Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (29 page)

Indeed, the Church entered a period of reaction during the papacy of Pius IX (1846–78). The 1848–49 revolutions and wars of unification in Italy made Pius "a violent enemy of liberalism and social reform." He subsequently proclaimed the doctrine of papal infallibility and issued his Syllabus of Errors condemning socialism, public education, rationalism, and other such iniquities. "It is an error," declared the Pope, "to believe that the Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself to, and agree with, progress, liberalism, and modern civilization." The American Catholic hierarchy took its cue from the Pope. Archbishop John Hughes of New York attacked abolitionists, Free Soilers, and various Protestant reform movements as kin to the "Red Republicanism" of Europe.
³¹

Immigration had caused Catholic church membership to grow three times faster than Protestant membership in the 1840s. Pointing with pride to this fact (which Protestants viewed with alarm), Archbishop Hughes in 1850 delivered a well-publicized address
The Decline of Protestantism and Its Causes
. "The object we hope to accomplish," said Hughes, "is to convert all Pagan nations, and all Protestant nations. . . . There is no secrecy in all this. . . . Our mission [is] to convert the world—including the inhabitants of the United States—the people of the cities, and the people of the country . . . the Legislatures, the Senate, the Cabinet, the President, and all!" The archbishopric's newspaper proclaimed that "Protestantism is effete, powerless, dying out . . . and conscious that its last moment is come when it is fairly set, face to face, with Catholic truth."
³²

Such words fanned the embers of anti-Catholicism. Folk memories of Bloody Mary, the Spanish Armada, the Gunpowder Plot, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and Foxe's
Book of Martyrs
were part of the Anglo-American Protestant consciousness. The Puritan war against popery had gone on for two and one-half centuries and was not over yet. In 1852 the first Plenary Council of American bishops, meeting in Baltimore, attacked the godlessness of public education and decided to seek

31
. Quotations from Robert Kelley,
The Transatlantic Persuasion: The Liberal-Democratic Mind in the Age of Gladstone
(New York, 1969), 106; Eric Hobsbawm,
TheAge of Capital, 1848–1875
(New York, 1976), 106; Walter G. Sharrow, "Northern Catholic Intellectuals and the Coming of the Civil War,"
New-York Historical Society Quarterly
, 58 (1974), 45.

32
. Hughes's address is quoted in Ray Allen Billington,
The Protestant Crusade
1800–1860 (New York, 1938), 291;
Freeman's Journal
, March 4, 1848, quoted in
ibid
., 290.

tax support for Catholic schools or tax relief for parents who sent their children to such schools. During 1852–53 this effort set off bitter campaigns in a dozen northern cities and states (including Maryland). "Free School" tickets drawn from both major parties, but especially from the Whigs, won several elections on the platform of defending public schools as the nursery of republicanism against the "bold effort" of this "despotic faith" to "unite . . . the Church and the State," to "uproot the tree of Liberty" and "substitute the mitre for our liberty cap." Archbishop Hughes replied in kind, branding public schools as wellsprings of "Socialism, Red Republicanism, Universalism, Infidelity, Deism, Atheism, and Pantheism."
³³

In the midst of these school campaigns, Hughes threw the hierarchy into another emotional struggle, this one over control of church property. Catholic churches in many areas were owned by a lay board of trustees representing the congregation. This accorded with Protestant practice but defied Catholic tradition. Attempts by the clergy to gain control of church property reached into several state legislatures, which refused after acrimonious debates to sanction clerical control—and indeed, in some cases tried to mandate lay control. In July 1853 Monsi-gnor Gaetano Bedini arrived in the United States as a papal nuncio to adjudicate the property dispute in certain dioceses. After doing so in favor of the clergy, Bedini toured the country to bestow the papal blessing on American Catholics. Much of the Protestant and nativist press erupted in frenzy. "He is here," exclaimed one journal, "to find the best way to rivet Italian chains upon us which will bind us as slaves to the throne of the most fierce tyranny the world knows." The Church's role in suppressing Italian nationalist uprisings in 1848–49 also aroused radical expatriates from several Catholic countries against Bedini, whom they labeled the "Butcher of Bologna." As Bedini's tour continued, riots broke out in several cities that he visited, and upon his departure for Italy in February 1854 he had to be smuggled aboard a ship in the New York harbor to escape a mob.
³⁴

The temperance movement also exacerbated ethnic tensions. Before 1850 this movement had been primarily one of self-denial and moral

33
. Dannenbaum, "Immigrants and Temperance,"
loc. cit
., 129; Holt,
Political Crisis of the 1850s
, 162; Vincent P. Lannie, "Alienation in America: The Immigrant Catholic and Public Education in Pre-Civil War America,"
Review of Politics
, 32 (1970), 515.

34
. Billington,
Protestant Crusade
, 300–303.

suasion aimed at persuading the Protestant middle and working classes to cast out demon rum and become sober, hard-working, upward-striving citizens. As such it had enjoyed an astonishing success. But conspicuous holdouts against this dry crusade were Irish and German immigrants, for whom taverns and beer gardens were centers of social and political life. A perceived rise of drunkenness, brawling, and crime especially among the Irish population helped turn temperance reform into a coercive movement aimed at this recalcitrant element. Believing that liquor was a cause of social disorder, prohibitionists sought passage of state laws to ban the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. They achieved their first major victory in Maine in 1851. This success set off a wave of "Maine law" debates in other legislatures. The Democratic party generally opposed temperance laws while the Whigs were divided. Fearful of alienating "wet" voters, Whigs refused to take a stand and thereby estranged the large temperance component in their ranks. Coalitions of drys from all parties captured control of enough legislatures from 1852 to 1855 to enact Maine laws in a dozen additional states including all of New England, New York and Delaware, and several midwestern states.
³⁵

