Ahlstrom: Chapters 32-34

The Roman Catholic church has a longer history in America—even in the United States—than any other Christian denomination, and each of its several American beginnings has at least a tenuous connection with the present day. These ancient traditions notwithstanding, no major church in America experienced a more decisive break between its colonial phase and its development after the Revolutionary War. Unlike the Congregational, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Lutheran churches, whose patterns of development were established long before 1776, the Roman Catholic church began almost a second history in the national period. So incredibly large was the flow of immigrants that by 1850 Roman Catholics, once a tiny and ignored minority, had become the country’s largest religious communion. The Revolution transformed the church’s legal and psychological situation to such an extent that Roman Catholics could participate with few legal restrictions in a free democratic society such as the world had never seen, and for which neither Roman Catholic theology, canon law, nor ancient precedent provided much guidance. Indeed, the American cultural ethos in its totality constituted so drastic a break with tradition that even after decades of explaining by American bishops, it still remained an enigma to popes and curial officials in Rome. And at the end of the nineteenth century “Americanism” would become a serious doctrinal issue both in Europe and America.

For Roman Catholics as for all other American colonials the Treaty of Paris in 1763 marked the end of an epoch. Great Britain’s resounding triumphs swept away the entire continental empire of the French and brought the Spanish Floridas under British rule. The perennial threat on the frontier was pushed beyond the Mississippi; Roman Catholics were no longer suspected as potential collaborationists, and tensions were eased. With regard to the ecclesiastical rule of Roman Catholics in British America, however, a new problem was created. Was a resident bishop to be sent, or could the diocese of Quebec be enlarged, or should regular visitations from Florida and Quebec be arranged, or should the old arrangements continue? Richard Challoner, after 1758 vicar apostolic of the London district with jurisdiction over the American colonies, persistently pressed the Vatican to provide closer regulation than he himself could exercise from afar. The Jesuits in the colonies, on the other hand, were deeply suspicious of anti-Jesuit sentiments among the bishops and cardinals in Rome and in other Catholic countries. Also aware of the uproar aroused by Anglican proposals for an American bishop, they warned against a move that would revive Protestant hostility. Challoner, in turn, interpreted these warnings as a Jesuitic maneuver, and dwelt on the tragedy of American Catholics being deprived of the sacrament of confirmation. In fact nothing was done to alter the old arrangements except that after the suppression of their society in 1773 the Jesuits were placed directly under Challoner’s authority as secular priests.

In the meantime, relations between England and America were steadily deteriorating, and most Catholics apparently shared the outrage of their countrymen at Parliament’s new taxes and tightened colonial administration. Charles Carroll of Maryland even entered into journalistic combat for the Patriot cause in 1773. Into this era of good feelings for Catholics, however, Parliament cast a bomb in 1774—the Quebec Act, which not only freed Quebec Catholics of the traditional oath of loyalty to the king and granted them full freedom of religion, but attached the entire trans-Appalachian territory north of the Ohio to Quebec. This provided new incitement to the rise of revolutionary sentiment, at the same time that it goaded colonists to another round of anti-Catholicism. So violent were the formal protests of the First Continental Congress, indeed, that future possibilities for Canadian participation in armed resistance were rendered out of the question. Had not the War for Independence begun, another season of domestic intolerance would undoubtedly have followed.

During the war, Roman Catholics seem to have participated in a way that justified Charles Carroll’s signature on the Declaration of Independence. Few of his coreligionists could rejoice over their stakes in the British Empire. If they were Irish, as were many, they were not likely to have forgotten the treatment that England had meted out in the past. They had every reason to expect much improvement of their situation in an independent America where no one church could expect to dominate the others. Their participation in the war effort, therefore, was wholehearted. Tories among them were very few; and though a Loyalist regiment was raised during General Howe’s occupation of Philadelphia, it was more than balanced by two Patriot regiments and an unknown number of volunteers in the Continental armies. The American alliance with Roman Catholic France and Spain provided additional motivation, as did the work of foreign volunteers like Count Pulaski.

Neither freedom and independence nor the grant of civil rights in Maryland and Pennsylvania (where most Roman Catholics lived) solved the serious ecclesiastical problems that lay before the twenty to twenty-five ex-Jesuit priests who were serving in America in 1783. In 1784, therefore, they organized themselves into a “Select Body of Clergy,” adopted a constitution regulating their affairs, and formed a corporation to administer the properties which the Society of Jesus had owned at the time of its suppression. This group also realized the importance of reestablishing their authority now that English jurisdiction was terminated, but here they faced a perplexing situation. Because they were aware of the strong hostility against the Society of Jesus still entertained at the Vatican, and because they worried about Protestant antipathies, they feared the appointment of an ordinary bishop and objected strenuously to the erection of a vicariate apostolic which would be in the jurisdiction of Propaganda in Rome.

A complicated series of maneuvers followed in which even Benjamin Franklin had a hand, since he desired to link American Catholics more closely to France, perhaps under a French bishop. But the United States government stated an explicit policy of noninvolvement in the affair. Finally in Rome on 9 June 1784, without the consultation of the American priests, the Reverend John Carroll was appointed superior of the mission in the United States. Carroll considered this arrangement unsatisfactory, for it placed severe limits on his authority, and he hesitated four months before accepting. Yet he and his colleagues were gratified that a French bishop had not been given the jurisdiction, and at least some of his fellow priests hoped that Rome would soon recognize the need for a regular diocesan arrangement. In any event, the man chosen for this arduous task was well fitted for the role.

John Carroll (1735-1815) was born into an old Maryland family distinguished for its material prosperity, its widely manifested civic responsibility, and its allegiance to the Church of Rome. As befitted his station, Carroll’s father, a merchant in upper Marlborough, sent his son first to a Jesuit school at Bohemia Manor near the Pennsylvania border, and then in 1748 to the famous school conducted by the English Jesuits at Saint Omer in French. Flanders. In the discipline and austerity of this academic and clerical world the boy found his vocation, and five years later he began his novitiate as a Jesuit. Upon completion of further studies he became a teacher in the school of his order at Liege. During the years which followed, however, an exceedingly disruptive series of events reached their climax, and the Society of Jesus was officially dissolved. In 1744 the long-smoldering opposition to the order had led to the condemnation of its missionary practices in China; then in 1759 it was expelled from Portugal. France, after various preparatory restrictions, proscribed it entirely in 1764, Spain followed suit in 1768, and finally, in 1773, Pope Clement XIV, a Franciscan, ordered its dissolution. After a tour of the Continent, Carroll returned to America in 1774, just as it was girding itself for armed conflict with England. He sympathized with this cause and even participated in an unsuccessful attempt to bring Canada into the Patriot camp. Thus doubly separated from traditional sources of authority, Father Carroll spent the war years as a priest in his home district, helping to secure the ex-Jesuit properties for the future work of his church in the new nation.

Like his distant cousin who had signed the Declaration of Independence, John Carroll was a convinced Patriot. As early as 1779 he assured an English correspondent that “the fullest and largest system of toleration is adopted in almost all of the American states; public protection and encouragement are extended alike to all denominations, and Roman Catholics are members of congress, assemblies, and hold civil and military posts as well as others.”[1] Though firm in his attachment to the Holy See and orthodox in doctrine, he was remarkably progressive in practical matters, favoring a vernacular liturgy and expressing fierce dissatisfaction with both the political and the ecclesiastical attitudes prevailing in Rome. Before receiving word of his own appointment he expressed the hope that if America were to have a bishop, it would be “an ordinary national bishop in whose appointment Rome shall have no share.” [2]

Carroll’s new status as superior of the mission was far from that of “an ordinary national bishop.” In fact, his very limited powers barely augmented those he had been exercising. Quite clearly his authority was insufficient to assert and retain control of an undisciplined situation where congregations of Roman Catholics, north and south, were organizing and calling priests at their own pleasure. But four years later the pope responded to requests from the American priests and allowed them to elect a bishop. In 1790 Carroll went to England to be consecrated bishop of Baltimore and to obtain much-needed assistance for work in his vast, half-explored diocese. As he indicated in his first report, there were then about twenty-five thousand Roman Catholics in the United States, sixteen thousand of them in Maryland, seven thousand in Pennsylvania, fifteen hundred in New York, and two hundred in Virginia.[3] What remnants of Catholicity there were beyond the mountains Carroll had no way of knowing.

After his consecration Bishop Carroll began in earnest to order and to pacify the “Church Turbulent” which was in his charge. The first major event in the diocese’s short history was the convocation of a synod in 1791, where his four vicars-general and sixteen other priests (of seven nationalities) gathered for the hard legal work of providing decrees to govern the church’s affairs. They did their work impressively well, and the result “served as a happy model for all its successors.” Aside from regulatory measures, however, Bishop Carroll had to make decisions—and to set precedents—with regard to one special problem which was to bring more consternation and tumult to the church during the ensuing sixty years than any other, namely, trusteeism. The American Roman Catholic equivalent of congregationalism, trusteeism was further evidence of the characteristic localism that in a practical way was to alter, at least temporarily, the traditional polity of almost every communion that moved onto the American scene. In many varying patterns and for a variety of reasons, nearly every early Roman Catholic diocese had to deal with the question. One case involving two fractious Irish Capuchins and a privately incorporated parish in New York City had already resulted in disgraceful public disturbances before Carroll became a bishop. In 1791, due to similar disruptions in Boston, he had to suspend two French-born secular priests. In Philadelphia he faced still another disturbing situation which stemmed from the founding in 1789 of Holy Trinity Church by a privately incorporated “German Religious Society of Roman Catholics,” the first such expressly national congregation formed in the United States.

The reasons for the emergence of these “congregational” churches are obvious. Distances were great; priests were few; genuine piety searched for parish expression. Protestant examples were everywhere to be seen. The revolutionary spirit and American ideals encouraged ecclesiastical democracy. Moreover it became known that the American priests had been authorized to elect their first bishop. In a time when funds were lacking and when episcopal authority was weak or nonexistent, trusteeism was a way of providing a church for people who wanted one; in a time of ethnic tensions, it would get them a priest who spoke the right language. For such good reasons, and because he was a mild-mannered person, Bishop Carroll at first permitted or accepted these practices; but he did not live to deal with the many extreme cases where unworthy priests or trustees violated canon law, creating situations where bishops had no alternative but to use every legal sanction to eliminate the practice. Later bishops would reap the whirlwind.

More impressive and positive, though also fraught with present and future difficulties, was Bishop Carroll’s chief stratagem for obtaining the priests he so desperately needed and for training the new American-horn clergy that would ultimately have to be relied upon. To attain these ends he accepted the support of the Society of Saint Sulpice in France. Carroll’s French contacts had been established during prerevolutionary days and had deepened during the war, but it was the outbreak of the French Revolution, with its attendant anticlericalism, that made available an invaluable reservoir of missionary zeal, educational talent, and administrative ability. During his visit to England and France in 179o, Carroll accepted the offer of Jacques Andre Emery, superior general of the Society of Saint Sulpice in Paris, to furnish not only priests, teachers, and some students, but important financial aid. In 1791 Charles Francois Nagot and three colleagues arrived in Baltimore and with little delay transformed the “One Mile Tavern” just beyond the town into Saint Mary’s Seminary. The institution nearly collapsed at times, yet for nearly two decades it remained the primary seminary of the American Catholic church as its graduates assumed many positions of usefulness and prominence. The Sulpicians also opened Mount Saint Mary’s College at Emmitsburg, Maryland, in 1808.

