Book Review: "Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620-1860"

This book, published by Cambridge University Press in 2017, is an episodic history of aspects of Anti-Catholicism in the British American Colonies and the United States of America from the year after The New York Times says our history begins until the year before the Civil War begins. According to the publisher:

Using fears of Catholicism as a mechanism through which to explore the contours of Anglo-American understandings of freedom, Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620–1860 reveals the ironic role that anti-Catholicism played in defining and sustaining some of the core values of American identity, values that continue to animate our religious and political discussions today. Farrelly explains how that bias helped to shape colonial and antebellum cultural understandings of God, the individual, salvation, society, government, law, national identity, and freedom. In so doing, Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620–1860 provides contemporary observers with a framework for understanding what is at stake in the debate over the place of Muslims and other non-Christian groups in American society.

• Uses anti-Catholicism as an opportunity to explore the various Protestant groups - Puritans and Pilgrims - that were dominant on the colonial and early-American landscape
• Shows how anti-Catholicism was both an expression of, and an abandonment of, the dominant values of the colonial and early-American period
• Provides a useful distillation of the narrative on anti-Catholicism in early America, while citations point them to the pertinent historiography

Please note that I purchased my copy of this book.

Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620-1860 received excellent advance praise and this review provides an effective precis of the book. The book is very neatly designed with each chapter titled with a contemporary quotation for the topic addressed, a vignette or example of the issues involved in each chapter, and a chapter overview and a chapter conclusion and notes following:

Table of Contents

Preface

1. "It Hath Been Found Inconsistent with the Safety and Welfare of this Protestant Kingdom": Anti-Catholicism in Old England and New

• Chapter Overview,
• The Reformation Briefly Considered
• Protestantism, Briefly Considered
• English Protestantism, Briefly Considered
• [NOTE: NO "Catholicism, Briefly Considered"]
• Calvinism and Liberty
• The Dominion of New England and the Protestant Interest
• The Power of Print and the Protestant Interest
• Chapter Conclusion
• Notes

2. "This Province is God be Thanked very Peaceable and Quiet": Anti-Catholicism and Colonial Catholics in the Seventeenth Century

• Chapter Overview
• The English Origins of Colonial America's Catholics
• The Catholic Calverts and the Puzzle of Anti-Catholicism
• Calvert's Early (and Unsuccessful) Strategy for Peace
• The Anti-Catholic Origins of Religious Toleration
• The Demise of the Catholic Calverts and the Rise of Contractarian Government
• Chapter Conclusion 
• Notes

3. "The Common Word Then Was: 'No King, No Popery'": Anti-Catholicism and the American Revolution

• Chapter Overview
• The Rhetorical Power of Popery
• Maryland's Revolutionary Reluctance
• Curbing the Growth of Popery
• Catholic Constitutionalism in Eighteenth Century Maryland
• Catholic Discourse in a Secular Context
• Chapter Conclusion
• Notes

4. "The Catholic Religion is Modified by the Spirit of the Time in America": Anti-Catholicism and the New Republic

• Chapter Overview
• Liberty, Not Toleration
• Religious Liberty in the States
• American Gets a Catholic Bishop
• Catholic Republicanism
• Lay Trusteeism in Philadelphia
• Chapter Conclusion
• Notes

5. "Those Now Pouring in Upon us . . . are Wholly of Another Kind in Morals and Intellect": Anti-Catholicism in the Age of Immigration

• Chapter Overview
• Unitarians React to the Convent Burning (Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts in 1834)
• The Bible(s) and the Schools
• The Philadelphia Bible Riots
• The Impact of the Publishing Industry
• Chapter Conclusion
• Notes

6. "The Benumbing and Paralyzing Influence of Romanism is such, as to Disqualifying a Person for the Relish and Enjoyment of Liberty": Anti-Catholicism and American Politics

• Chapter Overview
• Catholics, Abolitionists, and Slavery
• The Regional Nature of Anti-Catholicism: The South
• The Regional Nature of Anti-Catholicism: The West
• Nativism and Politics
• Chapter Conclusion
• Notes

Epilogue

• Notes

Index

As I noted above, this is an episodic discussion and analysis of anti-Catholicism in the Colonial, early Republic, and pre-Civil War eras--and I'm not sure that the disparate parts of this analysis add up to a comprehensive or comprehensible whole. Farrelly never analyses Catholic political thought: she quotes Robert Cardinal Bellarmine once and never mentions his disagreements with King James I on the Divine Right of Kings, with his support of the sovereignty of the people and their right to consent to be governed and other Catholic ideas about freedom, the "two swords" of secular and religious governance, etc. She grants the ideas of the defenders of the "Protestant Interest" complete sway and never presents an opposing view from any Catholic defender. 

