Lincoln wrestled with immigration’s politics—then and now
Abraham Lincoln faced a nation divided, and not just by the Civil War. A national battle over immigration had been raging for decades as millions of Europeans arrived, and the question of who belonged—politically, culturally, and legally—was already on full display long before modern slogans and cable-TV arguments.
Lincoln, the Republican president best known for his emancipation mission, also viewed immigration as essential to keeping the country going while so many men were off at war. In the Union Army, hundreds of thousands of German, Irish, and other foreign-born soldiers helped tip the balance.
But the historical record is messy, like it often is when you look too closely at real people. Lincoln signed legislation in 1862 that limited Chinese labor. At the same time, he championed a law that reduced barriers to immigration—described as the last such law for a century. His Homestead Act offered land out West to U.S. citizens and future citizens, though it came with a harsh tradeoff: it also meant more Native American displacement. “There’s always a tension,” one historian put it—between what a government claims to believe and what it ends up doing.
That tension showed up in politics too. Early in Lincoln’s career, he and other Whigs accused Democrats of coaxing ineligible Irish immigrants to vote. Misryoum newsroom reported that Lincoln’s own campaign letter from 1858 described seeing “about 15 Celtic gentlemen” who had just arrived, with the suggestion—bristling and ugly—that detectives might be needed to check whether they were coming to vote illegally. Still, there were complications. Earlier, Lincoln was in favor of noncitizen immigrants voting in municipal elections, reasoning that they were taxed for city services and participated in municipal life, meaning they should also have obligations and rights. Actually, it’s hard to summarize without sounding like a contradiction, because in practice it was—just not in a simple way.
Misryoum editorial desk noted that for Lincoln, immigration policy wasn’t only a matter of enforcement or fear. It also intersected with the antislavery movement and the party-building of a new era. Lincoln was helping organize the brand-new, antislavery Republican Party, and he “needed the biggest tent he could open” to swell its ranks. That meant, at least for a time, not shutting the door on people shaped by nativist politics—so long as anti-anti-slavery forces within the Know-Nothing movement wanted to work toward the coalition. The American Party, often called the Know-Nothings, ran a presidential candidate in 1856 who did very well; they elected a governor of Massachusetts and public officials in Illinois.
The historian also framed Lincoln’s immigration ideal as less about a neat merit test and more about opportunity—what he described as a “right to rise.” In that view, Lincoln believed that anyone with talent, ambition, and willingness to work “had the right to go as far as the American experiment allowed you to go.” The logic wasn’t strictly about credentials; it was about opening the door to people ready to labor. And over time, the historian argued, Lincoln’s thinking expanded—especially once Black people fought for their own freedom in the Union Army. If you’ve ever stood near a courthouse crowd on a winter morning, you know how quickly moral arguments become practical ones. Back then, Lincoln’s practicality was tied to the war effort and to the long struggle over citizenship itself.
Foreign-born troops weren’t just a footnote. Lincoln recognized early that man power advantage would be magnified in the Union Army because of the foreign-born population. Misryoum analysis indicates he encouraged enlistments from Irish- and German-born citizens—Irish soldiers at first were a political stretch because many were Democrats, while Germans were described as mostly Republican and mostly antislavery. There was also a military code requirement that soldiers speak English, though the historian said it was “sort of” ignored, and recruiters still brought people in from foreign-speaking regiments.
If Lincoln were helming the White House today, the historian said, he’d be “perplexed and disappointed” that the country doesn’t try to create a pathway to citizenship and encourage immigration. He also suggested Lincoln would find the idea of “roving bands of masked people” who pick up people working or living in the country—people going to school here, living here—abhorrent. And then the historian drifted, almost like a person you can’t quite stop from imagining what comes next: the Irish and German immigrant, he said, didn’t degrade the nation as worst-case editorials predicted. They gained footholds and enriched the culture.
Maybe, in some alternate version of history, Lincoln would turn the new ballroom into an immigration center. The thought lands softly, but it doesn’t quite resolve—because the argument about belonging never really ends. It just changes costumes.
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