Before 1815 these teachers were joined by nearly a hundred other emigre priests from France. In 1817 Ambrose Marechal, the rector of Saint Mary’s College who had shortly before declined the see of Philadelphia, was made archbishop of Baltimore. When in 1808 another emigre, Benedict Flaget, became bishop of Bardstown, Kentucky, he took with him Jean-Baptiste David, who founded a seminary in the West and later succeeded Flaget as bishop. In the meantime Jean Dubois left the presidency of Mount Saint Mary’s to become the second bishop of New York. Father Francois Matignon was sent to pacify the disrupted church in Boston, where he was later joined by Jean-Louis Lefebvre de Cheverus, who served as bishop there until translated to the see of Montauban in France. Cheverus was later made archbishop of Bordeaux and a cardinal. In Bordeaux he was as fondly remembered for his gentle saintliness as he had been in Boston. Even Georgetown College, one of the favorite educational projects of Bishop Carroll, owed its reputation and almost its existence in these early years to the French priests who served as it teachers and administrators.

Few of these émigré priests played a more varied role than William Du-bourg (1766-1833). After theological studies at Paris, Dubourg was ordained and entered the Order of Saint Sulpice in 1788. Fleeing the Revolution, he arrived in the United States in 1794, serving for a time as president of Georgetown College and later as the first superior of Saint Mary’s College. In 1812 he was appointed apostolic administrator of Louisiana and the Floridas, and three years later he was consecrated bishop. Because the cathedral at New Orleans was in the hands of those who refused submission to the American hierarchy, he was forced to reside at Saint Louis, where he founded a college and a theological seminary as well as an academy which later became Saint Louis University. During his visit to Europe in 1815—when he was consecrated bishop of New Orleans—Du-bourg also visited Lyons in France, and inspired a small group of laywomen with the need for missionary aid. Out of that seed grew the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, founded in 1822, which made a large and continuous financial contribution to church work in America. In 1826 Dubourg was transferred to the see of Montauban, in France, and in 1833 he became archbishop of Besancon.

Perhaps most eminent of all was the career of Ambrose Marechal (17641828). Marechal had entered the Sulpician Seminary in Orleans, but he sailed for Maryland immediately after his ordination in 1792. Here he served as a priest until 1799, when he became a teacher of theology first at Saint Mary’s College of Baltimore, later at Georgetown, then again at Saint Mary’s. Under Napoleon he returned to France for a time, but in 1812 he came back to his post in Baltimore, where he served until made archbishop. His years in that office-1817 to 1828—were stormy. There were disagreements with the Jesuits over ownership of the Whitemarsh plantation. Conflicts broke out continually over Irish and German resistance to priests of other nationalities. The issue of trusteeism erupted in several places. The Irish clergy were restive because of the obvious French dominance of the hierarchy. By exceeding his authority, Marechal did take some measures to pacify the church, but he steadfastly refused to call a provincial council, preferring to keep his bishops isolated from each other.[4] On the other hand, he did succeed in reducing European intervention in American church affairs. And in 1821, he dedicated the fine cathedral of Baltimore which Benjamin Latrobe had designed and which Archbishop Carroll had begun.

The nature of the theological and spiritual influence of the Sulpicians on the Roman Catholic church in America is difficult to estimate. But the society was always known for its firm discipline and for its strict conception of orthodoxy rather than for its venturesomeness, and it is perhaps just to say that it propagated a similar spirit in America, where in any event the intensely practical necessities of an expanding church hindered the growth of theological profundity, a great tradition of learning, or even the ardent piety associated with Jean-Jacques Olier, the society’s great founder. Here again a step taken by Bishop Carroll had a decisive impact on the church—in the immediate sense providing a source of priests and bishops when they were badly needed, but in the long run creating a very serious source of ethnic tension and jealousies that often sharpened trusteeship conflicts. Probably the most enduring legacy of the Sulpicians to the American church was their very conservative theological tradition.

The prominence of the Society of Jesus is another feature of American Catholicism which the church’s first prelate, a Jesuit himself, tended to accentuate, though in no unusually overt manner. In America the former members of the Society of Jesus, who in fact constituted the main body of clergy in 1783, maintained their identity despite their official nonexistence. After 1805, capitalizing on the pope’s recognition of the Society of Jesus in Russia, they reprofessed their vows and went ahead openly with their work, though there was no American province before 1833. During these early decades the college at Georgetown, opened in 1791, was the main center of their labor, but they made contributions as priests and bishops in every sector. It has been justly said that American Catholicism was “in its inception, wholly a Jesuit affair and [has] largely remained so.”[5] What truth there is to this exaggeration is largely due to the success of the Jesuits of Carroll’s generation in maintaining themselves and then in regaining a prominent place in the church’s life.

It must be added, however, that Sulpicians and Jesuits were not the only orders at work in these early years. In 1806-07 Father Edward D. Fenwick and other Dominicans built the Church of Saint Rose of Lima in Washington County, Kentucky, and opened a novitiate that marks the origin of that order in the United States. The Dominicans also worked extensively as missionaries in the area; and in 1821 Father Fenwick was made the first bishop of Cincinnati. Women’s orders, too, were at work. The Ursulines had been in New Orleans since 1727, and early in the nineteenth century they were carrying on their teaching work in New York and Boston. Outside of New Orleans the oldest convent in the United States is that settled by the Carmelites in Maryland in 1790; but the old established orders were not alone in advancing the course of education.

Notable in her own way was Elizabeth Seton (1774-1821). Widow of a well-to-do New York merchant and an Episcopalian, she became a Catholic soon after her husband’s death in 1803. After a brief teaching experience in New York City, she went in 1808 to Baltimore, where, encouraged by Carroll and Dubourg, she opened an academy in a house adjoining Saint Mary’s College. Moving to Emmitsburg a year later, she established Saint Joseph’s Academy, and in order to staff it, founded the Sisters of Charity as a teaching order. In decades to come the American Sisters of Charity would make a major contribution as teachers and administrators of schools throughout the country. Mother Seton was beatified by the pope in 1963, and she may well become the first American-born canonized saint.

The trends established and the problems faced or created during the early years of a fully constituted Roman Catholic church in the United States have been the focus of our attention up to this point. This has perhaps obscured the major fact that the church actively ministered to the widely scattered faithful in the new country, as well as to the ever increasing numbers arriving through immigration. The most obvious index of this activity is the expansion of the hierarchy and the increase in the priesthood and membership. In 1790 Bishop Carroll had been alone with little more than an ex-Jesuit remnant. In 1799, however, he received a coadjutor bishop, Leonard Neale, a Marylander and Jesuit; then, more momentously, in 1808 Pope Pius VII erected Baltimore as a metropolitan see. Archbishop Carroll now was given four suffragan sees: Boston, Bardstown, New York, and Philadelphia. As nearly as the archbishop and his suffragans could determine, there were then eighty Roman Catholic churches, seventy priests and perhaps seventy thousand faithful in the United States, exclusive of Louisiana.

At Boston John Cheverus became the ordinary of a diocese that included all of New England but consisted of only three widely scattered congregations, one of which was the recently conflict-ridden Boston congregation of about seven hundred members. Cheverus was one of the few French emigres who was deeply beloved by parishioners and non-Catholics alike; and the whole city mourned his departure when he returned to France in 1823. His successor, Benedict J. Fenwick, a Jesuit, took charge of a diocese that had grown only slightly to include eight churches served by three priests. Although his Boston membership was by then largely Irish, the great deluge still lay ahead.

The first bishop of Bardstown was Benedict Joseph Flaget, the Sulpician who since 1792 had been ministering in the West, at Vincennes and many other places. With a responsibility that at first included the entire trans-Appalachian region except the Louisiana Purchase lands, Flaget faced staggering problems. Yet aided by the Kentucky Dominicans and a small group of itinerant missionary priests (most of them French), he did much to organize the church life of old settlers and newcomers alike. The growth of his diocese was steady. In 1817 Flaget received a coadjutor, and the Dominican Father Fenwick was appointed to the newly erected see of Cincinnati with the Old Northwest as his charge.

The first bishop of New York was appointed in Rome and died at Naples in 1810 without ever seeing his diocese. His successor was another stranger to America, John Connolly, who did not occupy his unruly see until 1815. Until his death a decade later, Connolly’s efforts to cope with the rising tide of Irish immigration were inhibited by bitter struggles with trustees and an acute shortage of clergy. In 1825 he had but ten priests for an estimated 150,000 Roman Catholic people. His successor, the Sulpician Jean Dubois, a former schoolmate of Robespierre, showed greater competence. Dubois founded a diocesan seminary, but because of his nationality he was doomed to even fiercer opposition from the trustees. It was not until 1837, when John Hughes, a former seminary student of Dubois’s, was consecrated as coadjutor in New York, that the diocese gained a bishop fully able to deal with the rapidly growing Catholic population, serious trusteeship problems, and most ominous of all, the rising tide of anti-Catholicism. Orator, theologian, strenuous controversialist, and effective administrator, Hughes demonstrated the advantages and possibilities of a prelate who had been trained in the United States.

Philadelphia, the fourth suffragan see erected in 1808, had at that time and for some time continued to have the most substantial Catholic population in the country. Trusteeism raised greater problems here than elsewhere, and Michael Egan, a Franciscan who in 1810 became the city’s first bishop, was unable even to assert his authority over the cathedral priests. The man appointed in Europe to deal with the Philadelphia diocese after Egan’s death was Henry Conwell, the aged vicar general of Armagh in Ireland. Around him for a decade swirled the events of the Hogan affair, the cause celebre of trusteeism, which finally did him in. William Hogan was a handsome priest who came from Ireland in 1819, the year of Conwell’s consecration as bishop. He had been granted faculties as a priest in Saint Mary’s Church by the interim administrator of the diocese, but these faculties were withdrawn after Hogan publicly ridiculed the new bishop. The trustees of the cathedral church supported the priest, who in turn intensified his attack, accusing the bishop of exceeding the canonical limits of his authority (as, indeed, several bishops had done). Hogan also urged Archbishop Marechal to call a provincial council to rule on these matters; but he then outdid himself and forged a pastoral letter ascribed to Bishop Conwell. Conwell retaliated, admonishing the congregation and threatening Hogan with excommunication if he should exercise his faculties. Since Hogan, at the trustees’ urging, did not desist, he was excommunicated in May 1822. The trustees then went still farther and published an “Address of the Committee of Saint Mary’s Church of Philadelphia to their Brethren of the Roman Catholic Faith throughout the United States of America, on the Subject of a Reform of Certain Abuses in the Administration of our Church Discipline.” They alleged intervention by “foreigners” sent among them by “the Junta or Commission directing the Fide Propaganda of Rome,” and called for procedures allowing the “nomination and selection of our pastors from our own citizens.” From among these pastors, moreover, bishops should be chosen. They went on to accuse the existing bishops of being “a disgrace to our religion,” victims of “superstition and ignorance.” Hogan and the trustees were, in effect, calling for an independent Catholic church of some sort.