On a scale of one to five, I'd give it a three and a half. Some interesting analysis, good notes--I wish there was a bibliography or list of works for further reading--and a good organization structure, if episodic. I did find a book in the notes to order because I do not know that much about the "Dominion of New England" efforts of Charles I and James II to maintain control of the colonies: The Glorious Revolution in America by David S. Lovejoy (The Wesleyan University Press edition of 1987).

I wonder if Farrelly will continue the history of anti-Catholicism through to the twentieth century. I rather hope not. You might recall that I read and reviewed her book Papist Patriots: The Making of American Catholic Identity (Oxford University Press, 2012) here and here. I appreciate Farrelly's historical narrative more than her sociological/political theorizing.

Book Review: "America on Trial" by Robert Reilly (Part Two)

I published part one of my review on Saturday; it covered most of the book from the Introduction through chapter 8 on John Locke and how the Founders read him (see below for an outline of the book's contents, including the subheads in each chapter).

So, having offered his review of the intellectual background to the Founders' understanding of the issues of governance (Natural Law, Reason, happiness, tyranny, consent of the governed, Divine Right of Kings, rights to overthrow tyrants, etc), Reilly summarizes how they applied that knowledge to the situation the British American colonists faced in the 1760's and 1770's as Parliament (not really King George III) had violated their right of consent through taxation without representation. I found it remarkable that after all this discussion of the battle of ideas between Reason and Will, Reilly states that half of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were college graduates who had received classical Scholastic educations in the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, astronomy, music, and geometry) and had studied Latin, another vestige of medieval Catholic culture. Whatever the contemporary debate about rights and rulers--Hobbes vs. Locke et al--half of the signers had a grounding in the liberal arts. In that day, a university education was conservative of classical knowledge of the past.

Next, Reilly compares and contrasts the thoughts of some of the leaders of the French Revolution with those of the Founders, citing Abbé Sieyès, Marquis de Condorcet, Marquis de Sade, and Louis Saint-Just (who wasn't). He explains Jefferson's initial support of the French Revolution, before the Reign of Terror (a reign without a monarch!), and his disappointment with its progress after he left Paris, but then demonstrates how much John Adams and Alexander Hamilton inveighed against the philosophy and ideology of these French thinkers from the start. Reilly highlights Adam's arguments against Condorcet's The Progress of the Human Mind, carried out in the margins of a copy of the book, to demonstrate how completely he rejected Condorcet's view of the human person and society. Reilly's pithy statement in the section on the French Revolution's attack on the Catholic Church, Christianity, and Catholics sums up the dichotomy: The revolutionaries in France "attempted a total break with the past by destroying it"; the Founders of the United States of America "sought a fulfillment of the past by preserving and improving it" (p. 280). Tories, who had wanted to remain loyal to England's rule, may not have been "treated with kid gloves" (p. 288), but there was no genocide as in the Vendee, no rejection of Sunday as a day of rest and worship, no martyrdoms, September massacres, or new religion in the American Revolution.

Having built his case over ten chapters, Reilly now takes on the critics of the Founders and their intellectual background. Perhaps I am at a disadvantage here because I have not read the works of Deneen and Hanby. He devotes at least five pages to debunking Deneen's misquotation of a passage by James Madison in Federalist Papers Number Ten, noting that Deneen uses that misquotation several times in his analysis of the Founding. (The complete quotation is: "The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government.") Deneen proposes that Madison argues for the protection of the "diversity in the faculties of men" while Reilly argues that Madison wanted government to protect the "faculties" but acknowledged that the natural diversity in those faculties was an obstacle to unity that had to be dealt with because of dangers factionalism pose. A reading of that paper makes it clear to me that Madison was trying to find the better way of "controlling the effects of faction" while enabling and protecting liberty. Madison thought that the federalist structure helped balance those efforts: "The federal Constitution forms a happy combination in this respect; the great and aggregate interests being referred to the national, the local and particular to the State legislatures."

In his Epilogue, Reilly cites passages from Samuel Adams, John Adams, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton--whom he incorrectly identifies as a signer of both the Declaration and the Constitution (p. 314)--to demonstrate that the Founders believed the form of representative government they were establishing required Christian virtues to succeed and perdure. They predicted the decline of the Republic if Christian virtues were rejected and diminished among the Republic's citizens.