These laws, like Prohibition in a later generation, were frequently honored in the breach. Nonenforcement was widespread; legislatures or courts in several states subsequently repealed the laws or restricted their scope. Those who wanted to drink could continue to do so; those who did not had stopped doing so under the influence of the earlier moral-suasion phase of the crusade. By 1861 only three of the thirteen states that had legislated prohibition were still dry. The larger significance of the prohibition movement in the 1850s was not the laws it enacted but the impetus it gave to nativism. A Catholic newspaper classified prohibition with "State Education Systems, Infidelity, Pantheism," abolitionism, socialism, women's rights, and "European Red Republicanism" as "parts of a great whole, at war with God." Temperance advocates replied in kind. "It is liquor which fills so many Catholic (as well as other)

35
. There are a number of good studies of drinking and the temperance movement in this era: see especially Ian R. Tyrrell,
Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America, 1800–1860
(Westport, Conn., 1979); W. J. Rorabaugh,
The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition
(New York, 1976); Jed Dannen-baum,
Drink and Disorder: Temperance Reform in Cincinnati from the Washingtonian Revival to the WCTU
(Urbana, 1984); and Norman H. Clark,
Deliver Us from Evil: An Interpretation of American Prohibition
(New York, 1976),
chaps. 2
–
4
.

homes with discord and violence . . . fills our prisons with Irish culprits, and makes the gallows hideous with so many Catholic murderers," declared Horace Greeley's
New York Tribune
. "The fact that the Catholics of this country keep a great many more grog shops and sell more liquor in proportion to their number than any other denomination, creates and keeps alive a strong prejudice against them."
³⁶

Buffeted by the winds of anti-Nebraska, anti-liquor, anti-Catholic, and anti-immigrant, the two-party system in the North was ready for collapse by 1854. And it was not only the antislavery Republicans who picked up the pieces. In several states a new and powerful nativist party seemed to glean even more from the wreckage. A number of secret fraternal societies restricted in membership to native-born Protestants had sprung up by the 1850s. Two of them in New York, the Order of United Americans and the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, had merged in 1852 under the leadership of James Barker. Against the background of Protestant-Catholic clashes over public schools, the Bedini visit, and temperance campaigns, the dynamic Barker organized hundreds of lodges all over the country with an estimated membership ranging up to a million or more. Members were pledged to vote for no one except native-born Protestants for public office. In secret councils the Order endorsed certain candidates or nominated its own. When asked by outsiders about the Order, members were to respond "I know nothing." Because of their secrecy and tight-knit organization, these "Know Nothings" became a potentially powerful voting bloc.
³⁷

They drew their membership mainly from young men in white-collar and skilled blue-collar occupations. A good many of them were new voters. One analysis showed that men in their twenties were twice as likely to vote Know Nothing as men over thirty. Their leaders were also "new men" in politics who reflected the social backgrounds of their

36
.
Cincinnati Catholic Telegraph
, March 19, July 9, 1853, quoted in Dannenbaum, "Immigrants and Temperance,"
loc. cit
., 134;
New York Tribune
, quoted in Nevins,
Ordeal
, II, 329.

37
. General treatments of the Know Nothings include Billington,
Protestant Crusade
, especially
chaps. 11
–
26
; Ira M. Leonard and Robert D. Parmet,
American Nativism, 1830–1860
(New York, 1971); and Carleton Beals,
Brass-Knuckle Crusade: The Great Know-Nothing Conspiracy, 1820–1860
(New York, 1960), a sensationalized and untrustworthy account. In addition to several state studies of the Know Nothings, there is one regional monograph: W. Darrell Overdyke,
The Know-Nothing Party in the South
(Baton Rouge, 1950). For the Catholic response, see Robert Francis Hueston,
The Catholic Press and Nativism
1840–1860 (New York, 1976).

constituency. In Pittsburgh more than half of the Know-Nothing leaders were under thirty-five and nearly half were artisans and clerks. Know Nothings elected to the Massachusetts legislature in 1854 consisted mainly of skilled workers, rural clergymen, and clerks in various enterprises. Maryland's leaders were younger and less affluent than their Democratic counterparts.
³⁸

As a political movement, the Know Nothings had a platform as well as prejudices. They generally favored temperance and always opposed tax support for parochial schools. Their main goal was to reduce the power of foreign-born voters in politics. Under federal law, immigrants could become naturalized citizens after five years in the United States. In a few large cities Democratic judges obligingly issued naturalization papers almost as soon as immigrants got off the boat. Most states limited the vote to citizens, though several allowed immigrants to vote within a year of establishing residence. By the early 1850s the heavy wave of immigration that had begun in 1846 was showing up in voting rolls. Since immigrants were preponderantly young adults, the number of foreign-born voters grew faster than their proportion of the population. In Boston, for example, immigrant voters increased by 195 percent from 1850 to 1855 while the native-born vote rose only 14 percent. Because this "foreign" vote was mainly Democratic, Catholic, and wet, its rapid growth had alarming implications to Whigs, Protestants, and temperance reformers—and even to some native-born Democrats of the working class who found themselves competing with foreign-born laborers willing to work for lower wages. Rural residents also resented the growing power of the immigrant vote in the cities. The Know Nothings called for an increase of the waiting period for naturalization to twenty-one years. In some states they wished to restrict officeholding to native-born citizens and to impose a waiting period of several years after naturalization before immigrants could vote. They did not propose limits on immigration per se, though some Know Nothings probably hoped that by making citizenship and political rights more difficult to obtain they might discourage immigrants from coming to the United States.