The first overtures he made to men of prominence after his return were very favorable. He says, “The cordial reception and warm support, moreover, which our first overtures have met with from many eminent persons in Washington—senators or representatives from Texas, former governors and etc., with whom I have had recently the honor to converse, tended to strengthen me in my confidence.”[2] But the masses of the people of the South and of Texas, had during these seventeen months which had intervened between the first and second trips, been over-powered with one of those peculiar psychological phenomena which occur quite frequently in a nation. This time it was the Know-Nothing Party. This party grew up almost overnight and became a strong force in the politics of the nation. The party was a secret organization which had as its principal theories the idea that the government of the United States should be in the hands of “Native Americans,” that no one should be permitted to become a citizen until after a very long period of probation, and that Catholics should be excluded from all offices. The party gained its largest number of votes in 1854 and declined rapidly after that time, being dead in less than three years after its victories in 1854 and 1855. Such an organization, of course, could have very little welcome for a group of French socialists and, in the main, would be openly hostile toward them. The rather sensitive and alert Considerant quickly sensed the change. He immediately issued a statement concerning the attitude of himself and his colonists in which he stated: I by no means intend to criticize or to approve this political movement, or to pass judgment upon it in any manner whatever. God forbid that I should follow the example of those new comers who, having scarcely set foot on a great country where they find hospitality, freedom, and an immense field open to their activity, hasten to take part in its internal affairs, mixing themselves up in questions of which they cannot yet understand the first elements, speaking, judging and deciding, right or wrong, on all sorts of subjects, which demand long study and profound knowledge of things in order to be comprehended. No! my friends and myself, I am authorized to say, are men of common sense. We do not come to America in order to enlist in parties, of which we know neither the principles, the traditions, nor the exciting causes.