In due course these events prompted a condemnatory brief, Non sine magno, from Pope Pius VII. Though it did not rule out benign trusteeship arrangements, it did declare Father Hogan’s pastoral acts to be null and void. But even this did not end the affair. Hogan, after showing some reluctance, continued the struggle for a while, but he later resigned, became a lawyer, and was married in 1824. He died without the offices of the church in 1848. The trustees continued the conflict, however, by gaining the services of two other priests (Angelo Inglesi and then Thaddeus O’Meally) for another year. Thereupon the lay committee and the bishop worked out a compromise proposal for selecting pastors for Saint Mary’s, which, together with a confusing counterdeclaration by the lay committee, found its way to Rome. A decree of the Propaganda approved by the pope reprobated this agreement. Bishop Conwell was called to Rome and ordered not to return to his diocese. He did return, however, and was pardoned, but he was not allowed to exercise his episcopal functions. In his place Francis Patrick Kenrick (1796-1863) was appointed in 1831. Irish-born, educated in Rome, only thirty-four years old, and by nature a theologian rather than an administrator or man of action, Kenrick now faced the problem that had broken two bishops and left a vast diocese in undeveloped disarray. In addition to these problems, and in part because of them, he also would have to deal in future years with the infamous Know-Nothing riots of 1844, the most violent ever to occur in the United States. More suited to his nature was the direction of the seminary which he founded in 1835. Bishop Kenrick was transferred to the metropolitan see of Baltimore in 1851, where he served till his death. When he died he left to the church a large corpus of writing on dogmatic and moral theology, an English version of the Bible, and numerous treatises and controversial works on baptism, justification, the primacy of Peter, and other subjects.

Even prior to some of these events in the first four suffragan dioceses, other sees had been erected and other bishops appointed, and in these areas many of the same circumstances had been encountered. Some unaccountable decisions were made in Rome, such as the erection of a see in Virginia where there were scarcely enough church members to support a single priest. Good and bad appointments were likewise made: Bishop John England of Charleston being one of the greatest prelates ever to grace the church in America and Patrick Kelly of Richmond one of the least effective. Both came from Ireland, both faced trusteeism in one form or another.

In 1815 Archbishop Carroll died. His coadjutor, Leonard Neale, served as archbishop for two years until succeeded by Marechal. While this French prelate was metropolitan (1817-28) the need for uniform regulations and procedures and the consequent pressure for a council of bishops most forcefully arose. But Marechal refused to call one, and it was his successor, James Whitfield, who upon authorization from Pius VIII convoked the First Provincial Council for 4 October 1829.[6]

It was an auspicious conclave in a critical period of American history. Its proportions were modest, but the actions taken as well as the trends observable in the country portended much. The canonical members of the council were the bishops, including coadjutors, of the sees in the province of Baltimore: Baltimore, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Cincinnati (Richmond, which was vacant, was under the administration of the archdiocese of Baltimore). Also invited to be present were those bishops serving outside the province, and depending directly on the Congregation de Propaganda Fide in Rome: New Orleans, Saint Louis, and the vicariate of Alabama and Florida. In its collective letter to the Holy See, the council could rightly express thanks and something approaching amazement at the changes wrought in the state of the church during the past four decades. They could point to six “ecclesiastical seminaries,” nine colleges, three of which were chartered universities, houses of Dominicans, Jesuits, Sulpicians, and of the Congregation of the Mission, thirty-three monasteries and houses of religious women of several congregations and orders, and, of course, a rapidly growing body of faithful laity which even then numbered over two hundred thousand. The Roman Catholic church had become a major force in American life.

The first Provincial Council of Baltimore, held in October 1829, was an epoch-marking event in American Catholic history in the United States. In the first place, it was a considerable achievement in the realm of ecclesiastical aaministration, tor its influence would be wide and long-lasting. It also revealed to non-Catholic Americans in no uncertain terms that the Roman church was a substantial, growing, and well organized reality. With Andrew Jackson enjoying his first year in the White House, the council occurred at an important time of transition in the nation’s history; what historians have called the “early national period” was over. The “era of good feelings” and the day of presidential knee britches was yielding to the “age of the common man.” Amid sharpening sectional conflict, a notable increase in the rate of immigration was also heightening ethnic tensions.

The Roman Catholic church was especially implicated in immigration, and in two ways. First, because very many of the immigrants were Roman Catholic, the challenge of reaching them with the offices and sacraments of the church was to make all of its earlier efforts seem like pioneering sorties. Second, because the American people, in any event defensive, self-conscious, nationalistic, and somewhat xenophobic, were ill prepared to receive so large a component of “strangers” into their midst, the church was also required to adapt itself to a new atmosphere of suspicion and overt attack. The present chapter is concerned chiefly with the first challenge; that which follows will take up the matter of antebellum nativism.

Even in the late colonial period the Irish had constituted a large (possibly the largest) proportion of the church’s laity. Michael J. O’Brien has argued that his compatriots of the revolutionary era virtually won the war. But the uncertain estimates of colonial times yielded to firm statistical fact after the turn of the century, when increasingly large numbers of Roman Catholics from Ireland began their historic migration to the New World.

Why four and one-half million Irish came to America in the century after 182o is no mystery. If there were ever any doubts, Cecil Woodham-Smith has removed them with her recent research and unforgettable historical account of “the great hunger.” Life on the Emerald Isle had become unendurable as population pressure increased. Food was scarce, agricultural methods backward, prices and wages disastrously low, taxation heavy, and government by absentee English landlords unbelievably ruthless and intolerant. After the close of the Napoleonic wars emigration increased, especially among the class of more substantial farmers. As economic conditions grew worse, and as American factories and construction projects beckoned, still poorer people began to leave; and to accommodate their needs, the “immigrant traffic” grew as a means of providing mass transportation at minimum cost. During the 183os, 200,000 Irish arrived in the United States. After 1845 a succession of cold, damp summers and a mysterious blight ruined ‘the potato crop on which life itself depended, and as a result about 1.5 million died. What this meant for the villages of Ireland is suggested by the parish record in Donoughmore, County Cork, where the future American bishop, Dennis O’Connell, was born.

December, 1847: This was the Famine Year. There died of famine and fever from November 1846 to September 1847 over fourteen hundred of the people and one Priest, Revd. Dan. Horgan. Requiescat in Pace. Numbers remained unburied for a fortnight, many were buried in ditches near their houses, many without coffins, tho’ ther wer four men employed to bury the dead and make graves and [two], and sometimes four carpenters to make coffins. On this year also we were visited by the Cholera Mortis. 5 only died of it in this parish. [signed Michael Kane, Pastor][7]

The exodus from Ireland became a desperate, frantic flight, involving about 780,00o people in all. By 1850 the census reported 961,719 Irish in the United States, and over 200,000 came in that year alone. In another decade the total figure had risen to 1,611,304.

Yet statistics can never capture the meaning of this terrible exodus and its painful sequel in the shantytowns of America’s too rapidly growing cities, or the hardships and disrupted family life wherever there were backbreaking jobs at low pay on canal projects, railroad and dam construction, or anywhere else at the mudsill of the American labor market. Nor were the obstacles only hard work, poverty, and miserable living conditions, for the Irish had to face the contumely, prejudice, and insulting condescension of Protestant and Anglo-Saxon America. In this context the work of extending the Roman Catholic church proceeded.

Within the Roman Catholic church, tension between the Irish and Germans persisted during the entire nineteenth century. It underlay early trusteeship conflicts in New York, Buffalo, and Philadelphia, then reached its most critical stage in the latter half of the century, when the issues had involved the highest levels of the American hierarchy and become entangled in the internal and external politics of the Vatican. Ethnic hostility was thus vented within the church as well as against it. Yet the primary fact of Roman Catholic history in antebellum America, aside from its basic task or reaching the immigants, is the vigorous entry of the Irish into the life of the nation and the church.

The first and most obvious effect of Irish immigration was an immense multiplication of the church’s missionary problems. As it met and overcame these obstacles, the church experienced a phenomenal growth in numbers, reaching 1.75 million by 185o, and doubling this figure in another decade. In the process, a church originally largely Gallic in its leadership became and remained dominantly Gaelic. But such transformations do not usually come peacefully or without stress, and they did not in this case. Parishes revealed the conflict first, either through disagreements between Irish and French parishioners (as in Boston) or through the resistance of local trustees to a French bishop (as in New York).

In addition to disorderly manifestations by the laity, there were deep dissatisfactions among the lower clergy who, if Irish, resented the tendency of the hierarchy to award all the ecclesiastical plums to “foreigners.” This is not to say that the French appointments were unwarranted or unjust. These men were, as Maynard has said, almost too good. “Men so learned, so able, so pious as Cheverus and Dubourg and Dubois and Flaget and Brute and Marechal simply had to be made bishops.”[8] Such dispassionate judgments, however, could not come easily to those who had suffered real adversities in Ireland or America, who had come from humble circumstances, and who had received only such education as a raw young nation and a too rapidly expanding church could provide. And there were other grievances.

Members of the higher clergy were known to speak in private (as did Marechal) of “la canaille irlandaise.” And Archbishop James Whitfield, a French-educated Englishman, revealed the same kind of prejudice in a letter to his friend Joseph Rosati, then bishop of Saint Louis. Speaking in 1832 of the empty see in Cincinnati, he urged that “an American born be recommended” and then added that “(between us in strict confidence) I do really think we should guard against having more Irish bishops.”[9] In the midst of such attitudes peace and good will could hardly flourish.

Gradually the situation changed, however, in part because the Irish in the church exploited the same aptitudes that were making their political leaders a force to reckon with, and in part because of the sheer force of numbers. Not only was the overall increase due to immigration in their favor, but Irish-Americans were entering the priesthood and the religious orders in numbers far exceeding those of other nationalities. Furthermore, these men simply demonstrated their abilities. Outstanding among these was John Hughes, who in 1837 became the coadjutor of Bishop Dubois in New York, soon showed his superior talents for leading an harassed and growing church during turbulent times. Under these circumstances the Irish-American clergy gradually won their place in the church, and once they had attained a dominant position, they retained it successfully from that time forward except in sees which were tacitly reserved for Germans and a few other special cases. In the American church, unlike the ancient churches of Europe, these leaders would have to proceed without government aid or favor. Majority opinion in the nation would be hostile. Immigrant tides would roll in, and most of their constituency would be low on the social and economic scale. Yet the historic institutions of the church would rise—cathedrals, seminaries, colleges, monasteries, hospitals, and hundreds of parish churches—a tremendous testimony to the advantages of a free church in a free country and to their own ecclesiastical leadership.

