American Party

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Creation Date

c1854

Dissolution Date

c1858

Entity Type

Organization

"American Party" in the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition, discovery.civilwargovernors.org/document/O00012180, (accessed April 19, 2025).

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An antebellum political party that supported nativist, temperance, anti-Catholic, and other reform policies. Also known as the Know Nothing Party, it gained prominence in the mid-1850s following the downfall of the Whig Party. Membership grew from the support of native-born, Protestant voters who hoped to reduce the influence of immigrants and Roman Catholics in American society. As a national organization, the American Party dissolved on the eve of the Civil War due to internal divisions over slavery. Notable candidates included Millard Fillmore in the 1856 presidential election and Charles S. Morehead, who ran on a Know-Nothing ticket in Kentucky's 1855 gubernatorial election.

Tyler G. Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Charles E. Deusner, “The Know Nothing Riots in Louisville,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, vol. 61 (1963), 122-147. Agnes Geraldine McGann, Nativism in Kentucky to 1860 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1944). James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, paperback (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 140-144, 153-157, 188. Emmet V. Mittlebeeler, “The Aftermath of Louisville’s Bloody Monday Election Riot of 1855,” Filson Club History Quarterly, vol 66 (1992), 197-219. William Darrell Overdyke, The Know-Nothing Party in the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1950). James A. Ramage and Andrea S. Watkins, Kentucky Rising: Democracy, Slavery, and Culture from the Early Republic to the Civil War (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 95-96.

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