Samuel Morse
1835

Excerpts from Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States (1835).  At the time, Samuel Morse was a well known painter and a prominent anti-Catholic writer. He would later go on to help invent the telegraph and the Morse Code. He also ran for mayor of New York City as a nativist, but lost badly.

[W]e well know what is the nature of Roman Catholic ecclesiastical rule, — it is the double refined spirit of despotism, which, after arrogating to itself the prerogatives of Deity, and so claiming to bind or loose the soul eternally, makes it, in the comparison, but a mere trifle, to exercise absolute sway in all that relates to the body. The notorious ignorance in which the great mass of these emigrants have been all their lives sunk, until their minds are dead, makes them but senseless machines; they obey orders mechanically, for it is the habit of their education, in the despotic countries of their birth. And can it be for a moment supposed by any one that by the act of coming to this country, and being naturalized, their darkened intellects can suddenly be illuminated to discern the nice boundary where their ecclesiastical obedience to their priests ends, and their civil independence of them begins ? The very supposition is absurd.

They obey their priests as demigods, from the habit of their whole lives ; they have been taught from infancy that their priests are infallible in the greatest matters, and can they, by mere importation to this country, be suddenly imbued with the knowledge that in civil matters their priests may err, and that they are not in these also their infallible guides ? Who will teach them this ? Will their priests ? “Let common sense answer this question. Must not the priests, as a matter almost of certainty , control the opinions of their ignorant flock in civil as well as religious matters ? ,and do they not do it ?….

Will you not awake -the apprehension of the reality and extent of your danger? Will you be longer deceived by the pensioned Jesuits, who having surrounded your press, are now rising it all over the country to stifle the cries of danger, and lull your fears by attributing your alarm to a false cause? Up! up! I beseech you. Awake! To pour posts ! Let the tocsin sound from Maine to Louisiana. Fly to protect the vulnerable places of your Constitution and Laws. Place your guards ; you will peed them, and quickly too. — And first, shut your gates. Shut the open gates.

The very first step of safety is here. It is the beginning of defence. Your enemies, in the guise of friends, by thousands, are at this moment rushing in to your ruin through the open portals of naturalization. Stop them, or you are lost, irrevocably lost. The first battle is here at the gates. Concentrate here. And be sure your enemy will here show his strength ; you here can test his force or his existence, if you indeed doubt his existence. He will dispute this entrance inch by inch.

Already is he alarmed, already has he set in motion his troops to resist. Will you despise the cry of danger? Well, be it so. Believe the foreign Jesuit rather than your own countrymen. Open wide your doors. Yes, throw down your walls. Invite, nay allure, your enemies. Enlarge your alms houses and your prisons ; be not sparing of your money ; complain not of the outrages in your streets, nor the burden of your taxes. You will be repaid in praises of your toleration and liberality. What though European despots have compelled you to be the nurses of their halt, and blind, and naked, and the keepers of their criminals ; what though they have compelled you to the necessity of employing your lives in toiling and providing for their outcast poor, and have caused you to be vexed, and your habits outraged by the expatriated turbulence of their cities, instead of allowing you to rejoice in the prosperity, and happiness, and peaceful neighbourhood of your own well-provided, well-instructed children.

 

Samuel Morse, Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States Through Foreign Immigration and the Present State of the Naturalization Laws (New York: E. B. Clayton, 1835), p. 25.