If the Roman church’s response to the challenge of immigration and the integration of wave upon wave of new Irish-Americans was one major fact of its growth during its first half-century in America, the geographical expansion of its jurisdiction was hardly less exciting. Frontier church history is usually considered a predominantly Protestant phenomenon. But the Roman Catholic church from the first carried on an active work in the West. The small remnants of French Catholicism in the upper Mississippi Valley provided the first incentive to western plans, and the work preceding and following the appointment of Bishop Flaget was a critical beginning. This organizational activity was extended into the Midwest and into the vast territory purchased from France in 1803. In New Orleans both the laity and the old clergy offered stout resistance to incorporation in the United States hierarchy, even preventing Bishop Dubourg from occupying the cathedral, but after 1818 peace and order were established. In 1821 Ohio was erected into a diocese; in 1826 upper and lower Louisiana were separated into two dioceses; and in 1837 Mathias Loras was consecrated bishop of Dubuque with jurisdiction over Iowa, Minnesota, and part of Dakota. In 1843 Minnesota and Wisconsin became dioceses. And so the process continued as each of the successive provincial councils meeting at Baltimore (1833, 1837, 1840, 1843, and 1846) recommended new sees and the men to occupy them.

The 1840s, however, were a decade in which the territorial extent of the United States itself was heatedly contested—and then vastly increased—by the annexation of Texas, the Mexican War, and the Oregon settlement. With regard to the war in which the “enemy” was a Roman Catholic country, the hierarchy was silent, though it approved some overt efforts to convince Mexican church leaders that the United States did not threaten them. Patriotism tended to tranquilize rather than exacerbate anti-Catholicism, however, and after the war Congress approved President Polk’s recommendation that diplomatic relations be established with the sovereign of the Papal States. From 1848 until after the Civil War this representation was continued. More important for the church were the problems incident to a vast territorial gain in the Southwest.

In 1846, at a time when the Oregon question was still unsettled, a new stage in American hierarchical history was reached. A second metropolitan see was erected with the French-Canadian Francis N. Blanchet as archbishop, his brother as suffragan in Walla Walla, and another French-Canadian as bishop of Vancouver. In both fact and theory this province was at first an extension of the Canadian church. The first organized work in Oregon by the United States hierarchy was initiated in 1840, when Bishop Rosati of Saint Louis, having turned to the Jesuits, gave the assignment to Pierre Jean DeSmet (1801-73), a Belgian-born priest who had entered the Society of Jesus in Maryland in 1821. For thirty years DeSmet labored to extend and support the Northwest missions, making eight trips to Europe in search of aid, traveling over 250,000 miles, and even becoming a leading publicist of Indian missions. Led by DeSmet, the Jesuits conducted an extensive mission among the region’s Indians. Their exploits, indeed, recall the history of their society in New France—both in its eventfulness and in its lack of enduring success. In 1852 the Jesuit mission in Oregon was abandoned. The Oregon province, nevertheless, became part of the American church after the territorial controversy with Great Britain was resolved.

Saint Louis was given similar status in 1847, with Nashville, Chicago, Milwaukee, Dubuque, and Saint Paul included in the province. The country now had three archbishops, yet Americans and immigrants steadily moved west, and before the century ended each of these cities except Nashville had itself become a metropolitan see. Saint Louis was by then a great ecclesiastical center, and one of the dedicated pioneers who had helped to make it so was Mother Philippine Duchesne (1769-1852).

Born in Grenoble, France, Philippine Duchesne had entered the Society of the Sacred Heart, a teaching order organized by Saint Madeleine Sophie Barat. Responding to the missionary needs that Bishop Dubourg had described, she won permission to go out to Saint Louis, where after 1818, in close collaboration with the Jesuits, she and her sisters founded several schools. She was over seventy years old when she took up work in Indian territory. Philippine Duchesne’s career stands as a saintly example of the enormous educational work her order would perform in America.[10]

In the meantime, a vast area of former Mexican territory was added to the Union, a region with a storied Spanish past but, by the mid-nineteenth century, very little organized church life. In Texas, where nominal Catholics may have numbered ten thousand, Vicar Apostolic Odin, a Frenchman, was made bishop of Galveston in 1847. New Mexico, where possibly twenty-five thousand Catholics were being served by only nine priests under the bishop of Durango, was made a vicariate apostolic under the American hierarchy in 1850. Three years later the see of Santa Fe was erected and Jean-Baptiste Lamy (1814-88) was named to lead this picturesque desert diocese where Indian, Spanish, Mexican, and American traditions now crossed. The life of this remarkable French churchman is the subject of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (1926). California remained under the bishop of Monterey until 1853, when the archdiocese of San Francisco was constituted—and with this administrative act the continent was spanned. Considered as a whole, this ecclesiastical conquest was a stupendous achievement, though not because dioceses were drawn on a map, but because countless men and women yielded themselves to a task and to a command.

One era was concluded and another opened, a fact which was fittingly documented when the archbishop of Baltimore, Francis Patrick Kenrick, received papal authorization to convoke the first plenary council in America. On Sunday, 9 May 1852, the council was convened with the solemn procession into the Baltimore cathedral of the incumbents or proxies of six metropolitan and twenty-seven suffragan sees, an abbot, and the superiors of many religious orders and congregations. The Catholic population stood at an estimated 1.6 million, served by 1,800 priests in about 1,600 churches and mission stations. A fine Roman Catholic historian who himself at Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 1896 became the bishop of a western diocese is entitled to a measure of pride in summarizing the accomplishments of the six decades since John Carroll had become the country’s first bishop: “The world beheld the objective lesson of a growth and extension within half a century for the like of which we must go back to the earliest days of Christianity, when in the freshness of youth and vigor of apostolic zeal the church laid hold of the Roman Empire. . . . The era of plenary councils begins.”[11]

The first half-century of American Catholic history is not simply a story of geographic expansion and external organization. There is another remarkable dimension to the story, involving a different kind of pioneering—the adaptation of this rapidly expanding, multinational immigrant church to an individualistic democratic society. For this undertaking, guidance or example could scarcely be found in the church’s experience since the age of the Emperor Constantine. Father O’Gorman’s fervent reference to the “earliest days” of the church was warranted. As for the Curia in Rome, it seems not to have understood the distinctive character of American developments until well into the twentieth century, if then. Shaping an American Catholic church was an exciting venture, carried out on a grand scale by men who were often so involved in the multifarious details of their work that they did not know that they were ecclesiastical revolutionaries. Yet that something like an “American revolution” was accomplished in the Roman Catholic church as well as in society at large could not be hidden or suppressed. In the decrees of the First Plenary Council (1852) there are more than intimations of that fact, as the bishops dealt with the crosscurrents of language and national tradition which flowed through the American church. In their pastoral letter the bishops exhorted their vast flock: “Obey the public authorities, not only for wrath but for conscience sake. Show your attachment to the institutions of our beloved country.”

The First Plenary Council was closely followed by the Civil War, during which the American sense of nationhood gained a new kind of profundity. Almost immediately after that appalling sacrifice of life and wealth, a Second Plenary Council was convoked in Baltimore by Archbishop Martin John Spalding on 7 October 1866. At the time, this was the largest formal conciliary assembly held in the Roman Catholic church since the Council of Trent; seven archbishops, twenty-eight bishops, three mitred abbots, and over one hundred twenty theologians were in attendance. They spoke in behalf of a church of over two million members which had almost doubled in size since 1852. Behind them lay not only the war and Lincoln’s assassination but the encyclical of Pope Pius IX (Quanta Cura, 1864) and the sensational “Syllabus of Errors” which accompanied it. This comprehensive attack on modern thought and political liberalism had long since been “explained” in public by several American Catholics, yet it undeniably created difficulties for the council because the clear meaning of its reactionary denunciations could not be avoided. Despite this dilemma, the council fathers wished to express their democratic faith and their thankfulness for American institutions. The decrees of the council and the pastoral letter of the bishops were, therefore, “the nearest to a definition of Catholic Americanism that any official body of Catholics ever reached in the nineteenth century.”[12] The only serious complaint about the American situation voiced by the council pertained to the laws by which some of the states, most pointedly Missouri, denied the right of the church to possess property.

The process of adjusting the structures and attitudes of a European church which had relatively little experience in conducting itself as a minority in a large democratic society resulted in an important two-way flow of ideas. Catholicism, on the one hand, commended itself to a surprisingly large number of American Protestants despite nativism and an old tradition of antipopery. Democracy, on the other hand, was interpreted to the church both by general experience and by theologians and church leaders, of whom the two most significant were, as it happened, converts.

The Roman Catholic church had successfully sought converts to its faith and discipline during the whole course of American colonial history. In fact, one source of the hostility directed against the early Jesuits in Maryland was their success in this regard. Toward the end of the seventeenth century the example of the later Stuart royal family gave rise to a considerable number of “Jacobite” converts, though the age of the Enlightenment coupled with many legal harassments had a contrary effect. Around 180o0, a surfeit of “reasonable religion” and reaction from the French Revolution led to a widespread “romantic” reassessment of the religious heritage. In its wake came a new wave of Catholic interest. This impulse was often only aesthetic or sentimental, but it sometimes resulted in movements of Catholic renewal in the Reformation churches; and it also stimulated a great increase of conversions to the Roman church. The romantic revolution in religion is considered in a later chapter, but certain aspects of it loom large in antebellum Catholic history. In the words of one Catholic, it was “a time when great throngs of Americans began to flock to the Roman Catholic church despite bitterly intense propaganda and overt opposition.” Between 1813 and 1893 the number of converts may have reached 700,000.[13]

Even if greatly exaggerated or almost balanced by an equally large defection from the church, such figures reveal an important fact of American religious life. They also point to a significant factor in the shaping of American Catholicism. Mixed marriages probably account for most of the losses and gains of the Roman church, but among the converts who attained some degree of public notice, the largest number came from the ranks of High Church Anglicans who were dissatisfied by the evangelicalism of the Protestant Episcopal church and who were carried forward by the implications of their own arguments on apostolic succession and “valid” ordination. After the Oxford Movement’s Tracts for the Times began to appear, and especially after John Henry Newman’s sensational conversion to Rome in 1845, there was considerable movement of Episcopalians toward Catholicism, about fifty of whom were priests or seminary graduates. The most publicized case was the conversion of a bishop, Levi S. Ives of North Carolina, in 1852.

Some of these converts attained considerable eminence as Roman Catholics, notably Edgar P. Wadhams, who in 1872 became bishop of Ogdensburg, New York, after twenty-two years in the priesthood, and Augustine F. Hewit, one of the first Paulists and the successor of Father Hecker as superior-general of the congregation. Achieving the highest eminence of all was James Roosevelt Bayley, a relative of Mother Seton, who, like so many of his fellow Episcopal priests, turned to Rome during the 1840s. After serving in several positions in the appointment of Archbishop Hughes Bayley became bishop of Newark in 1853. His great ability as diocesan leader finally led in 1872 to his translation to the archepiscopal see of Baltimore.[14]

Among all the converts of the period, however, there were two men who best expressed the thoughts and feelings that lay behind this renewal of Catholic interest: Orestes Brownson and Isaac Hecker. By an interesting irony, both emerged from the Transcendentalist movement on the left wing of Unitarianism, and perhaps because of this fact, both men were especially eloquent interpreters of the reciprocal benefits of democratic ideals and Catholic faith.

