A History of the American People

subjects to America to promote the takeover. This, combined with labor disputes brought about
the willingness of poor Catholic immigrants to accept low rates of pay, led to the founding in
1849 of a secret-oath-bound society, the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, which flourished in
New York and other cities. It was geared to politics by opposing the willingness of the
Democratic Party machine to cater for Catholic votes and when its members were questioned
about its activities they were drilled to answer I Know Nothing.' The Know Nothing Party had a brief but phenomenal growth in the early 1850s, especially in 1852, when it triumphed in local and state elections from New Hampshire to Texas. In 1856 it even ran ex-President Millard Fillmore as a national candidate, but it was doomed by its proslavery Southern leadership. The Catholics were thus put on the defensive. And some of them, in any event, had reservations about the Horace Mann approach to education. The most incisive Catholic convert of the time, Orestes Brownson (1803-76), argued that the state had no obligation to educate its citizens morally and that to do so on a lowest-common-denominator basis would promote a bland, platitudinous form of public discourse. America, he argued, needed the provocation and moral judgments which only Biblical religion could provide and the stimulation of religious controversy between competing sects. But most American Catholics, then and later, wanted badly to win the acceptance of fellow-Americans by fitting into the citizenship formula. And, less defensively and more enthusiastically, they accepted the fact that America had a free market in religion as well as everything else. From the 183os they competed eagerly to build the most churches and schools and colleges, to display the largest congregations, win the most converts, and demonstrate that Catholics were more American and better citizens than members of other sects.' The Jews did not proselytize like the Catholics but they competed in other ways and they were just as anxious to demonstrate their Americanism. In 1654 the French privateer St Catherine brought twenty-three Jewish refugees from Recife in Brazil to the Dutch colonial town of New Amsterdam. The governor, Peter Stuyvesant, protested to the Dutch West India Company against the settlement of what he calleda deceitful race' whose abominable religion' worshipedthe
feet of mammon.' They were denied all rights of citizenship and forbidden to build a synagogue.
But when New Amsterdam fell to the English in 1664 and became New York, the Jews benefited
from a decision taken under the English Commonwealth regime, later confirmed by Charles II, to
allow them to acquire all the rights of English citizenship so long as they demean themselves peaceably and quietly, with due obedience to His Majesty's laws and without scandal to his government.' Some early statutes and proclamations, stressing religious liberty, included only those who profess Christianity' in this freedom of worship. But in fact the Jews were never
directly persecuted on American soil and the great governor of New York, Edmund Andros,
went out of his way to include Jews when he promised equal treatment to all law-abiding persons
`of what religion soever.' As in England, the issue of Jewishness was not raised. Jews simply
came, enjoyed equal rights, and, it seems, voted in the earliest elections; they held offices too.
Jews settled in other areas, beginning with the Delaware Valley. Some difficulties arose when
the Jews wished to have their own cemetery in New York. But in 1677 one was opened in
Newport, Rhode Island-later the subject of one of Longfellow's finest poems-and New York got
its own five years later. In 1730 the Shearith Israel Congregation of New York consecrated its
first synagogue and a particularly handsome one was built in Newport in 1763, now a national
shrine. Even in colonial times, Jews' existence in America was fundamentally unlike the life they
lived in Europe. There, they had their own legal status, ran their own courts, schools, shops, paid
their own special, heavier taxes, and usually lived in ghettos. In America, where there was no