The Know Nothing Party sprang from a small nativist sect in New York City called the Order of the Star Spangled Banner. Within months after the 1852 election, it attracted an estimated membership of more than a million. Its program held that only Protestant-born citizens should hold public office, under the slogan: “Americans Only Shall Govern America.”

As nativism spread, Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, Lincoln’s constant rival, proposed his Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 to repeal the Missouri Compromise, which prohibited slavery in the North, and leave the question of slavery to be decided by settlers. Rising from obscurity, Lincoln delivered incisive speeches laying out the political and constitutional case against the extension of slavery. Douglas, appealing to white supremacy, smeared his opponents as “black Republicans.” “He might call names, and thereby pander to prejudice, as much as he chose,” replied Lincoln.

Amid the deepening crisis, Lincoln wondered in 1855 how he could be effective fighting slavery while maintaining his identity in the crumpling Whig Party. “I think I am a Whig; but others say there are no Whigs, and that I am an abolitionist,” he wrote. But he had no doubt that nativism was thwarting the antislavery cause:

I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

Finally, on February 22, 1856, a group of antislavery newspaper editors invited Lincoln to join them as their political leader at a meeting to found the Illinois Republican Party. But when one of them, George Schneider, editor of the German-language newspaper Staats-Zeitung, proposed a plank denouncing Know-Nothingism, the nativists present strongly rejected it. Schneider responded that he would submit his resolution to Lincoln and “abide by his decision.”

“Gentlemen,” declared Lincoln, “the resolution introduced by Mr. Schneider is nothing new. It is already contained in the Declaration of Independence and you cannot form a new party on prescriptive principles.” For Lincoln, opposing nativism was consistent with opposing slavery. “This declaration of Mr. Lincoln’s,” Schneider recalled, “saved the resolution and in fact, helped to establish the new party on the most liberal democratic basis.” Lincoln’s judgment made possible the creation of the Republican Party, which became the instrument that would carry him to the presidency.

On October 16, 1885, under the open U.S. immigration policy of the time, Frederich Drumpf, from Germany, entered the Castle Garden Emigrant Landing Depot in New York City, and his name was changed to “Trumpf.”

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