Reilly identifies German historicism as the cause of our current decline as we've been taught that progress in itself perfects. Our truths are superior to truths of the past--there is no objective, natural, real truth; it's relative to time and place; it's subjective for each person. "That may be your truth, but it's not mine. Don't impose your truth on me." (I overheard that in a pub outside Canterbury Cathedral many years ago when one woman opined that it's good to be married before you have children--and it was spoken in anger, not comity. The discussion was closed.) Therefore, who ever has the most power to impose their subjective truth--BLM, the NBA, NFL, MSM, Corporations, etc--will triumph; there will be no discussion or debate on a reasonable basis. Wilson, Dewey, and Obama agree: Social reform and political control; schools as great factories to create properly formed citizens; Truth as the object of will because there is no absolute truth. Except for the truth that there is no absolute truth.

In the final paragraphs of the Epilogue, Reilly calls for a ressourcement of the Founding--a return "to reality, to reason, to 'the laws of Nature's God'"--and avers that it will come as the "modern project" destroys itself, cancels itself, devours itself as the Soviet Empire "imploded from its own hollowness." (p. 331)

But as the history of the Soviet Empire demonstrates, there will be great suffering before the end of the modern project: viz Portland, Seattle, and Chicago, et al.

Contents:
Foreword by Larry P. Arnn, PhD
Preface
Introduction: Do We Hold These Truths?
--Whose Fault Is It?
--Sources of the Founding

Chapter 1. The Legacies of Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome
--The Prephilosophical World
--Magic Time: The Problem with Pantheism
--The Problem with an Eternal Universe
--The Philosophical World: Athens
--Natural Law: "What Is"
--The End of Man and Morality
--The Order of the City and the Order of the Soul
--The Problem of Happiness
--Jerusalem: Transcendent Monotheism
--The Goodness of Creation and the "Imago Dei"
--The Origin of Evil
--Rome: Christianity--The Nuptials of Jerusalem and Athens
--Logos Incarnate
--The Solution to Happiness
--Limiting the Political to Itself
--Dedivinization of the World
--Man's Freedom
--The Spiritual Genealogy: Equality

Chapter 2. The Medieval Roots of Civilization
--Dual Sovereignties
--Wielding the Two Swords
--The Investiture Conflict
--The Struggle in England
--Magna Carta
--The Struggle in the Holy Roman Empire
--The Contribution of Canon Law to Constitutional Thinking
--What Touches All Must Be Approved by All
--The Development of Consent

Chapter 3. The Loss of Reason and Nature
--The Realist Metaphysics of Reality
--Nominalism and the End of Essences
--Voluntarism and the Primacy of Will
--Parallels with Islamic Voluntarism
--Loss of Cause and Effect
--Consequences for Law

Chapter 4. Enter: Martin Luther--Exit: Christendom
--Luther and Nominalism
--The Hidden God--Deus Absconditas
--Complete Corruption of Original Sin
--Faith Alone
--Contra Aristotle and Philosophy
--Freedom from Free Will
--The Political Consequences
--The End of Dual Sovereignty
--Legal Positivism--Law as Will

Chapter 5. Richard Hooker: Restoring Natural Law
--Recovery of Reason
--The Requirement of Consent
--Hooker's Influence

Chapter 6. Thomas Hobbes and the Rise of Secular Absolutism
--Hobbes versus Hooker
--Denial of the Highest Good
--Mutable Men
--Primacy of Passion and Power
--The War of All against All
--All-Powerful Leviathan
--Dispositive Despotism
--The Reaction

Chapter 7. The Divine Right of Kings and Its Enemies
--Bellarmine and Suarez
--James I's Divine Right
--Filmer's Defense of Divine Right
--Sovereignty of the People
--Principle of Equality
--Francisco Suarez
--A Catholic Founding? (parallel passages from Bellarmine, Suarez, the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the Declaration of Independence)
--Algernon Sidney

8. John Locke: Problem or Solution?
--Equality and Consent
--The Right to Revolution
--Locke and the Founders
--A Two-Faced Janus?
--The State of Nature
--Happiness or Hedonism?
--Locke vs. Hobbes

9. A Restorative Founding on Reason
--War of Ideas
--Parliament's Violation of the Right of Consent
--Violating the "Laws of Nature" and "Natural Right"
--James Wilson and Natural Law
--The Revolution Arrives
--Declaration of Independence
--The Theology of the Founding
--"All Men Are Created Equal"
--The Relationship between Liberty and Happiness
--The Constitution

10. The Antipodes: The American Revolution versus the French Revolution
--French Enlightenment Ideologies
--The Assault on Christianity
--Adams and Hamilton React

11. Critiquing the Critics: Why They Go Wrong about What Was Right
--Scorning America
--The Abolitionism
--Misquoting Madison
--America Devoted to Diversity?
--Misunderstanding the Declaration
--Misunderstanding Massachusetts
--Retrofitting the American Founding
--Cogs in the Machine
--Suicidal Blunder

Epilogue

Selected Bibliography
Index

Book Review: "Papist Devils"

As mankind become more liberal they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protection of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations in examples of justice and liberality. And I presume that your fellow-citizens will not forget the patriotic part which you took in the accomplishment of their Revolution, and the establishment of their government; or the important assistance which they received from a nation in which the Roman Catholic faith is professed.