Orestes Brownson (1803-76) was a self-educated spiritual wanderer from rural Vermont whose pilgrimage brought him to the Church of Rome at the age of forty-two--but by a notoriously winding route.

[1] In 1822 he ended a youthful period of haphazard religious drift by entering the Presbyterian church; but within three years he had recoiled from its doctrinal rigor,

[2]and from 1824 to 1829 he was active as a Universalist preacher and editor.

[3]Enticed from that tie by the earnest arguments of Fanny Wright, the British-born freethinker and humanitarian reformer, Brownson entered a period of atheism during which the Workingman’s party was his chief preoccupation.

[4]In 1831, deeply moved by William Ellery Channing’s writings, he became a Unitarian; and after ministries in various places he burst onto the Boston scene in 1836, editing a reform journal and preaching to a Society for Christian Union and Progress which he organized in order to reach laboring people untouched by the regular churches.

[5]In the same year he published his New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church, which together with his lectures and articles soon made him one of the most influential leaders of the emerging Transcendental movement. Deeply imbued with the romantic religious philosophies of France, Brownson became the leading American expositor of Benjamin Constant, Victor Cousin, and a group of Saint-Simonian thinkers.

[N/B Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) was a French Utopian socialist and reputed founder of sociology whose writings inspired Marx and Engels, among others. He defined a working class and advocated a Christianity stripped of dogma and confined to morality]

His radical Jacksonianism gave a sharp critical edge to his social prophecy, but the disgusting character and disappointing result of the 1840 presidential campaign diminished his political optimism and gradually religious perspectives again dominated his thought. In this context the French Saint-Simonian Pierre Leroux (1797-1871) became to him so sure a guide that Brownson would always regard him as, after Malebranche, “the ablest and most original philosopher France has produced.” Leroux convinced him that human life and thought is a “joint product of subject and object,” and that man’s well-being and progress depend, therefore, on “communion”—with nature, mankind, and with God.

[6] For Leroux humanity was the means to communion with God; for Brownson the means slowly came to be understood as “the mediatorial life of Christ” (the “Providential man”), then more precisely the corporate church, and finally—despite the lifelong prejudices of a New Englander—the Roman Catholic church. On 20 October 1844, after a period of instruction under John Bernard Fitzpatrick, coadjutor-bishop of Boston, Brownson did as he had always done: he took the step to which his convictions had led.

Under the tutelage of Bishop Fitzpatrick he continued to publish Brownson’s Quarterly Review, which he had founded in 1843 as successor to his Boston Quarterly Review, but he abandoned the line of thought that had led him to Rome, adopted the bishop’s strictly traditional apologetics, and consigned all of his former friends and all other victims of Protestant “no-churchism” to the nether regions of hell. They, in turn, wrote off his last turn of mind as another example of his “vicissitudinary petulance” and struck him from their lists of Transcendental heroes. Brownson the Roman Catholic was still Brownson, however, as sure as ever that his convictions were based on unerring deductions from indubitable premises. In the midst of vigorous activity as America’s foremost convert, he gradually reasserted his characteristic modes of thought, and for these reasons as well as for his impolitic criticism of parochial schools and of the Irish “rabble,” he had soon aroused a Roman Catholic opposition which for the rest of his life would undermine his prestige and assault nearly every position he occupied.

In 1855 Brownson moved out of the Boston diocese to New York, but in this supposedly freer atmosphere his outspoken “Americanism” awakened the hostility of Archbishop John Hughes and many others, while his criticism of despotic rule in the Papal States and of even the idea of the pope’s wielding temporal power aroused suspicions in Rome. Moving to New Jersey in 1857, he published The Convert, or Leaves from My Experience, which was, in effect, a declaration of intellectual independence.

Although to the end of his days this independence was limited by harassment and attack from all quarters, Brownson did nevertheless return to the lines of thought which had led him to Catholicism, augmenting themes derived from Leroux with an equally great responsiveness to the writings of the Piedmontese philosopher-theologian Vicenzo Gi.oberti (1801-52). Gioberti was a fervent champion of Catholic truth and Italian unity whom Brownson declared to be “certainly one of the profoundest philosophical writers of this century.” A critic of modern romantic pantheism, he convinced Brownson that ontology, not psychology, is the proper starting point of human thought, and that Malebranche, not Cousin, was the greatest of French religious philosophers. Since Gioberti’s works were put on the Index, largely because of his alleged “ontologism,” Brownson was also tarred with that brush despite his efforts to “correct” Gioberti’s errors.[15]

Combining these various emphases in his own way, Brownson became again a bold and distinctive thinker. He continued to believe that religion and politics were virtually inseparable and that Catholicism was a fulfillment of American ideals, though his dual commitment to Calhoun’s constitutional thought and to the antirevolutionary school of Catholic thinkers (notably Joseph de Maistre) gave a very conservative organicistic tincture to his advocacy. In the country’s great sectional controversy he held a strong “Southern” position even through the Dred Scott affair. Only in the campaign of I86o did he become an antislavery Unionist—and remain so throughout the war, to the great irritation of Archbishop Hughes and many powerful members of the hierarchy. During these years Brownson also became more liberal on theological issues, a fact which he documented in his one systematic work The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny (1866). This work shows the continuing hold of Leroux, Gioberti, and Maistre on his thought, but it is also a ringing affirmation of democratic ideals. Yet Pius IX’s sweeping condemnation of liberalism in Quanta Cura and its accompanying Syllabus of Errors created difficulties for Brownson. It seemed to sustain the view of his Catholic critics and hence reduced the influence of his best political thinking.

Brownson’s lifetime literary production was enormous, running to twenty large volumes in the collected Works; and almost to the end of his life, his powers of analysis and expression remained impressive. But his influence was small, especially after 1844, and especially among Catholics. His “Americanism,” his hostility to the Jesuits, and his condescending attitudes toward immigrant culture offended Roman Catholics at every level. His harshly stated defenses of papal infallibility and the church’s authority struck Catholics as impolitic and Protestants as outrageous. The acerbity of his attacks offended everyone. Perhaps a realization of these shortcomings had something to do with his discontinuance of his Review for a decade. After 1873 he did reassert the ultra-orthodoxy of his early Catholic period, but at his death disappointment and bitterness loomed large in his thoughts. Ten years later, in a fitting tribute to an immensely creative but unappreciated thinker, his remains were reinterred in the Chapel of the Sacred Heart at the University of Notre Dame.

Isaac Hecker (1819-88) was a convert of Brownson’s before either of them encountered Catholicism, and despite many differences, their later lives ran in parallel channels as interpreters and defenders of the Roman Catholic Church in democratic America. Both of them were just as inested in changing the attitudes of their adopted church as the Protestantism they left behind.

Born in New York to a modestly situated family of German immigrants, Hecker was first a Methodist. Very early his concern for the plight of working men had led him to be active in the antimonopoly faction of the Locofoco Democrats. He attended a lecture by Brownson in 1841, and from this meeting grew other associations that took Hecker to Boston, Concord, and finally, to both Brook Farm and Bronson Alcott’s utopian fiasco at Fruitlands. Intensely contemplative and religious by nature, Hecker was drawn to Catholicism for quite different reasons than was Brownson, though it was the latter’s advocacy that triggered his own. He entered the Roman church on 2 August 1844, more than two months before his mentor, and in the following summer, along with two recent converts from the Episcopal church, he sailed for Saint Trond in the Netherlands for his novitiate as a Redemptorist. A year later he took his vows, and in October 1849 he was ordained.

Hecker had chosen to enter the austere and ascetic Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer (Congregatio SS. Redemptoris), founded in 1732 by Saint Alphonsus Liguori “to preach the gospel to the poor.” During the succeeding century the Redemptorists had spread rapidly into most European countries, and in the United States they were performing valuable services among German immigrants. Almost immediately upon his return to the United States in 1851, Hecker became an active member of a Redemptorist team of parish revival missioners that achieved outstanding success in almost every part of the country. Hecker was even one of the three nominees for the vacant see of Natchez.

The appointment of a new Redemptorist provincial in 1854, however, brought these activities to an end; and in the midst of the ensuing difficulties, a small group of young American members of the order (all of them converts) informally delegated Hecker to present their case to the order’s rector major in Rome. This group desired to found a distinctly American house where

and which would have as its primary missionary concern American Protestants rather than immigrants.

But the rector major of the order was of another mind. For having made the visit to Rome Hecker was charged with disobedience, and dismissal would have shortly followed had he not won powerful support in the papal Curia. At last, after seven anxious months of working and waiting, he and his four associates received from Pope Pius IX a dispensation from their Redemptorist vows and permission to organize a new congregation with a specific mission to non-Catholic America.

After his Roman triumph Hecker sailed for America in April 1858, and by July he had won Archbishop Hughes’s approval of the “Program of Rule” for the Congregation of Missionary Priests of Saint Paul the Apostle (CSP). Except for the substitution of a voluntary agreement in place of vows, the rule provided for a religious life very similar to that of other orders, notably the Redemptorists. At first their work consisted largely of preaching missions to Catholic parishes; but in 1859, having been assigned a parish in (then) suburban 59th Street, they occupied their own convent and church in New York. In 1865 they founded the Catholic World (the church’s first general monthly magazine) and soon afterward they began a tract society to distribute far and wide the appealing and highly intelligent apologetic literature for which the Paulist Fathers were rapidly becoming famous. In all of their work they sought to confront Protestant America not with the traditional type of polemic, but with the sort of positive and comforting message that characterized Father Hecker’s two most widely read books: Questions of the Soul (1855) and Aspirations of Nature (1857). Through these books and countless other articles Hecker accomplished what Brownson with his fiery, dogmatic temperament never could: a genuinely persuasive portrayal of Catholicism as an answer to man’s spiritual dilemmas and as a fulfillment and guarantee of democracy’s highest ideals.

Even while commending his church to non-Catholics, Hecker and his Paulists became an extremely significant force within the Roman church as champions of a revised estimate of America, with its freedom, voluntary churches, and church-state separation, as an environment for Roman Catholicism. “Heckerism,” to use a term that later gained controversial currency, became a recognizable point of view. Its foundation, of course, was a firm commitment to the dogmatic tradition; Hecker was not a “Minimalist” in doctrinal matters as was sometimes charged, and certainly not a Modernist. The closest he came to doctrinal revision was in the field of ethics, where he accented the “active” virtues rather than the “passive” emphasis of classic monasticism; and with regard to the Holy Spirit, where he stated his views so fervently that some suspected a depreciation of the instituted church. Like many American bishops, Hecker thought that the constitutions on papal infallibility of the Vatican Council of 1869-70 were inopportune and unnecessary. His greatest influence undoubtedly resulted from the Paulists’ central campaign, which was at once reformatory and apologetic: to increase the rapport of the Roman Catholic church with democratic institutions and with modern modes of thought. Probably no nineteenth-century Roman Catholic in America, so clearly foreshadowed the aggiornamento which Pope John XXIII would begin to call for when he became pope—on the centenary of the Paulists’ founding.

