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Morse became one of the Native Americans’ chief spokesmen. Although a longtime Democrat, he considered independent opinion his privilege as an American. And at the moment he saw little more in the bickering between Democrats and Whigs than the defensiveness of officeholders and frustration of office seekers. The Native Americans had got hold of a momentous issue, vital to “all true patriots, whatever may be their party predilections.”

America, in Morse’s view, had fought itself free of Kings, Emperors, and Czars. But the new immigrants retained the mentality of subjects, bringing with them the same sinister anti-republican forces he had seen produce squalor and maintain oppression on the Continent. He believed that America properly welcomed “the intelligent and persecuted of all nations.” But on his moral-aesthetic scale the new arrivals stood beside the pizza-eating lazzeroni of Naples: “Filthy and ragged in body, ignorant in mind, and but too often most debased in morals … a loathsome picture of degradation, moral and physical.”

Morse’s visceral revulsion was felt by many others in New York’s older Protestant community, such as the diarist George Templeton Strong: “It was enough to turn a man’s stomach—to make a man abjure republicanism forever—to see the way they were naturalizing this morning. Wretched, filthy, bestial-looking Italians and Irish … the very scum and dregs of human nature.” And more were on their way. “All Europe is coming across the ocean,” Philip Hone grumbled, “all that part at least who cannot make a living at home; and what shall we do with them?”

In support of the Native American Democratic Association, Morse wrote a series of impassioned letters for the Journal of Commerce, published separately as Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States Through Foreign Immigration. He took as his occasion a rise in public violence that “sadly degraded” the American character. He mentioned no specific events, but in recent memory a New York physician had been trampled to death during a clubs-and-brickbats clash between a Bowery gang and some Irishmen, the mayhem spreading in the city until put down by two hundred police. Some might view the lawlessness as a byproduct of democracy, Morse said. But the real cause was immigration, “foreign turbulence imported by shiploads.”

Morse scourged three immigrant groups in particular. First, predictably, the Hapsburg-Vatican Manchurian candidates, the “hundreds of thousands of human priest-controlled machines.” Next, the “outcast tenants of the poorhouses and prisons,” paupers and convicts whose immigration European governments in fact sometimes subsidized. He took special aim, however, at newcomers who weakened the coherence of the Union by resisting assimilation. He had in mind clannish Germans, Italians, and, especially, Irish who called the old country “home,” living in America as neither foreigners nor natives—“anomalous, nondescript, hermaphrodite.”

Among the national clubs they often formed, Morse singled out an Irish organization founded by a Bowery saloon keeper, the O’Connell Guard. He considered the name offensive and incendiary. It honored the Irish Catholic patriot Daniel O’Connell, who often publicly contrasted America’s reputed democracy with the reality of slavery in the South. At a crowded anti-slavery meeting in London’s Exeter Hall, he stood beside the Abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison and damned the United States as “the vilest of hypocrites—the greatest of liars.” To Morse, the new Abolitionist movement was “rife with danger to our country,” and in naming their paramilitary club the O’Connell Guard, Irish immigrants had “thrown a firebrand into the Slavery question.”

Morse acknowledged that not all immigrants were ignorant, vicious, or unpatriotic. But the present, “when the country is invaded by an army,” allowed for no nice discrimination. The innocent and the guilty come over together and live together: “We must of necessity suspect them all.” To