--George Washington to prominent Catholics who congratulated him

on his election as the first President of the United States, March 15, 1790

Robert Emmett Curran may cover some of the same ground at Papist Patriots in his telling of the history of Catholics in Maryland, but by examining the Catholic populations of the British West Indies and other colonies like New York and Pennsylvania he broadens the range of this study:

This is a brief [320 pages] highly readable history of the Catholic experience in British America, which shaped the development of the colonies and the nascent republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historian Robert Emmett Curran begins his account with the English reformation, which helps us to understand the Catholic exodus from England, Ireland, and Scotland that took place over the nearly two centuries that constitute the colonial period. The deeply rooted English understanding of Catholics as enemies of the political and religious values at the heart of British tradition, ironically acted as a catalyst for the emergence of a Catholic republican movement that was a critical factor in the decision of a strong majority of American Catholics in 1775 to support the cause for independence.

Papist Devils utilizes archival material, newspapers, and other contemporary records in addition to a broad array of general histories, monographs, and dissertations dealing with the British Atlantic world.The unprecedentedly broad scope of this study, which encompasses not only the thirteen colonies that took up arms against Britain in 1775, but also those in the maritime provinces of Canada as well as the ones in the West Indies, constitutes a unique coverage of the British Catholic colonial experience, as does the extension of the colonial period through the American Revolution, which was its logical dénouement.

He clearly demonstrates the long reach of the English Reformation and its penal laws against Catholics, Catholic priests, and the Catholic Mass. There was a constant tension between Catholics and Anglicans and other Protestants even in those colonies founded expressly to allow religious liberty, Maryland and New York. I think we forget what "York" represents in that name: James, the Duke of York, Charles II's Catholic convert brother and heir. The long recusant period had inspired a longing for religious freedom in Catholics and a continued suspicion and hatred of Catholics in Anglicans and Protestant dissenters from the Church of England. Catholics in British America inherited the legacy of English fear of them as disloyal, dangerous, and conspiratorial--and as enemies of freedom! Hatred and fear lead to paranoia and bigotry of course, and the Catholics of Maryland and New York soon found themselves disenfranchised and penalized for their faith.

When the British Parliament recognized the freedom of Catholics in French Canada to practice their faith (the Quebec Act), British Americans regarded this as an act of tyranny. But it was through French Canada that British Americans began to change their minds a little about Catholics--because they needed Catholics to reach out to Quebec to join the revolution. Benjamin Franklin, enlightened Catholic hater though he was, found out by going to Quebec with Charles Carroll of Carrolton and his cousin Father John Carroll that Catholics are human beings. Franklin was touched by John Carroll's concern for him when he fell ill. Although the mission failed, George Washington had forbidden the celebration of Pope Day (Guy Fawkes Day) on the 5th of November, pointing out that it made little sense to attack the spiritual leader of possible French Catholic allies. The support of French and Polish Catholic military leaders extended the ban on burning the Pope in effigy.

It almost seems miraculous that Catholics were finally allowed to participate in the founding of the United States of America, based on the history of anti-Catholic prejudice in the British American colonies. In the West Indies, that fear and hatred was focused on the Irish indentured servants, temporary slaves of the sugar plantations, and those Irish who had been sent into true slavery during the English Civil War and Cromwell's campaigns in Ireland. Their land had been confiscated, their families divided, and they were branded, sometimes literally, as felons and slaves. With the African slaves brought to the West Indies, they sometimes resisted the cruelty of the great planters and then were ruthlessly put down and punished.

On the Continent, the Seven Years War/French and Indian War inspired more anti-Catholic fervor with the French as enemies, and the horrible dispersal of the French Catholic Acadians of Nova Scotia was hailed as a great British accomplishment! Fear of Catholic conspiracies against the British Empire in time of war was exacerbated by evangelical ministers like the cross-eyed George Whitfield, friend of Charles and John Wesley, during the first Great Awakening. He saw the Seven Years War as a vast Catholic wing conspiracy against Protestantism (Arminian or not). Wherever Catholics congregated in significant numbers they were suspected of some conspiracy against British forces in the field of battle, and Catholics were harassed, attacked, and taxed at a higher rate.

