The soldiers had been ordered onto the streets of Washington by the president. In the years beforehand, anti-immigrant rhetoric had boiled over into violence in cities across America.

Now it had spread to the capital on Election Day, and in response Marines were deployed with orders to protect polling stations and dispel troublemakers. Citizens, including those born overseas, set out to cast their votes.

By the close of the day, six young men — two teenagers among them — were dead. The fatalities were “A slaughter of Americans peaceably voting by marines ordered out by a proslavery president,” historian David Grimstead wrote in “American Mobbing.”

They blamed immigrants

This was 1857, the president was James Buchanan, and the violence that the soldiers were responding to had been fanne

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