Know-Nothingism was a development of the native American movement of the forties. The support tendered by the Irish immigrants to the Democrats had assisted in the disorganization and severe defeat of the Republican party. Hence many disappointed Republican leaders determined to form an organization which should withhold political rights from European newcomers. At first they organized a secret fraternity called the "Know-Nothings" from "I don't know," the ever-repeated reply of its members to inquiry about its nature. The original name bestowed upon the fraternity by its founders was "The Sons of '76", or the "Order of the Star-Spangled Banner"; and its slogan was "America for the Americans." Its favourite counter-sign was the traditional order of Washington, "Put none but Americans on guard to-night." The national sentiment behind the society was reinforced by Protestant sectarian zeal, since its organizers were concerned not merely with depriving immigrants of power, but with excluding all Catholics from office. Thanks to the allure of its novelty, this party developed with phenomenal rapidity. In 1854 its candidates swept the elections in Massachusetts, and Gardiner, its nominee, became governor of the state. Its members sought to control nomination for office by secret conventions of delegates. They bound themselves to cast no votes for any except Protestant-born citizens, and endeavoured to alter the naturalization laws so that foreigners might not be allowed to vote until they had resided twenty-one years in the country. The Know-Nothing party could never have had more than temporary success. As Horace Greeley, the noted editor of the New York _Tribune_, remarked, it "would seem as devoid of the elements of persistence as an anti-cholera or an anti-potato-rot party would be." But McGee, like other leaders of the swelling Irish population, was alarmed at its growing strength. It threatened to proscribe the men of his faith, and to exclude from the exercise of political rights immigrants like himself who sought a new home in the republic. In the columns of the _Celt_, he attacked its aims, assailed its champions, and marshalled Irish-American opinion against it. There is little doubt that this conflict, in which McGee was engaged during the last five years of his residence in New York, did much to disillusion him in respect to American life and institutions. A few years before he had written the lines: Hail to the land whose broad domain Rejoices under Freedom's reign Where neither right nor race is banned. But he no longer viewed the republic as a Utopia. He now discovered that the so-called land of freedom was a land of intolerance, and his migration to Canada was largely due to the action of the Know-Nothing faction. As he later remarked, "I did not want to be a citizen on sufferance, as it were, courted one day and proscribed the next."