Many people celebrate the United States as a nation of immigrants, but nativism has infused its politics from the outset. As revolutionary currents flowed from Europe and embryonic parties coalesced in Congress and mobilized out of doors, the political influence of immigrants—including naturalized citizens—alarmed many Anglo Americans who conceived of liberty being in some way tied to their Englishness. Federalist leaders feared foreign agents and their domestic sympathizers bringing radical egalitarianism and violence (“Jacobinism,” as it was called) into the United States, and possibly plotting to surrender the country to France. Federalist editors and writers gave shape to those fears by concocting narratives that ostensibly revealed parts of an insidious scheme. At times, Federalist crowds seized on the very words in these stories as they shouted their outrage and grasped for the alleged outsiders corrupting their communities and subverting the republic.
As I’ve explained in my recent JER article, an early and frequent target of Federalist nativism was Albert Gallatin (1761–1849), a French-accented immigrant who rose, uniquely, to a position of leadership among Democratic-Republicans. After immigrating from the republic of Geneva to southwestern Pennsylvania as a young man, he became an Anti-Federalist, a prominent opponent of the excise on distilled spirits, and, after marrying Hannah Nicholson in late 1793, son-in-law of James Nicholson, the president of the Democratic Society of the City of New-York. In early 1794, Federalists expelled Gallatin from the U.S. Senate on the grounds of not meeting the required period of citizenship; some asserted that his naturalization was altogether illegitimate and that he remained an alien. By the time Gallatin entered the House of Representatives in late 1795, Federalists frequently denounced him not merely as a foreigner, but specifically as a dangerous Genevan. The republic of Gallatin’s birth experienced repeated revolution and French interference between 1789 and 1794, and French annexation in 1798. A network encompassing Genevan exiles in London, Federalist printers, and high-ranking members of the Washington and Adams administrations disseminated accounts of Geneva as a cautionary tale of how democratic aspirations and French subversion destroyed a modern republic, and they pointed to its lessons as they claimed Gallatin’s opposition to Federalist political economy and foreign policy represented dangerous, insidious influence.