You got me hunting witches and being fit for a dunking stool? Wierd.

New Englands history against anything other than puritan religions goes back to its beginning. But related to the Civil War anti-Catholic riots rocked New England in the 1840s and political parties were formed just to be anti-Catholic up until 1860. Any religion that even seemed to be related to Catholics also came under attack, so there seems to be a basis to my theory, even if I'm wrong.

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Massachusetts Bay- Puritan government enacted an anti-priest law in May of 1647, which threatened with death "all and every Jesuit, seminary priest, missionary or other spiritual or ecclesiastical person made or ordained by any authority, power or jurisdiction, derived, challenged or pretended, from the Pope or See of Rome."

"Pope's Day in Boston

Remember, remember, the fifth of November took on a new ritual life in Boston. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the traditional English effigy-burning had evolved into a city-wide festival marked by battles between the North End's and the South End's apprentices and artisans. The "lower orders" in each part of the city made effigies of the Pope, Devil, and Pretender and then tried to capture and burn each other's effigies. The riots were certainly anti-Catholic but also served another purpose. Resistance to the Stamp Tax in 1765-66 was built on networks of communication and leadership already in place to coordinate "organized" Pope's Day rioting. Ironically, what was a celebration of English, Protestant identity, and by extension, a celebration of Parliamentary and monarchical authority, helped foment revolution against those very institutions."

"1798: The Alien and Sedition Laws
Earliest expression of American nativism under the new constitutiona1 system was manifest during the John Adams administration with the infamous Alien and Sedition laws directed especially against foreign immigrants. Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson asking, "Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic religion?"
1830: The Leopoldine "Conspirarcy"
In Ohio there were twenty-two churches, twenty-four priests, twenty thousand Catholics, one Catholic newspaper, a college, and a seminary. The preponderant number of Catholics, especially German, among the immigrants flooding into the Midwest caused American nativists to think that the power of the Pope might be transferred there. Samuel F.B. Morse (1791-1872), inventor of the telegraph, who gained his first fame as an artist, was the descendant of a New England Puritan family in Boston. He became aware of the grants of money by the Leopoldine Society to the Church in the West and viewed this as a foreign conspiracy. He decided to dedicate the greater part of his life to opposing the Church of Rome.
"Anti-Catholic animus in the United States reached a peak in the nineteenth century when the Protestant population became alarmed by the influx of Roman Catholic immigrants. The resulting "nativist" movement, which achieved prominence in the 1840s, was whipped into a frenzy of anti-Catholicism that led to mob violence, the burning of Roman Catholic property, and the killing of Roman Catholics. This violence was fed by claims that Catholics were destroying the culture of the United States. Irish Catholic immigrants were blamed for raising the taxes of the country as well as spreading violence and disease. The nativist movement found expression in a national political movement called the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s, which (unsuccessfully) ran former president Millard Fillmore as its presidential candidate in 1856."

The Know-Nothing Party was an anti-Catholic political party originated in New York in the 1850s. By 1860 most had become Republicans.

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David Upton