When Hecker died in 1888 the Paulists were occupying their new church in New York, then the city’s largest after Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. The congregation continued to show modest but steady growth. At the turn of the century they numbered over 70 priests (in addition to novices and seminarians), and by 1965 this number had risen to 265. From the start, however, Paulist influence had never been a function of the order’s size. During most of its first century it was a leading force in the “Americanist” movement in the church. Contributing much to Paulist effectiveness was the Apostolic Mission House founded in 1902 at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., to train priests for the apostolate to non-Catholic America. Its founder and rector was Father Walter Elliott (1842-1928), a Roman Catholic lawyer and Civil War veteran whom Hecker had won for the Paulist priesthood in 1867. Few did more than he to continue the congregation’s spirit and aims - after Hecker’s death. Elliott also did much to extend Hecker’s personal influence beyond the grave, with his Life of Father Hecker in 1891. The translation of this book into French made “Heckerism” the focus of international controversy. The dramatic series of events that constitute the great Americanism crisis, however, is the concern of a later chapter in this history.

During the first half of the nineteenth century the Roman Catholic church in the United States ceased to be a persecuted, numerically insignificant body and became the largest church in the country. Due to this unexpected shift in the nation’s denominational equilibrium, America experienced the most violent period of religious discord in its history. Local, state, and national politics became involved, and in a culminating phase of the struggle, a bitter and secretive form of anti-Catholic nativism reached the very threshold of national power. Never before or since have religion and American politics been more explicitly interrelated, nor has ethnic conflict reached such ugly dimensions.

The basic reasons for such eruptions are not altogether mysterious. The inner security of individuals rests upon a sense of group identity. Groups define themselves against other groups. People are also disturbed by rapid social change. When one of the transitional factors is a rapidly accelerating immigration rate which disrupts established group relationships, a strong response is likely to ensue. Xenophobia is thus latent in almost every self-conscious people, and especially near the surface in a country which has only recently achieved full national status and which is vigorously engaged on many fronts in asserting its special character and destiny.

Within the Roman Catholic church itself, ethnic tensions played an exceedingly active role. Even distinguished prelates heightened the unrest; and during the heyday of trusteeism these fears and jealousies flared up in a continual series of power struggles. From New York to Charleston, and as far west as Saint Louis and New Orleans, Americans beheld a bitter struggle between French, Irish, and German elements in the Roman Catholic church. When conflicts of such intensity could break out within Catholicism, it is scarcely surprising that more violent conflicts and fiercer disagreements should arise between this increasingly assertive church and the great body of non-Catholic Americans.

A full explanation of American nativism and anti-Catholicism, however, requires consideration of peculiarly American factors. The subfoundation of nativism was the militant religious tradition which had been a basic element of Anglo-American thinking since the days when Queen Elizabeth led the Protestant cause against Philip of Spain and all the allies of popery. This sentiment became still more explicit and fervent among the Puritans, who carried it in one form or another to all the American colonies. Here it was kept alive by the imperial threat of France and Spain. These attitudes nourished the view that the United States had a special responsibility to realize its destiny as a Protestant nation. Emotional revivalism intensified such views even as it emptied them of doctrinal content. Finally, to many Protestants who were distressed by intersectarian conflict, anti-Catholicism offered a motive for Protestant solidarity and reunion.

To this aggressive Puritanic impulse was added the characteristic bias of the Enlightenment, which was, if anything, more negative. To a philosophe like Thomas Jefferson, the Roman Catholic church was simply the most powerful—and therefore the most dangerous—institutionalization of medieval superstition, sectarian narrowness, and monarchical despotism in religion. This “enlightened” form of anti-Catholicism figured prominently in the denunciation of the Quebec Act by the First Continental Congress, and it persisted long after the revolutionary era.

Resting on these foundations was the somewhat rambling structure of the American Protestant “quasi-establishment,” which was enjoying its heyday of public influence between 1815 and 186o. Its moral attitudes and basic teachings were honored by lawmakers, and dominated newspapers and textbooks. The faculties and curriculum of the public schools and even state universities were molded according to its specifications. Any threat to this establishment, needless to say, would be strenuously resisted. There were also social, political, and economic factors which intensified group conflict.

The social factor was probably foremost: urban concentrations of working people were an obvious intrusion on the traditional patterns of American life. America’s middle and upper classes would have reacted with consternation even if this new segment of society had been drawn entirely from older American stock (as indeed it was in some areas). The disruption of America’s agrarian dream could not but disturb even the most thoughtful and humane. Protestant reformers had for years been castigating the strong thirst for gin and the disorderliness of the “lower orders,” but now immigration and the growth of cities added an identifiable brogue and a new religious dimension to the old problem.

Political fears enlarged and stimulated this intolerance. The Federalist—National Republican—Whig tradition of American conservatism was put under severe strain by the widening popular base of politics. Every immigrant ship at the wharf made the older political elites more apprehensive about the country’s future. With the politically adept, ideologically united Irish strengthening the Democratic hosts of Jackson and Van Buren, it seemed that decency, order, justice, and sound social principles (i.e. a conservatively structured society) were doomed. Since the Democratic party was far better geared (both ideologically and organizationally) to mobilize the immigrant population, a strong temptation to exploit popular fears was placed before opposition aspirants, and many political leaders, as well as voters, quickly yielded.

It may be stated parenthetically that the political needs and the fears of a conspiracy against democratic institutions which brought nativism into the anti-Jacksonian camp also fostered the anti-Masonic movement. The Christian opposition to Masonry was of long standing; and in 1798, when Jeffer-sonianism and the “French mania” were undermining the Federalist order, Jedidiah Morse of anti-Unitarian fame had raised the specter of subversion by the Bavarian Illuminati. In 1827 the old antipathy for the Masonic Lodge broke out again when William Morgan of Batavia, New York, was abducted and apparently murdered for exposing lodge secrets. Even the Book of Mormon reflects this uproar.[16] With much aid from evangelical ministers, William Henry Seward of New York, Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, and many opponents of Jackson in other states harnessed the resultant anti-Masonism into an effective political movement. It proved powerless on the national level, and by 1831 its independent life was almost over; but its great popularity in several states provided considerable voting strength to the Whig party. Soon Mormonism itself became the object of sustained attack because it, too, seemed to subvert American democratic aspirations and to violate prevailing views of religious orthodoxy.

In the North a very similar countersubversionary campaign was directed against the “Slavocracy” on the grounds that it was the slaveholder’s conspiracy with designs on ultimate governmental power. Anti-Masonry proved to be the most ephemeral of these crusades, yet the gravitation of all four toward the Republican party when it was formed points to the existence of a certain ground beneath them.

Finally, there were economic pressures. The influx of cheap labor brought an outcry, and often outright violence, from those who suffered from it—or thought they did. Later in the nineteenth century, neither the pope nor the American hierarchy of the Roman church could force German-American laborers to welcome Polish or Italian Catholic immigrants to their society or to their churches. In the twentieth century some of the harshest behavior toward Negroes and Puerto Ricans has come from the whites and blacks who were most imperiled by competition in the labor market. In the Jacksonian period, native American labor reacted to the Irish immigrants in a similar manner, making them objects of derision and aggression. To make matters worse, the immigrants were often jobless, and thus they began to fill the almshouses of coastal cities and to require a large proportion of the funds available for charity. By 1837 there were 105,000 paupers in the country, of whom perhaps half had immigrated recently. New York City alone in that year devoted $280,000 to their care.

In summary, it may be said that the lot of the immigrant has rarely been made easy by the receiving population, and that there were many factors in the American situation during the first half of the nineteenth century which conduced to make his plight harder than usual. Given the swiftly increasing immigration rate, these factors provided the materials for a sordid chapter in the nation’s history. Yet it is equally important to bear in mind that most Americans favored immigration until the twentieth century, despite many campaigns to close the gates. One of the most remarkable facts about America’s nativism was its inability to obtain significant supporting legislation. When successive showdowns came, the force of the movement proved illusory. Too many Americans, it seemed, always loved—or needed—the “foreigners.”

Colonial history is full of overt and explicit anti-Catholicism. In the seventeenth century, as the Protestant obverse of Louis XIV’s fierce dragon-nades against the Huguenots, American Catholics faced disabilities in every colony, even Maryland. In some cases this legislation was supported by the very Huguenots who had fled France for their lives. After 1688 the principle of toleration emerging from the Anglo-American experience of religious pluralism gradually began to find practical expression, and the development of the idea of equality during the American Revolution produced further moderating effects. Even so, seven of the original thirteen colonies carried some kind of anti-Catholic legislation into the national period, the Bill of Rights notwithstanding.

Late in the 1820s, however, a new kind of anti-Catholic mood began to flow in American life, gradually changing its form and becoming increasingly political both in action and in ideology. Religious and political adventurers, profit seekers, publicity hounds, fanatics, opportunists, “joiners” of all kinds, and some men who in retrospect seem almost mad played their unseemly roles. Yet respectable church leaders did not avoid the fray, abetted by the great interdenominational voluntary associations and puritanical movements for temperance and Sabbath reform. Even the founding of the Evangelical Alliance in 1846 must be understood in this context. Horace Bushnell worked for its formation chiefly on anti-Catholic grounds, and he expressed his disgust when it adopted more positively evangelical aims. The Lutheran proponent of the alliance, Samuel S. Schmucker, also combined nativism with his desires for a “fraternal union” of Protestant churches, though in actuality the alliance took a very elevated stand on this issue. The essential unity of the “Protestant Crusade,” however, and the peculiar ways in which it differs from colonial anti-Catholicism can be perceived only in a survey of its history down to the eclipse of the movement by the slavery issue, secession, and war.

As the immigrants kept coming and the Roman church kept growing, grave doubts about the future of American democracy began to displace the earlier optimism. During the 182os, when the battle began to reach new heights of intensity and new depths of vulgarity, other catalysts besides immigration statistics began to have their effect. In 1827 Pope Leo XII announced a papal jubilee. In 1829 the First Provincial Council not only made the growth of American Catholicism manifest, but also castigated the King James Version of the Bible and encouraged the founding of parochial schools. In the same year the English Catholic Emancipation Bill provoked a tremendous outpouring of “No Popery” literature which quickly made its way into the United States and Canada.

