Congress accepted James Madison’s position that “when crowds of them [nobility] come here, they should be forced to renounce everything contrary to the spirit of the Constitution.” In its final version, the bill specified that an alien at the time of application for citizenship must “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to every foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty whatever, and particularly by name, the prince, potentate, state or sovereignty, whereof before he was a citizen or subject.”42
The Jeffersonians won on the issue of the renunciation of titles, but the Federalists made some headway on lengthening the residency requirement from two to five years in the U.S. while conceding a one-year residency in a state or territory. Although many Anglo-American congressmen may have found the German and Scotch-Irish newcomers distasteful, they explained their call for a longer waiting period in terms of ideology. Samuel Smith, a Maryland Federalist, for example, argued that aliens would need time to acquire “just ideas of our Constitution and the excellence of our institutions before they were admitted to the rights of a citizen.”43 For Federalists, generally, the fear of foreigners remained strong, not just because they usually voted for the opposition candidates but also because many looked, talked, and worshiped differently from the Yankees.
When the Federalists, whose leadership came from New England, took firm control over both executive and legislative branches of the federal government in 1798, they capitalized on growing anti-alien feeling as a result of the so-called “XYZ Affair,” which implicated the French in an attempt to bribe American commissioners sent to Paris to negotiate a treaty. Congress quickly pushed through a new naturalization act extending the time necessary for a foreigner to become a citizen from five to fourteen years. An Alien Act, also of 1798, required all foreigners to register with the federal government and allowed the president to deport without trial any alien whom he considered “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.”44 Although never enforced, the Alien Act was considered a hostile measure by many Scotch-Irish, Irish, and German immigrants, most of whom, particularly those in the West, already were unsympathetic to the conservative policies of President John Adams.
Only four years later, with the Jeffersonians back in control, the residency requirement was changed again to five years; it has never been altered since. But the Federalists continued to sputter against immigration. Meeting at its Hartford convention in 1812, the party passed a resolution urging a constitutional amendment to bar naturalized citizens from elective and civil office. Although the economic imperatives of nation building made it foolish to cut back on incentives for immigration, the Federalists hoped that by lengthening the time required for naturalization from five years to a much longer period and by restricting the privileges of naturalized citizens they could weaken their increasingly powerful political opponents.
Two years later, furious that the opposition party had made it easy for naturalized foreigners to hold “places of trust, honor or profit” in the government, Federalists cloaked their basic xenophobic feelings and political frustration in the language of republican ideology. By giving jobs to the immigrants, the Federalists charged that the party of Jefferson had provided “an inducement to the malcontent subjects of the Old World to come to these States in quest of executive patronage, and to repay it by an abject devotion to executive measures.”45 The Federalist solution—that no naturalized citizen should be eligible to become a member of the Senate or the House of Representatives or be permitted to hold any civil office in the federal government—was buried as inimical to the overwhelming American urge for expansion, and the Federalist party soon died.
The Ethnic-Americanization of the Germans
The concern of Jefferson and other republican ideologues was understandable, since most of them lived in a world of Anglo-Americans. The debates on immigration and naturalization policy were not informed by the opinions of immigrants, as such debates would be in the twentieth century. Few of the founding fathers were immigrants. James Wilson, a major author of Article Two of the Constitution, was born in Scotland; Alexander Hamilton was born in the West Indies; the second secretary of the treasury, Albert Gallatin, emigrated from Switzerland. More than 95 percent of the leaders of the Revolution, signers of the Declaration of Independence, and authors of the Constitution had English Protestant backgrounds. Not one signer belonged to the largest non-English-speaking immigrant-ethnic group, the Germans. John Jay wrote in the Federalist Papers that “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors,” even though his own paternal grandfather had been a French Huguenot immigrant and he was Dutch on his mother’s side.46 Neither he, Madison, nor Hamilton had anything to say about the German-speaking communities in the Federalist Papers. Jay had exaggerated the cultural unity of Americans probably in order to buttress his argument for the creation of a national government.
New immigration was slight in the first twenty years of the republic, and Dutch and German—the two most widely used foreign languages—became local curiosities in some areas and died out in others. In the churches, American-born ministers were replacing those from abroad and were introducing English in place of German or Dutch in services, although some Pennsylvania German churches resisted the trend, as they do even now. One looked in vain in Tocqueville’s discussions on the press, political associations, the unlimited power of the majority, language and literature, and public associations for any mention of nationality influences or what would later be called ethnicity. But if Tocqueville had been German, or if he had returned fifteen years later, he could hardly have avoided it.47
German immigrants and their children, more than any other group, provided a large-scale early example of the process of ethnic-Americanization, in which ancestral loyalties (religious, linguistic, and cultural) are changed (and in some ways strengthened) to American circumstances even as immigrants and their children embrace American political ideals and participate in American political institutions. More than 50,000 immigrants arrived annually beginning in 1832, the year of Tocqueville’s visit, with the exceptions of 1835 and 1838. In the 1840s, a total of 1,713,251 immigrant arrivals were reported, a large majority of them either Irish or German. Some Germans remained separate from the larger society, as do many immigrants from other countries today. In the 1980s, the Hutterite Brethren, with about six thousand members, the largest Christian communal group, continued to speak German even though they were fluent in English. It was their strong religious commitment and not their German nationalism that defined their social system and kept them from social and political assimilation. But the German flavor of the Hutterite colonies, principally in South Dakota and Montana, was unmistakable, even though the largest group of immigrants came to South Dakota more than one hundred years ago.48
The Old Order Amish Mennonites, about eighty thousand of whom lived in twenty states in the 1980s (mainly Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana), kept largely to themselves. With other Germans, they began to settle in Pennsylvania from 1727 to 1790; a second wave came after 1815 to Ohio, New York, Indiana, and Illinois. The Amish formed unique farming communities and German enclaves in the U.S. for two and a half centuries, refraining not only from participation in American politics, but, under the strict rules of their church, from modern technology and conveniences.49 Other German pietistic communal settlements in Harmony (1805) and Economy (1825), Pennsylvania, Zoar, Ohio (1817), and Amana, Iowa (1843),50 disappeared. The vast majority of German settlers in the second quarter of the nineteenth century were not religious pietists at all. They wanted, not to live entirely apart from American society, but to be Germans and Americans, too.
Thousands of white European immigrants united around republican principles, just as Jefferson had hoped they would but feared they might not. Tocqueville saw that immigrants quickly claimed the principles of republican government as their own, sharing in the cult of the glorious Fourth of July (the Declaration of Independence was read aloud on village greens and main streets) and the worship of “god-like Washington,” whose birthday was made a national holiday in 1799 and was, like the Fourth of July, an occasion for teachers and preachers to talk about the virtues of American liberty and opportunity.51 Without using the term, Tocqueville described the civic culture as a unifying set of principles of and practices in government. “It is possible to conceive the surprising liberty that the Americans enjoy,”