Carolina. Levin is said to have become "dangerous and unmanageable" on the train to Richmond, whereupon friends and railway workers subdued him and detained him in the mail car. The nature of his madness is unclear, but one newspaper, expanding on a wire-service story, speculated, "His insanity is supposed to have been brought about by an immoderate use of opium." He was returned to the Philadelphia Hospital for the Insane and died there of "Insanity" in March 1860. Levin was buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia. Legacy Levin's role in a nativist party is a paradox, despite the fact he was native-born himself (albeit first-generation). His opposition was not to immigration as such but rather to Catholicism; he eagerly sought support from non-Catholic immigrants. 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. Levin himself did not seem to have any personal sectarian animus, which suggests that his anti-Catholic activism was merely rhetorical and opportunistic. The explorer and soldier John Gregory Bourke (1846–1896), whose devoutly Catholic family were friends and neighbors of Levin's in 1840s and 1850s Philadelphia, recalled Levin fondly and wrote that the Bourke and Levin families were close for many years. Similarly, Charles Nordhoff worked for Lewis Levin when he was a boy, around 1845, and recalled Levin as a kind, generous employer. A "printer's devil" for Levin's Daily Sun newspaper, Nordhoff really wanted to be a cabin boy on a US Navy ship going to China. Levin first warned the lad that he'd end up as a "dirty, drunken old sailor," but relented at last, and intervened with Philadelphia Navy Yard commander, Commodore Jesse Elliot to get the boy a billet. Nordhoff's maritime and writing career was thereby launched. Levin was one of the most popular public speakers of his era, often quoted and anthologized. 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. In a book about the fraught history of religious freedom in the United States, the writer Steven Waldman recalled Levin and his role in the nativist anti-Catholic agitation in the 1840s and 1850s. Referring to Levin's ostensible status as