The irony is that because the Pope did not take sides in the American Revolution, Catholics were free to choose which side to support--some were Loyalists, fighting for King George--but Commodore John Barry exemplifies the contribution Catholics made to the war. While British Americans had regarded the Catholic Church as the source and summit of tyranny in the world, Catholics supported them in their efforts to throw off tyranny! Pardon the anachronism, but it must have blown their minds!

Curran narrates this story and its surprising conclusion vividly and clearly, describing conflicts, personalities, and events throughout British American history. The bibliography is excellent and the book is well illustrated. Highly recommended.

Happy Birthday, John Carroll!

Russell Shaw writes about the life and career of John Carroll in the December 23, 2013 issue of Our Sunday Visitor newsweekly:

A member of a wealthy and respected Catholic family, with excellent contacts among America’s political and social elite, Archbishop Carroll proved notably adept at building bridges with the non-Catholic world in a career spanning more than three decades. “A gentleman of learning and abilities,” John Adams, who was to be second president of the United States, said of the young priest in 1776, the year of American independence.

Along with persuading Protestants that Catholics also had a place in America, John Carroll was to tackle the mammoth task of building the infrastructure of the Church from scratch. And in this, too, he proved remarkably successful.

He was born Jan. 8, 1735, at his parents’ plantation in southern Maryland, the fourth of seven children. His older brother, Daniel, was to be one of only five men who signed both the Articles of Confederation and the U.S. Constitution. His cousin and lifelong friend, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, was the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence and the first U.S. senator from Maryland.

Read the rest here.

Revolutionary England, Almost

 

Frank McLynn writes about seven times when England could have experienced a complete revolution--somehow passing over the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. He includes the Pilgrimage of Grace and the Jacobite uprising (the '45) among the seven. As Nigel Jones comments in this review, the premise is a little weak, and the selection might be questionable:

 

It is axiomatic in British history that this country – unlike many European neighbours – does not ‘do’ revolutions. This assumption is at least arguable. If the Civil War of the 1640s, resulting in the quasi-legal killing of a king, and his replacement by a military dictatorship with millennial overtones, was not a revolution, then the term has no meaning. Ditto the 1688 ‘Glorious Revolution’. Yet according to Frank McLynn, neither of these upheavals constituted a true revolution, which, he argues, Britain has never experienced.

His book focuses on seven moments when he claims Britain came closest to “the possibility for overthrow of a regime and a drastic change of direction politically, economically, socially”: the Peasants’ Revolt, Jack Cade’s 1450 rebellion, the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536, the Civil War, the 1745/6 Jacobite uprising; the Chartists of the 1840s, and the 1926 General Strike. . . .

The examples McLynn lumps into his revolutionary sack are questionable: if the Pilgrimage, why not the Prayer Book or Kett’s rebellion? And if Chartism, why not the era of Peterloo and the Cato Street conspiracy? This is also very old-fashioned history, with heroes and villains praised – or more frequently damned – featuring Henry VIII, Cromwell and (bizarrely) Stanley Baldwin in a rogues’ gallery of tyranny.

As to why Britain avoided revolution, McLynn discounts such theories as its insular isolation, its small professional army, the popularity of its modern monarchy, or the myth that its people were less violent than their continental counterparts (before the 18th century the reverse was the case). He identifies a few factors as crucial: Britain’s early industrialisation; its acquisition of an empire to export its surplus workforce; and finally the preference for gradualist reformism to revolutionary activism, exemplified by the popularity of Methodism over Marxism.

Whenever I think of book about revolutions, I think of Susan Dunn's Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light, published in 2000:

The American and French revolutions presented the world with two very different visions of democracy. Although both professed similar Enlightenment ideals of freedom, equality, and justice and set similar political agendas, there were also fundamental differences. The French sought a complete break with a thousand years of history; the Americans were content to preserve many aspects of their English heritage. Why did the two revolutions follow such different trajectories? And what lessons do they offer us about democracy today? In lucid narrative style, Dunn captures the personalities and lives of the great figures of both revolutions, and shows how their stories added up to make two very different events.

I completely agree with the assessment of this reviewer: "Everybody should read this book. It offers a lively education in a small package. Then, if there's time, reread Federalist 10 and 51, as well as Simon Schama's book Citizens. What the French took from the Americans, Lord Acton once wrote, "was their theory of revolution not their theory of government — their cutting but not their sewing.""