“In St. Louis City and Country, what afterwards became the Republican party was known as the Free-Soil Democracy, led by the Honorable Frank P. Blair. Most of my neighbors had know me as an officer of the army with Whig proclivities. They had been on the same side, and, on the death of their party, many had become Know-Nothings, or members of the American party. There was a lodge near my new home, and I was invited to join it. I accepted the invitation; was initiated; attended a meeting just one week later, and never went to another afterwards. 

I have no apologies to make for having been one week a member of the American party; for I still think native-borne citizens of the United States should have a much protection, as many privileges in their native country, as those who voluntarily select it for a home. But all secret, oath-bound political parties are dangerous to any nation, no matter how pure or how patriotic the motives and principles which first bring them together. No political party can or ought to exist when one of its corner-stones is opposition to freedom of thought and to the right to worship God “according to the dictate of one’s own conscience,” or according to the creed of any religious denomination whatever.

Nevertheless, if a sect sets up its laws as binding above the State laws, wherever the two come in conflict this claim must be resisted and suppressed at whatever cost”.  The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant (The complete annotated edition), 148-149. 

The editors include the following annotation: “The Know-Nothing Party, officially known as the American Party, espoused anti-immigration and anti-Catholic positions and emerged in the 1850s in the wake of the dissolution of the Whig Party.” Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 104-106. 

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