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Catholic clergymen disavowed the Broadway Hall riot, but nativists seized on it as justification of their concerns. In June, with James Watson Webb, pugnacious editor of the Courier and Enquirer, serving as a prime mover, the Native American Democratic Association was organized—the first explicitly nativist political party in the United States. It established ward committees, set up its own newspaper (the Spirit of ‘76), and warned Anglo-American voters, chiefly small masters and journeymen, of the “swarms of foreign artisans who are more destructive to native American industry than the locusts and lice were to the Egyptian fields.”

Violence erupted again in 1835 when a Bowery saloon keeper announced plans to form an Irish militia company, to be called the O’Connell Guards in honor of the Irish patriot. The nativist press shrieked about a “foreign armed force stationed among us,” and on June 21, 1835, the American Guards, a Bowery gang proclaiming native ancestry, clashed with Irishmen in Chatham Square. The battle, fought with clubs and brickbats, took the life of a passerby—a physician, struck by a brick, fell to the sidewalk and was trampled by struggling combatants. Rioting spread throughout the Five Points and elsewhere in the city, until subdued by Mayor Lawrence and two hundred policemen.

That fall, the Native American Democratic Association ran its first ticket, on a platform demanding that only native-born Americans be permitted to hold office, but the new party, snarled in internal divisions, had little impact. Philip Hone wrote gloomily in his diary that December that “low Irishmen”—“the most ignorant, and consequently the most obstinate white men in the world”—were now able to “decide the elections in the city of New York.” In time, he feared, “the same brogue which they have instructed to shout ‘Hurrah for Jackson!’ shall be used to impart additional horror to the cry of ‘Down with the natives!’”

Nativists emerged in Brooklyn too; its populace, friendly to the Irish in the 1820s, had grown alarmed by the 1830s, their fears played on by politicians and editors (like Alden Spooner, who raised a hue and cry against “foreigners”). Here, too, Native American candidates did poorly and moderates remained in command: the Rev. Evan Johnson, rector of St. John’s Episcopal, used his 1835 Thanksgiving Day sermon to preach against nativism.

Seeking a more combustible issue, nativists spiced their theology with sex. In January 1836 Harper Brothers published Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal, by one Maria Monk. (The Harpers, though nativists themselves, were concerned enough about their firm’s reputation to set up a dummy company to bring Awful out.) In the book, which Benjamin Day excerpted in the Sun, Monk told of her Protestant upbringing, her embrace of Catholicism, and her arrival at the Canadian convent, where she discovered that nuns were forced to have intercourse with lustful priests (those who refused were executed). Children born of these criminal unions were baptized, then strangled and thrown into a large hole in the basement. Monk, impregnated by one Father Phelan, escaped to New York City, tried to commit suicide, was taken to a charity hospital, and confessed all to a kindly Protestant clergyman.

The anti-Catholic press gave Awful Disclosures complete credence. Indeed the Rev. George Bourne of the Protestant Association capitalized on the furor to launch a new organization, the Protestant Reformation Society, and more ministers joined the antipopery crusade. Catholic clerics, led by Father Várela, charged that the “revelations” were a manufactured smear, and so they proved to be. Maria’s mother came forward to say her daughter’s tale was the product of a brain injured in infancy when the child had run a slate pencil into her head. Growing up wild, Maria had been confined in a Catholic Magdalen asylum. She had escaped, with the aid of a former lover, and come to New York, where leading nativist ministers—including