There is no doubt that the concept of republicanism has suffered from overuse by historians. Almost inevitably, many scholars have recently argued that republican ideology is not the powerful explanation for many developments in American history that it once seemed. Even those who still maintain that the "republican synthesis" was central to the American Revolution seem reluctant to find republicanism persisting beyond the Revolutionary era. The most compelling statement of this perspective remains Gordon Wood's claim in his influential The Creation of the American Republic, 1770-1787, that 1787 marked "the end of classical politics" (i.e., politics based on republican beliefs) because the new federal constitution was based on an acceptance of the idea of competing self interests, rather than the republican insistence that all men of virtue strive to achieve the common good. What can scholars do, then, who study antebellum America, only to find their sources permeated with what seem undeniably to be the republican beliefs of nineteenth-century Americans? The most plausible explanation seems to be that the scholarship about the republican synthesis has often lacked discussion of an element that gave republican ideals continuing resonance well into the nineteenth century: religion.
The nativist movement in antebellum Philadelphia provides a compelling illustration of this. An extremely diverse and broad group of Philadelphians united in the 1840s to combat what appeared to them to be a serious threat to the survival of the republic, the influx of foreign immigrants (mostly Irish Catholics) to their city. Nativists came from many different perspectives -- some formed a political party which dominated the political culture of Philadelphia county during the period, some were clergy who mounted a campaign to educate the public about the danger posed by the immigrants, still others were women who joined the movement to protect their homes -- but all were united and motivated by republican beliefs. The many newspapers (including one published by women), pamphlets, sermons, and other sources that survive reveal that nativists were sure immigrants jeopardized the United States, and they expressed their fears in an unmistakably "republican style." But immigrants were not a new feature of Philadelphia life in the 1840s, nor did they stop arriving after the movement's demise. The coalescence of so many citizens around nativist beliefs in that particular setting and time is due to the fact that in 1843 the immigrants' leader, the bishop of Philadelphia, requested that Catholic children be excused from the readings of the King James Bible that were routine in the common schools. This request sparked a furor that resulted in a powerful movement that charged Catholic immigrants and their leaders with endangering the very foundation of the nation, the most damning evidence being what nativists consistently termed an attempt to "remove" the Bible from the public schools. In their newspaper women nativists asked, "Can not every man see that the war against the Bible by Romanists, is the entering wedge of the subversion of liberty in this country?" Nativism was not simply anti-Catholicism (although it was that); republican fears and beliefs were inseparable from traditional Protestant convictions about the political dangers posed by Catholics. The combination of these factors is what gave nativism its potency in antebellum Philadelphia.