As a result of such provocations, churches joined individuals in protest. In their pastoral letter of 1829 the Episcopal bishops warned of papist perils. The many evangelical periodicals founded to advance the Second Awakening gave increasingly more space to anti-Catholic writings. The very influential New York Observer (founded 1823) was particularly active in this cause, and it was joined in the next decade by a considerable brood of specifically nativist magazines. The Protestant, founded in 183o by George Bourne, has the dubious distinction of chronological priority, though it soon gave place to the Protestant Vindicator, founded in 1834 by the Reverend William Craig Brownlee. This Dutch Reformed minister, who for several years had been the leading light in New York anti-Catholic circles, further augmented his influence in 1836 by helping to found the American Society to Promote the Principles of the Protestant Reformation. Organized along the interdenominational lines which had become standard for almost all evangelical and reformatory causes of the period, this was a voluntary association with a national agency and local auxiliary societies. The Protestant Vindicator became its official organ.

Roman Catholic publications naturally took up the gauntlet. The United States Catholic Miscellany, founded in 1822 by Bishop John England of South Carolina, was among the earliest—and most elevated. It was soon joined by vigorous papers in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, ana in 1827 the Catholic Tract Society was formed. Through these and many other channels the controversy was prosecuted in very strenuous terms, with the individual papers often reporting or featuring special debates between well-known figures. As the years went by, formal debates and recognizably theological discussion came to play an increasingly large role, but in the 183os unprincipled exaggerations tended to preoccupy the Protestant forces, while desperate efforts at correction and contradiction were prominent in the Catholic papers. Bishops and priests had to take time off from the overwhelming problems of an immigrant church to deny (and somehow try to prove) that subterranean dungeons for the murder and burial of illegitimate babies were not standard furnishings in a Roman Catholic convent. So extreme was the tenor of this journalism that the highly inflammatory Protestant readily accepted as authentic and published a whole series of articles signed “Cranmer”—which turned out later to have been written as parodies of nativist writings by none other than John Hughes, later bishop of New York.

The horror literature, which often had a strong salacious appeal, found an even more popular outlet in book form. The first sensation in this category was published in Boston, where no Puritan raised a cry to have it banned. Six Months in a Convent (1835) purported to be the confessions of one Rebecca Theresa Reed, a well-known figure in Boston because of her uncertain connections with the Ursuline convent there. Despite a detailed answer by the mother superior, the book was widely praised in the Protestant press and became a best seller. Lurid though Rebecca Reed’s account may have been, it seemed pale and innocuous when compared with Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal (1836), which was published (and in large part written) by a group of New York anti-Catholics, lay and clerical. Actually her popularity, as well as the public’s credulity, had been seriously undermined by 1837 when her Further Disclosures appeared; and no small part of this undermining was accomplished by the even more transparent fraudulency of a companion piece, The Escape of Sainte Frances Patrick, Another Nun from the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal, published by an anti-Catholic competitor of the Maria Monk clique. Miss Monk (if we may call her that) had been quite forgotten by her former sponsors in 1849, when she died in prison after having been arrested for picking the pockets of her “companion” in a house of ill-fame. But her books continued to sell, reaching the 300,000 mark by 186o and appearing in new editions after the Civil War (and in still another in 1960). It earned, as Professor Billington says, “the questionable distinction of being the ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin of Know-Nothingism.’”[17]

But the conflict did not begin and end with mere words. In Boston, several years of mounting tension, punctuated by frequent outbreaks between Yankee and Irish workingmen and a great many anti-Catholic sermons, finally culminated on the night of 11 August 1834. A well-organized group burned the Ursuline convent in Charlestown which until then had been conducting a successful girls’ school. The whole nation was shocked by this incident, and a flood of laments and disclaimers followed. Yet the remorse seemed to have been brief and limited. Men of prominence soon made plans for publishing Rebecca Reed’s confessions, while the “meaner sort” made municipal heroes out of the men who were tried for arson and acquitted.

Lyman Beecher, whose sermons were at least indirectly related to the Ursuline tragedy, responded by publishing his Plea for the West (1834). It contains the substance of his fund-raising messages for Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, of which he had been president since 1832. In this masterpiece of propaganda Beecher opens with a paean to the nation’s destiny, an exposition of Jonathan Edwards’s belief that the millennium would commence in America. But this exordium is followed by a 140-page tirade which depicts the pope and Europe’s reactionary kings, with the Austrian emperor at their head and Catholic immigrants for agents, as engaged in an organized conspiracy to take over the Mississippi Valley.

“The spirit of the age,” which Bonaparte says dethroned him, is moving on to put an end in Europe to Catholic domination, creating the necessity of making reprisals abroad for what liberty conquers at home. . . . Clouds like the locusts of Egypt are rising from the hills and plains of Europe, and on the wings of every wind, are coming over to settle down upon our fair fields; while millions, moved by the noise of their rising and cheered by the news of their safe arrival and green pastures, are preparing for flight in an endless succession. . . .

No design! How does it happen that their duty, and the analogy of their past policy, and their profession in Europe, and their predictions and exultation in this country, and their deeds, should come together accidentally with such admirable indications of design? [18]

Taking a cue from Samuel F. B. Morse, Beecher put nativism and anti-Catholicism on a common ideological footing; and as this mode of thinking grew more prevalent, the popular strength of the Protestant crusade increased, especially since “native American” organizations and papers were springing up in almost all of the eastern cities due to growing economic pressures, certain honest fears for the functioning of democratic institutions, and an irrational repugnance for aliens.

These years also mark the emergence of nativistic anti-Catholicism as an intensely relevant political force, with Samuel F. B. Morse playing a prominent role. A son of the anti-Unitarian controversialist Jedidiah Morse, but best remembered for his invention of the telegraph and very worthy of remembrance for his contributions to American painting, Morse is said to have been incited to enter the nativist campaign by a soldier in Rome who knocked off his hat as a religious procession passed by. The anonymous letters which he began writing to the New York Observer were republished quickly in a volume entitled Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States (1834). Through many editions it purveyed the theory which Beecher found so convincing—that the Holy Alliance, through the pope, the Jesuits, and the hierarchy, was conspiring to subvert democracy by promoting Catholic immigration to America.

What then shall be done? [Morse asked.] Shall Protestants organize themselves into a political union after the manner of the Papists, and the various classes of industry and even of foreigners in the country? Shall they form an Anti-Popery Union, and take their places among this strange medley of conflicting interests? And why should they not? [19]

Morse became a nativist candidate for mayor of New York City in 1836, but he was defeated because his Democratic background gave him no hold on the Whig vote. A year later, when Whiggery was placated, nativists carried the election.

More significant still was the widening of the political rift between 1840 and 1842 as a result of the school issue. In this crisis Bishop John Hughes took the initiative, demanding a share of public funds for Catholic schools and roundly condemning the Protestant character of existing instruction, particularly their practice of reading the King James Version of the Bible. Thwarted at every turn and ignored by the major parties, Hughes finally entered a Catholic party in the contest of 1841, and taught New York City Democrats a lesson by whittling away their margin of victory. Under Governor William H. Seward, state legislation such as Bishop Hughes had desired was finally passed, but in the city itself nativist political strength prevented Hughes from reaping much more than a reputation for crafty political manipulation and jesuitical argument. The bishop thus did much to bring New York City’s “American Republican” party into existence, to guarantee its successes there, and to provide the basis for its expansion as a national movement.

In May 1844 violence erupted in connection with meetings called by the American Republican party in Kensington, a suburb of Philadelphia, and one nativist, George Shift’ler, lost his life. This disturbance led to the wildest and bloodiest rioting of the entire crusade. Two Roman Catholic churches and dozens of Irish homes were burned, militia fired point-blank upon advancing crowds, a cannon was turned against the soldiers guarding Saint Philip Neri Church, and for three days mob rule prevailed in the city and its environs. The final toll was thirteen dead and over fifty wounded. Bishop Kenrick felt obliged “to suspend the exercises of public worship in the Catholic churches which still remain, until it can be resumed with safety.”

When the same sort of hostilities under the same auspices threatened New York City a few days later, Bishop Hughes acted with his customary decisiveness. He stationed large numbers of fully armed men around every Catholic church, and by such a show of strength (which neither police nor militia had done in Philadelphia or would have done in New York), he prevented ominous nativist mass meetings from turning into anti-Catholic mobs. Thus again, ten years after the burning of the Ursuline convent in Boston, bigotry had resulted in violence.

Before the memory of these tense days had faded, America had a new diversion which also had indirect anti-Catholic implications. On 25 April 1846, shots were exchanged on the disputed Texas border, and soon the nation was embroiled in the Mexican War. Nativistic anti-Catholicism declined in the period from 1845 to 1850 as Americans were swept up in the momentous issues of war and territorial expansion and as economic conditions improved. Despite an enormous rise in the flow of immigration, tempers cooled. Many northern evangelicals turned to attacking the war as a slaveholder’s conspiracy. A number of fanatics including William Craig Brownlee retired or lost their prominence, to be replaced by the more respectable type of controversialist exemplified by Nicholas Murray, a Presbyterian minister in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The specifically Protestant element in the movement turned to more positive approaches, especially through existing missionary and educational agencies. Brownlee’s intemperate society and journal were replaced by the far more constructive American Protestant Society and its American Protestant Magazine. In 1849 the American and Foreign Christian Union was organized with a program for diffusing “the principles of Religious Liberty, and a pure and Evangelical Christianity, both at home and abroad, wherever a corrupted Christianity exists.” Its instruments were to be “light and love.” Robert Baird’s famous book Religion in America (1844) is a memorial of its relatively benign spirit. By far the most constructive of such organizational efforts was the Evangelical Alliance formed in London in 1846 by some fifty denominations of Great Britain and America.

While these religious developments unfolded, anti-Catholic sentiment broadened out through the middle and upper classes of “American” ancestry, becoming diluted but not disappearing as it blended with vague feelings of Anglo-Saxon pride and class consciousness. In the process, it helped to palliate Whig frustrations by providing something that looked like an “issue” to a party that had always had difficulty in finding anything more substantial than Clay’s compromises, Webster’s rhetoric, Tippecanoe, log cabins, and an intense distaste for Jackson. The almost incredible increase in immigration during the late forties and early fifties served meanwhile to give some basis to nativistic concern. It should be recalled that whereas the total immigration in the twenties was 128,452 and in the thirties 538,381, in the fifties it reached 2,811,554. Between 185o and 186o, indeed, almost a third of the nation’s population growth—from 23,191,000 to 31,443,000—was accounted for by immigration. Pauperism, labor-class rowdyism, and crime statistics showed that the country was facing a new kind of social problem, although immigration was merely the most easily exploited factor.

The impulse for nativism’s sensational surge came from a secret “patriotic” society, the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, founded by Charles B. Allen of New York in 1849 and reorganized by James W. Barker, a merchant, also of New York, in 1852. By 1854 internal difficulties and organizational kinks had been straightened out, and the entire “lodge” was set up on a federal basis with local, district, state, and national councils, each responsible for political decisions within its own jurisdiction. Only American-born Protestants without Catholic wives or parents were eligible; upon joining they swore to oppose the election of foreigners and Roman Catholics and to renounce other political ties. If a member advanced to the exalted second degree of the order, he was eligible for office in the order and for nomination by the order to public office. At this rank he had to swear that he would not appoint foreigners or Roman Catholics to public office and that he would remove them wherever it was legally possible. Upon initiation the member was introduced to all the glories of a secret lodge: grand titles, special handclasps, passwords, distress signals, and other types of mumbo-jumbo. George Washington’s order, “put only Americans on guard tonight,” was a favorite slogan. As a political entity, the body was called officially the American party; but because of their secretiveness and their frequent reliance on “I don’t know,” they were known popularly as the Know-Nothings.

