Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration

Holzer, one of the most prolific and respected biographers of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, has written a fascinating study of his long evolution on the vexed subject of immigration. Although he was never as bigoted against immigrants, especially Catholics, as most Americans, Lincoln straddled the issue for many years. By the middle of the Civil War, however, he had come to see immigrants as national assets, needed not only as cannon fodder on the battlefield but to replenish the country’s labor force when the war ended. A strongly worded message to Congress in 1863 quickly led to the passage of the first federal legislation to encourage immigration—and the last such act for the next hundred years. Lincoln’s evolution on the issue was the reverse of George Washington’s; the first U.S. president welcomed immigrants in his early years but bequeathed to his successor John Adams the views that led to the infamous, harshly anti-immigrant and arguably unconstitutional Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. The prejudices of eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Americans eerily echo today’s (Lincoln wanted more immigration from Europe, but not from Latin America or Asia)—as do fears, both unfounded and legitimate, about competition over jobs.