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Southern Harmony: Catholic-Protestant Relations in the Antebellum South

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Andrew Stern
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Abstract

This essay seeks to recover the experiences of Catholics in the antebellum South by focusing on their relations with Protestants. It argues that, despite incidents of animosity, many southern Protestants accepted and supported Catholics, and Catholics integrated themselves into southern society while maintaining their distinct religious identity. Catholic–Protestant cooperation was most clear in the public spaces the two groups shared. Protestants funded Catholic churches, schools, and hospitals, while Catholics also contributed to Protestant causes. Beyond financial support, each group participated in the institutions created by the other. Catholics and Protestants worshipped in each other's churches, studied in each other's schools, and recovered or died in each other's hospitals. This essay explores a series of hypotheses for the cooperation. It argues that Protestants valued Catholic contributions to southern society; it contends that effective Catholic leaders demonstrated the compatibility of Catholicism and American ideals and institutions; and it examines Catholic attitudes towards slavery as a ground for religious harmony. Catholics proved themselves to be useful citizens, true Americans, and loyal Southerners, and their Protestant neighbors approvingly took note. Catholic–Protestant cooperation complicates the dominant historiographical view of interreligious animosity and offers a model of religious pluralism in an unexpected place and time.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , Summer 2007 , pp. 165 - 190
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2007

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References

Notes

I would like to thank the late Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eugene Genovese, James Roark, Grant Wacker, and especially Brooks Holifield for their comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to Emory University and to the Filson Historical Society of Louisville for grants that allowed me to conduct much of the research for this article.

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18. Crews, , Presence and Possibility, 17 Google Scholar. Spalding estimated the total amount raised at $3,000 and also noted that Protestants were the major donors (Sketches of the Early Catholic Missions of Kentucky, 262). Protestants also served as members of the Corporation, the chartered body of Charleston Catholics. This arrangement, however, became a source of controversy when England clashed with the Corporation. As a result, he decided in January of 1822 to require all members to subscribe to articles of faith “as only Roman Catholics can with a safe conscience subscribe to” ( Hopkins, , St. Mary's Church, 47–48 Google Scholar).

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33. Ibid., April 7, 1854.

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41. John Macpherson Berrien, “To the People of Georgia,” Rockingham, Georgia, September 4, 1855, cited in Miller, Stephen F., The Bench and Bar of Georgia: Memoirs and Sketches (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1858), 94 Google Scholar.

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46. Report of Bishop England to the Cardinal Prefect of the Propaganda, 1833, ACHS 8, no. 3 (September 1897): 329.

47. England to Paul Cardinal Cullen, Charleston, February 23,

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85. Miscellany, November 24, 1827.

86. Ibid., August 7, 1822.

87. Ibid., July 3, 1822.

88. Ibid., December 8, 1827; see also January 12, 1825, and September 9, 1826.

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