As early as 1852 they exerted a real, though mysterious, influence in New York City politics. But the national Democratic victory which brought Franklin Pierce to the White House, allegedly on the strength of the “foreign” vote, spurred the Know-Nothings to greater activity during 1853 and 1854. In local and state elections in the spring and summer of 1854, they began to win sensational victories, sometimes snatching offices from unopposed candidates with write-in votes. By fall they were the rage of the day, and sent seventy-five men to Congress. In Massachusetts they won every state contest except in the House of Representatives, where one Whig and one Free Soiler won the right to sit with 376 Know-Nothings. In 1855 they also did very well in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Maryland, and Kentucky; not much worse in Tennessee, New York, and Pennsylvania; and they very nearly carried Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. A presidential victory and control of the national Congress appeared to be in sight for 1856.

The true sensation of 1856, however, was not a Know-Nothing sweep but the phenomenal strength of an even younger party, the Republican, which had come into existence in 1854. Ever more serious threats to national unity had been felt ever since the Mexican War and the Compromise of 185o with its fugitive slave law. Then came the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and provided for popular sovereignty in the new territories. Senator Charles Sumner said at the time that it was “at once the worst and best Bill on which Congress ever acted; the worst because it was a victory for the Slave Power, the best because it annuls all past compromises with slavery, and makes all future compromises impossible.” Since the Know-Nothing party was at best a compromise on the slavery issue, its position did become impossible. At its national council of 1855 Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, an abolitionist who had bored from within, led the party’s northern delegates to repudiate the proslavery platform.

By 1856 Know-Nothing strength lay almost wholly in the South, where the party’s unionism made it an expression of moderation. In searching for a standard bearer, they could find none better than the innocuous incumbent, Millard Fillmore, whom the Whigs also nominated. Fillmore had joined the Know-Nothing party for what political good it might do him, but he was little interested in nativism and went down to defeat essentially as a Whig. The Know-Nothing party survived only in Maryland and in a few other localities. As a political power it was dead, except for its continuing effect on the Republican party which absorbed—and held—most of the northern nativists as well as the main anti-Masonic remnant.

What explains the rise and fall of the political Know-Nothingism? Taking most obvious things first, it rose because two centuries of antipopery made a large part of the American population suspicious of Roman Catholics, and because immigration as well as many other social, economic, and political specters aroused fears of the foreigner. David Brion Davis isolates another important factor by noting how the Catholic stereotype, like that of Mormon and Mason, embodied “those traits that were precise antitheses of American ideals . . . an inverted image of Jacksonian democracy.”[20] One may suggest a corollary to this insight: that the anti-Catholic attitudes of most participants in the antislavery movement were steadily heightened because the Roman Catholic hierarchy remained noncommittal on slavery and almost completely unrepresented in the abolitionist crusade. One subversive power seemed to be abetting the other.

Roman Catholic developments also conspired to aggravate American suspicions during these years. From Europe came persistent reports of the church’s opposition to the revolutions of 1848, including its successful suppression of the Hungarian independence movement which had endeared itself to American hearts. This was brought forcefully to public attention in 1852 by the nationwide tour of Louis Kossuth, who had led that abortive revolt, and by many other anticlerical lecturers, sensationalists, and intellectuals, some of them in exile. These conflicts did not remain remote European questions, however, for the old trusteeship question flared up again in so virulent a way that Bishop Timon of Buffalo, New York, had to place a German church (Saint Louis) in that city under interdict in 1851. When John Hughes, now an archbishop, began agitation for legislation vesting all church properties in the hierarchy, the New York legislature reacted by passing in 1855 a bill requiring lay trusteeship. Then, as if to magnify both European reaction and the trustee problem in American eyes, Pius IX (who had just crushed a republican revolution in Rome itself) sent Monsignor Gaetano Bedini to the United States as a papal representative empowered to deal with the recalcitrant trustees. As an administrator of the Papal States, Bedini had helped to quell the upsurge of Italian liberalism in 1848. This role was exaggerated enormously by all the forces of anti-Catholicism in this country; but even if he had played no role at all in that affair, his coming would have been denounced as foreign intervention. His tour of the country in 1853-54 was a riot-ridden disaster which heads the list of Roman Catholic blunders during this period. Bedini probably stimulated as many Know-Nothing votes as any other single factor.

Despite all these very good reasons for the success of Know-Nothingism, one must not lose sight of the transitoriness of its triumph. It fell so swiftly and so resoundingly because, in the last analysis, the American people were more seriously divided by the slavery issue than by ethnic or religious issues. The latter issues were susceptible to a pluralistic settlement, the former was not; the country could be half “foreign,” but not half slave. Had Senator Douglas decided one or two years earlier to run the Kansas-Nebraska Act through the gauntlet of the American conscience, political Know-Nothingism might be remembered as only a minor localized phenomenon. Yet at least two other factors also hastened its downfall: the continual eruptions of violence that accompanied campaigns in which nativists were active, and the inescapable contradiction between Know-Nothing methods—the sinister aspect of a large political party conducting its affairs in secrecy—and the anticonspiratorial ideals which most Americans honored.

The fall of Know-Nothingism was as abrupt as its rise. However deep Protestant convictions about the errors of Rome may have been (and theywere held at least as firmly as Roman Catholic views of Protestant error), however thoroughly anti-Catholic attitudes were inculcated (and they were disseminated with a thoroughness that rivaled the indoctrination of Roman Catholics), Americans in general were not ready to deny both their moral heritage and their national ideals.[21] Know-Nothingism failed most completely in the Old Northwest, where immigrants and Roman Catholics were more familiar to native Protestant Americans because they mingled on equal terms and in about equal numbers.

Yet antagonism and conflict continued. Just as anti-Catholic nativism was a blight on the reformist movements of antebellum America, so it would be after the Civil War. Against a background of rapid social change, both nativism and anti-Catholicism (joined in due course by anti-Semitism) would again become ugly realities. Race relations would also deteriorate steadily. A nation of immigrants dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal would again postpone the new birth of freedom. Americans were dis-roverin cr that Crevecoeur’s “melting not” was easier to conceive than to realize. Not everyone wanted to be melted.[22]

[1] Carroll to Charles Plowden, a8 February 1779, in Annabelle M. Melville, John Carroll of Baltimore, p. 55.

[2] John Tracy Ellis, Catholics in Colonial America, p. 426.

[3] Carroll’s Report to Cardinal Antonelli, in Catholic History, p. 152. John Tracy Ellis, Documents of American

[4] See Thomas F. Casey, The Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide and the Re vision of the First Provincial Council of Baltimore 1829-1830 (Rome: Gregorian University, 1957), pp. 12--16; and the several works of Peter Guilday therein cited.

[5] Thomas O’Gorman, History of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, ACHS, vol. 9 (New York, 1895), p. 208.

[6] James Whitfield (1770-1834), fourth archbishop of Baltimore, was born at Liverpool, England, lived for a time in Italy, and when detained in France by the Napoleonic wars, was educated at Saint Irenaeus Seminary. Ordained in 180g, he continued on to England where he became for a time a Jesuit novice. In 1817 he departed for Baltimore to join his close friend and former rector of Saint Ire-naeus, Ambrose Markhal, then coadjutor to Archbishop Neale of Baltimore. Under Marechal, who was soon made archbishop, Whitfield was appointed first rector of the Cathedral of the Assumption in 1821, and as coadjutor and titular bishop of Apollonia on 8 January 1828. Marechal died three weeks later, and on 25 May, Whitfield was consecrated as archbishop.

[7] Quoted by Gerald Fogarty, “The Life of Dennis O’Connell” (unpublished manuscript, Yale University, 1968). On the Irish catastrophe as a whole, see Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland, 1845-1849 (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).

[8] Theodore Maynard, The Catholic Church and the American Idea, p. 184.

[9] John Tracy Ellis, American Catholicism, p. 49.

[10] 4. The Society of the Sacred Heart had been formed in the restorationist underground of Napoleonic France in collaboration with men who were working for the reorganization of the Jesuits. Philippine Duchesne was virtually a cofounder. First authorized in 1807 as Dames de l’Instruction Chretienne, the society has always made education its primary mission. By 1935 the work begun in the United States by Mother Duchesne was an impressive subsystem of Catholic education that included seventy-two elementary and secondary schools and ninety institutions of higher learning (see Louise Callan, Philippine Duchesne).

[11] Thomas O’Gorman, History of the Roman vol. 9 (New York, 1895), p. 425. Catholic Church in the United States, ACHS,

[12] T. T. McAvoy, The Great Crisis in American Catholic History, 1895-190o, p. 14.

[13] George K. Malone, The True Church: A (Mundelein, Ill.: Saint Mary of the Lake Study in the Apologetics of Orestes Brownson Seminary, 1957), _P. 2.

[14] The Oxford Movement and American Anglo-Catholicism are considered in more detail in their Episcopal context in chap. 38.

[15] Ontologism was a heresy which consisted of carrying the ontological argument to un due lengths, so as to assert that the primary or fundamental operation of intellect is the direct intuition of Being, identified as God. It was a view which nineteenth-century currents of philosophical idealism often encouraged.

[16] For references to secret societies in the Book of Mormon, see Helaman 6:18, 19-26; Ether 8:15-26, and many other passages. During the Nauvoo period, on the other hand, Joseph Smith showed a positive interest in the secrecy and ceremonial aspects of Masonry. In this respect he reflected a propensity of vast numbers of Americans who before long would be flocking not only to Masonic lodges, but to many other national lodge organizations and (in the colleges) to various secret fraternities. Lodges as such soon ceased to be an object of concerted criticism except from the Catholic and Lutheran churches. For many they seemed to satisfy social needs and a yearning for rites and ceremonies that Protestantism lacked. For many others they seem to have provided a religious alternative to the churches.

[17] Ray A. Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-186o, p. 108.

[18] Lyman Beecher, Plea for the West, 2d ed. (Cincinnati, 1835), pp. 72, 117, 129.

[19] “Can the right with any propriety be refused to American Christians?” he asked in a footnote—and answered affirmatively (Bru- against the Liberties of the United States, rev. tus [Samuel F. B. Morse], Foreign Conspiracy ed. [New York, 1835], pp. 125-26).

[20] “Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (September 1960): 208; see also Davis’s Fear of Conspiracy: Images of UnAmerican Subversion.

[21] The parenthetical references in this sentence merely point to the stand-off in Catholic-Protestant relations that had prevailed since the excommunication of Luther (152o) and of Queen Elizabeth (157o). It would be another century before the “revolution” of Pope John XXIII would bring the Counter-Reformation to an end.

[22] See the quotation from Letters from an American Farmer, p. 7 above.

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