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By 1850 California(not yet a state) had a larger population than Delaware and Florida

By the early 1850s the heavy wave of immigrants that had begun in 1846 was showing up in the voting rolls. Since immigrants were preponderantly young adults the number of foreign born voters grew faster than their proportion of the population.

The Know Nothings probably hoped that by making citizenship and political rights more difficult to obtain they might discourage immigrants from coming to the United States.

President Buchanan had a long standing desire to acquire Cuba and turn it into a new slave state for the Union.

In 1856 the first national platform of the Republican party branded polygamy a "barbarism " equal to slavery.

In the first 40 years of the republic immigrants had not come in large numbers. Even in the 1820's arrivals averaged fewer than 13,000 a year.