Lincoln And The Immigrant

Between 1840 and 1860, as Abraham Lincoln pursued his law career, more than four and a half million citizens of other countries became residents of the United States. The annexation of Texas and the outcome of the Mexican War meant that hundreds of thousands of Mexicans had become Americans, and a huge influx of newcomers arrived from northern and western Europe, while a smaller number came from China. Although some Americans sought to make immigration more difficult and to curtail the rights afforded to immigrants, Lincoln advocated for full protection of the rights of all legal residents. In this succinct study, Jason H. Silverman investigates Lincoln's evolving personal, professional, and political relationships with the wide variety of immigrant groups he encountered throughout his life, revealing the ways in which Lincoln differed from his contemporaries in his acceptance and interaction with these newcomers. From an early age, Silverman shows, Lincoln developed an awareness of and a tolerance for different peoples and their cultures. While no doubt a man of his time, Lincoln nevertheless refused to let his environment blind him to the strengths of diversity. His travels at a young age to the port of New Orleans exposed Lincoln to the sights, sounds, and tastes of a world unlike any he had ever seen and established in him a lifelong empathy for the foreign-born. Throughout his legal and political career, he displayed an affinity for immigrants, especially those of German, Irish, Jewish, and Scandinavian descent. Recognizing the need for immigrant labor, Lincoln saw that America could be a land of opportunity for newcomers. Consequently, he opposed the Know Nothing Party and the antiforeign attitudes of those in his own Republican Party. Revealing how immigrants affected Lincoln's presidential policies, Silverman details the importance of German support to Lincoln's 1860 presidential victory, his appointment of political generals of varying ethnicities, his reliance on an immigrant for the literal rules of war, and the issues that these and other dealings created for him. The first book to examine Lincoln and the place of the immigrant in America's society and economy, Silverman's pioneering work offers a rare new perspective on the renowned sixteenth president.

From acclaimed Abraham Lincoln historian Harold Holzer, a groundbreaking account of Lincoln’s grappling with the politics of immigration against the backdrop of the Civil War. In the three decades before the Civil War, some ten million foreign-born people settled in the United States, forever altering the nation’s demographics, culture, and—perhaps most significantly—voting patterns. America’s newest residents fueled the national economy, but they also wrought enormous changes in the political landscape and exposed an ugly, at times violent, vein of nativist bigotry. Abraham Lincoln’s rise ran parallel to this turmoil; even Lincoln himself did not always rise above it. Tensions over immigration would split and ultimately destroy Lincoln’s Whig Party years before the Civil War. Yet the war made clear just how important immigrants were, and how interwoven they had become in American society. Harold Holzer, winner of the Lincoln Prize, charts Lincoln’s political career through the lens of immigration, from his role as a member of an increasingly nativist political party to his evolution into an immigration champion, a progression that would come at the same time as he refined his views on abolition and Black citizenship. As Holzer writes, “The Civil War could not have been won without Lincoln’s leadership; but it could not have been fought without the immigrant soldiers who served and, by the tens of thousands, died that the ‘nation might live.’” An utterly captivating and illuminating work, Brought Forth on This Continent assesses Lincoln's life and legacy in a wholly original way, unveiling remarkable similarities between the nineteenth century and the twenty-first.

In this inspiring nonfiction book, readers will discover stories about immigrants that came to America from China, Poland, Peru, and the Dominican Republic. The alluring images and supportive text work in conjunction with the helpful glossary, index, and table of contents to engage readers and to enhance their understanding of the content.

Argues convincingly that immigration continues to benefit U.S. natives as well as most developed countries

Though they were not, as Charlotte claimed, refugees from the French Revolution, Augustus Waldemar and Charlotte Victoire Mentelle undoubtedly felt like exiles in their adopted hometown of Lexington, Kentucky -- a settlement that was still a frontier town when they arrived in 1798. Through the years, the cultured Parisian couple often reinvented themselves out of necessity, but their most famous venture was Mentelle's for Young Ladies, an intellectually rigorous school that attracted students from around the region and greatly influenced its most well-known pupil, Mary Todd Lincoln. Drawing on newly translated materials and previously overlooked primary sources, Randolph Paul Runyon explores the life and times of the important but understudied pair in this intriguing dual biography. He illustrates how the Mentelles' origins and education gave them access to the higher strata of Bluegrass society even as their views on religion, politics, and culture kept them from feeling at home in America. They were intimates of statesman Henry Clay, and one of their daughters married into the Clay family, but like other immigrant families in the region, they struggled to survive. Throughout, Runyon reveals the Mentelles as eloquent chroniclers of crucial moments in Ohio and Kentucky history, from the turn of the nineteenth century to the eve of the Civil War. They rankled at the baleful influence of conservative religion on the local college, the influence of whiskey on the local population, and the scandal of slavery in the land of liberty. This study sheds new light on the lives of a remarkable pair who not only bore witness to key events in early American history, but also had a singular impact on the lives of their friends, their students, and their community.