EV Chapter 13

It is amazing to think and read about how many immigrants came to the United States in such a short amount of time. It is strange that the people already settled in the United States were opposed to new immigrants coming over when most of them themselves were immigrants as well. The first settler of the United States created a strong nativism party against new immigrants. The nativist party created a group called the “Know-Nothing” Party, which seems slightly ironic that people would create a party that implies that they “know nothing” it would seem that with a name like that no one would take them serious. The main reason behind nativism was the fear of the new and the unknown people immigrating to the United States, the “natives” were afraid that the new immigrants would disrupt their new government and throw everything that they worked so hard to achieve into chaos. Many of the immigrants who came to the United States were in favor of the Democrat party because the Democrats were more sympathetic to the new immigrants. Another reason for their support of the Democrat party was because Republicans were in favor of abolishing slavery and the new immigrants, the Irish in particular, feared that the freed slaves would be strong competition for them with jobs/the economy; the Whig party also was big in religion and good morals which did not support the German and Irish ways of heavy drinking. As the population of the United States continued to grow so did the continuation of the expansion to the west. It was believed by many that there was a “Manifest Destiny”, meaning that god was telling the people of the United States that it was their destiny to expand westward until we couldn't anymore. Another reason for westward expansion was  due in part to that the settlers in the United States were not wisely using/harvesting the land and therefore would expand westward in search for new land for their crops.