had been drawn by musquetoes.[23] Whether he was accepting or shunning military glory, it apparently never struck Lincoln that Black Hawk and his followers regarded white soldiers as the real invaders, or at the very least as unwelcome immigrants occupying Native land.

Military service was considered a prerequisite for political success, but ironically, because he reenlisted (as a private) and remained largely unavailable to campaign for office, Lincoln lost his first bid for the Illinois state legislature in August 1832. Two years later, he did win a seat, after which he began to study law. By this time, he had outgrown his surroundings. Like the village dry goods store in which he had invested and lost money, New Salem itself seemed destined to wink out, so Lincoln moved on.[24] In 1837, he packed his meager belongings into saddlebags and relocated to the newly minted state capital of Springfield—exactly two hundred years after his ancestor Samuel had abandoned England for America. In an even greater numerological coincidence, Lincoln arrived in Springfield on April 15; he was twenty-eight years old and had twenty-eight more years to live—to the day.

Foreign immigration was not quite yet a contentious issue in the American West. But enough foreign-born settlers had migrated to Illinois to fuel the newcomer’s already renowned gift for storytelling. Abraham Lincoln was the drollest man I ever saw, remembered his Illinois acquaintance Clark E. Carr. He could make a cat laugh.[25] Lincoln’s fellow Black Hawk War veteran Joseph Gillespie added, No man could tell a story as well as he could[.] He never missed the nib on an anecdote.[26] By now the increasingly mesmerizing public speaker had armed himself with a seemingly endless supply of on-point stories. Although many of the yarns he spun to friends tended to the sexual or scatological, for a time he also told ethnic jokes in both public and private. No bigot, the Lincoln of this period can best be described as an equal-opportunity comedian. His jibes spared none and offended few.

Inevitably, recent immigrants—especially the Irish Catholics now beginning to flow into American cities in pursuit of paid work—became the occasional butt of Lincoln’s ridicule. The jokes helped deflect from a serious political irony: Whig-supported public works projects were attracting hordes of foreign workers to build them, yet the Whigs remained at best wary of, and at times hostile to, foreigners. Not surprisingly, when these immigrant laborers became eligible for citizenship after the required five years’ residency, they voted overwhelmingly Democratic.[27] And once the first naturalized Irish Americans found their political home with the opposition, Irish jokes became standard weapons in Lincoln’s rhetorical arsenal. Lincoln unleashed one such barb in December 1839 when he squared off with another ambitious young politician, Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, on the seemingly arid subject of banking and currency—nineteen years before their storied senatorial debates.

In fact, banking, like infrastructure investment, was an emotional issue at the time. Illinois was just emerging from the economic Panic of 1837, along with the aftershocks of President Jackson’s dissolution of the Second Bank of the United States. Democrats, including Douglas, believed that an independent sub-treasury, with branches in individual states, would restore public access to the cash and credit choked off by the financial downturn. Whigs like Lincoln insisted that full recovery would require the reestablishment of the federal bank and opposed the sub-treasury scheme. It became the burning topic of the day, and it grew even hotter when Illinois confronted a debt incurred in part by the public works spending long advocated by Lincoln and the Whigs. Without government intervention of some kind, Illinois seemed destined for bankruptcy.

For all its dry solemnity, the subject elicited flavorful oratory from both sides. In a particularly spirited stem-winder delivered at the newly built state capitol building on December 26, 1839, Lincoln opened by delving into complex economic theory.[28] Soon enough, he pivoted into stump-speech mode, taunting Democrats for exhibiting "a species of ‘running itch’ that sent them scampering away with the public money to Texas, to Europe, and to every spot of the earth where a villain may hope to fund refuge from justice. Here he was referring to Democratic policies that allowed for tax revenues collected on Illinois land sales to be deposited in Missouri banks. Then Lincoln piled on with an anecdote, which seems too strikingly in point to be omitted." It turned out to be his first recorded Irish joke.[29] In his telling:

"A witty Irish soldier, who was always boasting of his bravery, when no danger was near, but who invariably retreated without orders at the first charge of an engagement, being asked by his Captain why he did so, replied: ‘Captain, I have as brave a heart as Julius Caesar ever had; but some how or other, whenever danger approaches, my cowardly legs will run away with it.’ So it was, Lincoln drawled, with Democrats committed to establishing a sub-treasury. They take the public money into their hand for the most laudable purpose, that wise heads and honest hearts can dictate; but before they can possibly get it out again their rascally ‘vulnerable heels’ will run away with them."[30]

The allusion might have strained for relevance to fiscal issues, but it deftly managed to land two political blows at once: Democrats were not to be trusted with public funds, and Irishmen, most of whom voted Democratic, were not to be relied on for much of anything. In telling the story, Lincoln probably assumed an Irish brogue for maximum effect. It was not only the initial Irish story he told in a public speech; it was the first recorded—that is, transcribed—funny story of any kind that he ever delivered anywhere.[31]

Making reference to clichéd Irish character flaws apparently proved even more irresistible when Lincoln rose at the local Second Presbyterian Church on Washington’s birthday in 1842 to address the Springfield Washington Temperance Society.[32] To his credit, Lincoln handled the subject of the day in much the same way he hoped his contemporaries would approach drinking itself: in moderation. Notably, he resisted the impulse to link the Irish to their most notorious alleged weakness: what Lincoln called the demon of Intemperance. Lincoln himself was by then a teetotaler, though not a reformer, and in his enlightened view, alcohol dependence did not represent "the use of a bad thing but rather the abuse of a very good thing. Chronic drunkenness should therefore be treated, he argued, as a misfortune and not as a crime or even as a disgrace"—and never as a pathway to perdition.[33] Lincoln might have taken a different route and linked the pro-Democrat Irish to chronic alcohol abuse, but he did not. Besides, as he well knew, German Whigs liked their ale as much as Irish Democrats savored their whiskey, a point that critics of all kinds of immigration would make for years to come.

Yet Lincoln could not help himself from extracting one good Irish story from his repertoire, even if it lost much of its bite when his remarks appeared in print the following month in the pro-Whig Sangamo Journal. Judging from the absence of a setup introduction, Lincoln’s audience must have known the gag well—an imaginary exchange of dialogue between an Irish thief and the onlooker who catches him in the act. Better lay down that spade you’re stealing, Paddy, declares the eyewitness, to which the robber replies: By the powers, if ye’ll credit me so long, I’ll take another, jist. The oblique message, for those who did not get the joke, was that threats of punishment seldom reformed sinners; if they did not take a drink today, they would do so tomorrow when no one was watching. Since they had fallen from grace so often, they simply added new indiscretions to their bulging records of vice. This system of consigning the habitual drunkard to hopeless ruin, Lincoln concluded his oration, . . . should be replaced with ‘a larger philanthropy’ focused on present as well as future good. It was not Lincoln’s fault if the audience went home still chuckling over his good-natured joke about the Irish recidivist burglar.[34]

What do we make of these early forays into ethnic humor? Of course, Lincoln was an inveterate yarn-spinner blessed with an indelibly strong memory for every funny story he had ever heard or read. For a man sorrowful by nature, comedy provided a tonic, and if anyone was addicted, it was Lincoln. If it were not for these stories—jokes—jests I should die, he told William Herndon. [T]hey are the vents of my mood & gloom.[35] Moreover, Lincoln’s stories always scored points—he wielded them as a weapon for satire and ridicule.[36] But the raconteur’s early Irish jokes also reflected a genuine anxiety among