Lewis Charles Levin

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Lewis Charles Levin (November 10, 1808-March 14, 1860) was the first Jewish person elected to the United States Congress.

Lewis Charles Levin was born in Charleston, South Carolina and graduated from the University of South Carolina in 1828. After teaching for a time he practiced law in several states for a time. He settled in Philadelphia and edited the Philadelphia Daily Sun. In that capacity he was arrested for "exciting to riot and treason" in inciting locals to invade and burn several Catholic churches and a convent in Philadelphia and Kensington in mid-1844.[1]

Levin is often credited as a founder of the American Republican Party (sometimes called the Native American Party, later renamed the American Party and nicknamed the "Know-Nothings"), an anti-Catholic faction of the 1840s and 1850s.

Shortly after the 1844 Philadelphia riots, Levin ran for Congress and was elected on his party's platform, to wit: (1) to extend the period of naturalization to twenty-one years; (2) to elect only native born to all offices; (3) to reject foreign interference in all institutions, social, religious, and political.

Levin was returned to Congress in 1846 and 1848. He served as chairman of the United States House Committee on Engraving during the Thirtieth Congress, 1847-48. (As a side note, it was this Thirtieth Congress that saw a young Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln serve his one and only term in the House.)

Levin finally lost his seat in the 1850 election. He died in the Philadelphia Hospital for the Insane in March 1860, after suffering from 'Insanity' for two years, according to the Federal Census Mortality Schedule. [2] He was buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery, in Philadelphia.

Lewis Levin's role in a nativist party is sometimes deemed a paradox, but actually it was not, inasmuch as he was native-born himself. His opposition was not to immigration per se but rather to Catholicism; he eagerly sought support from non-Catholic immigrants.[3] It is a mark of his skill that he was able to equate "nativism" with anti-Catholicism, and to do so in Philadelphia, where sectarian animosity had historically been minimal, and where native-born Catholics had lived side-by-side with Anglicans, Quakers, and others since the Colonial period.

In 1905 a veteran Pennsylvania journalist and politician, Alexander Kelly McClure, recalled Levin as one of the shrewdest and most persuasive politicians of the period[4]:

A brilliant adventurer named Lewis C. Levin, a native of Charleston, S.C., and a peripatetic law practitioner, first in South Carolina, next in Maryland, next in Louisiana, next in Kentucky and finally in Pennsylvania, was the acknowledged leader of the Native American element that had erupted during the summer of 1844 in what is remembered as the disgraceful riots of that year in which Catholic churches and institutions were burnt by the mob... He was one of the most brilliant and unscrupulous orators I have ever heard. He presented a fine appearance, graceful in every action charming in rhetoric and utterly reckless in assertion. I have heard him both as a temperance and political orator, and I doubt whether during his day any person in either party of the State surpassed him on the hustings. He was elected by a good majority and was re-elected in 1846 and '48, thus serving six consecutive years as a representative from the city. (Old Time Notes of Pennsylvania, 1905, pp. 84-85.)


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Preceded by
Edward J. Morris		 Member of the U.S. House of Representatives
from Pennsylvania's 1st congressional district
1845 - 1851		 Succeeded by
Thomas B. Florence