Terry Golway's fascinating new history of New York's Tammany Hall machine offers a glimpse into the immigration politics of the 1800s, showing how it affected the party system. (I draw many examples in this post from Golway's book.) Even in the early 1800s, Tammany welcomed European immigrants into its fold, irking Whig politicians and reform-minded journalists who saw Tammany's supporters as a

"noisy rabble." Asked one writer in 1820, "Would you admit the populace, that patroon's footman, to vote?" The machine clearly would, and it worked even harder to embrace immigrants after the state legislative elections of 1841, in which Irish Catholics formed a splinter party and demonstrated that their vote could swing a district toward either the Democrats or the Whigs. Tammany politicians reacted by advocating policies favored by the Catholic immigrants, such as education reforms that would keep their children from needing to recite Protestant prayers in public schools.

Such actions put Tammany in an advantageous position to woo the support of the millions of Irish Catholics who would arrive in the wake of the Great Famine (1845-1852). By the mid-1850s, roughly a quarter of New York City was Irish-born, and roughly half of the city had been born outside the United States. The film "Gangs of New York" (2002) did a nice job depicting New York City life of this period, with impoverished Irish immigrants often grouping together in gangs to compete for basic needs and political influence, and the Tammany organization actively courting their support with offers of food, firewood, coal, jobs, and municipal services.