Catholic Influx

. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the number of Catholics in the United States barely exceeded 100,000, a negligible percentage of the total population. This changed with the mass immigration of Irish Catholics into the cities of the Northeast that began in the 1830s and accelerated greatly after 1845. By 1850 the estimated American Catholic population was 1,606,000. In New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, Irish immigrants formed distinct communities within the larger population, complete with their own taverns, clubs, newspapers, and churches. Many nativeborn Protestants saw in the growing numbers of Catholics an economic threat and a cultural danger and looked with deep suspicion on the Pope and his followers. Such fears led to nativist and anti-Catholic sentiment that manifested itself in the burning of Catholic churches, the formation of an anti-Catholic political party (the Native American Party, or Know-Nothing Party), and...