Natives were not necessarily the most nativist. Earlier Protestant immigrants from England, Scotland, and especially Ulster had brought their anti-Catholic sentiments with them and often formed the vanguard of anti-Irish rioters and voters in the United States. Radicals and agnostics among the Forty-eighters who had fled Germany after suppression of the 1848 revolutions carried to America a bitter enmity toward the Catholic Church which had sided with the forces of counterrevolution.
