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The year was 1855, when the convention of the State Council of Know-Nothings -- an insurgent political party based on Protestant fear of being marginalized by Irish and German immigrants flooding the Northeast and Midwest -- met here to adopt a national platform.

I don't think they actually called themselves that officially.

The Know-Nothings opposed all political organizations composed exclusively of foreigners and the exclusion of the Bible from government-funded schools; they considered slavery a local, not a national, issue but opposed its extension to new states.

A common enough stand at the time. Also, the state party may have opposed the expansion of slavery to the territories, but it's not in the national platform. Opposition to anything having to do with slavery would have broken the party in two.

As we found out a few days back, Know Nothing sentiment was so weak after the war that some new states admitted to the union allowed foreigners to vote, if they declared that they intended eventually to become citizens.

x: "Know Nothing sentiment was so weak after the war that some new states admitted to the union allowed foreigners to vote, if they declared that they intended eventually to become citizens."

from the article: "By 1856 -- after they successfully nominated, supported and won the Ohio's governor race with Salmon Chase, who would go on to become Lincoln's Treasury secretary -- they split over the issue of slavery; most of them entered into an alliance with the Republicans....

"Lincoln told Americans that immigrants may not be the physical descendants of the Founders, but they are their spiritual heirs:

" 'When [immigrants] look through that old Declaration of Independence, they find that those old men say that 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal'; and then they feel that that moral sentiment, taught in that day, evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that Declaration; and so they are.' "

The same forces which split and killed the old Whig party also killed the "Know-Nothings".
In 1860, those in the North mostly voted Republican, those in the South mostly voted for John Bell's Constitutional Union alliance with Know-Nothings.
They carried the states of Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.
In 1860, the governor of Maryland, for example, was a Know-Nothing, and much as he disliked President Lincoln, refused to lead Maryland into the Confederacy.

So, Republicans have always had a "Know-Nothing" wing, but since Lincoln have been tolerant and encouraging of immigrants who want to become real Americans!

Know-Nothing Governor of Maryland 1858 - 1862, Thomas Hicks: