A Nation Rising (20 page)

The flowering of these religious groups indicated a wider transformation of America's spiritual life in the early nineteenth century. Old-line Protestantism, if not under attack, was undergoing
enormous changes. William Ellery Channing, born in Newport, Rhode Island, the grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was a Harvard-trained theologian who broke from traditional Calvinist orthodoxy in the early 1800s to help establish what became known as Unitarianism. Channing rejected the notion of the Trinity, believed in the essential goodness of humanity, and held that revelation might come through rational thought rather than Scripture alone. Among his followers were people like Ralph Waldo Emerson who held Transcendentalist ideas and eventually broke from the church completely. Channing's influence and success, as well as more radical departures such as Smith's Mormons and Miller's apocalyptic visions, went hand in hand with a Second Great Awakening. Like the First Great Awakening a century earlier, this one profoundly changed America.

One of the staunchest, most vocal, and most influential men to emerge from that movement was Samuel F. B. Morse. As most schoolchildren once learned, Morse is largely credited with the invention of the telegraph and the code—consisting of dots and dashes—that still bears his name. But that extraordinary combination of American ingenuity and technology would not make Morse famous—or enormously wealthy—for another few years. His famous telegraphed message—“What hath God wrought!”—was sent from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore in 1844.

Samuel was the eldest son of Jedediah Morse, a renowned Calvinist preacher who was also famous both as the author of a basic geography textbook and for his expressed belief—founded in his fundamental, Puritan-inspired Christian faith—that America would create the “largest empire that ever existed.” Samuel was
born in Charlestown, outside Boston, in 1791, and attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and then Yale. An aspiring painter, he went to Europe to study the masters. In an incident that might seem comic if it had not had such significant repercussions, Morse was standing in a square in Rome when the pope passed by. He failed to remove his hat as the procession moved past and was struck by one of the pope's Swiss guards, who knocked his hat to the ground.

While teaching fine arts at New York University, Morse began to publish his attacks on Catholicism in the
New York Observer
, a religious newsweekly run by his brother Richard. In a series of twelve articles, Morse cataloged the abuses of Catholicism and Catholic immigrants and issued dire warnings about the fate of America. These articles were later collected and published in 1835 as a book,
The Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States
.

Warning of cells of Jesuit priests who were undermining American education and luring American children into Catholic schools, Morse cautioned his readers, “I exposed in my last chapter the remarkable coincidence of the tenets of Popery with the principles of despotic government, in this respect so opposite to the tenets of Protestantism; Popery, from its very nature, favoring despotism, and Protestantism, from its very nature, favoring liberty. Is it not then perfectly natural that the Austrian government should be active in supporting Catholic missions in this country? Is it not clear that the cause of Popery is the cause of despotism?”
¹⁰

Morse's book was both controversial and influential. His biographer Kenneth Silverman writes, “Widely circulated and often extracted in the anti-Catholic press, it spurred the formation of such
anti-Catholic groups as the New York Protestant Association, dedicated to exposing the inconsistency of popery with civil liberties.”
¹¹
Morse turned his Nativist views into a political career. In 1835, he formed the Native American Democratic Association (“Native American” then meant American-born whites) and became the party's chief spokesman. As a Nativist candidate for mayor in New York City, Morse was blindsided by New York's rough-and-tumble politics and finished a miserable third.

Aside from his predictions that the Catholics would bring catastrophe to American democracy, Morse had included in his warnings the titillating notion of sexual corruption in the Catholic church. He also edited an account of lechery among priests:
Confessions of a Catholic Priest
, published in 1837.
¹²
This was about the same time that Americans were shuddering over scandalous revelations made in another book, which was said to expose corrupt practices within the walls of a Catholic church and convent.

In January 1836, Harper Brothers published a contrived memoir called
The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk
, written by Maria Monk. In it, she recounted a Protestant upbringing, followed by an embrace of Catholicism. But upon her arrival at the Canadian convent, Monk said, she discovered that the nuns were forced to have intercourse with lustful priests and that those who refused were murdered. She also said that the children born of these illicit unions were baptized, then strangled and thrown into a large hole in the basement.

Given complete credence by the American anti-Catholic press, the book was a sensation. Prior to the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist epic,
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, in 1852, Maria Monk's
salacious—by standards of the day—exposé was America's bestselling book. It was all a tissue of lies; and after a second volume appeared, Monk was discredited. She eventually turned to crime and prostitution.

But her fevered reports of abuses in convents captured the imagination of the public, apparently eager to believe the worst. Such rumors and the widespread anti-Catholic sentiment had already led to the destruction of an American convent, in Charlestown, near the Bunker Hill battlefield. The Ursuline nuns, a teaching order specializing in women's education, ran this convent. It included a boarding school for young girls, and most of the students there were Unitarians from Boston, whose well-to-do parents were more concerned with their personal than their spiritual education. But the convent aroused suspicions among the working-class farmers and tradesmen of the area. There were fears and rumors that innocent American girls were being corrupted by papist teachings.

When one of the students ran away in 1832, she told lurid stories of life in the convent. When she was followed by one of the sisters, a Protestant convert (who later returned to the convent), the girl's account of the “unholy” practices of the nuns was confirmed. The picture these two painted also confirmed the fears and suspicions of American Protestants. Tales of severe punishments, such as being forced to lick the floor or to kiss the feet of the mother superior, shocked and appalled Charlestown's Protestants.

On August 14, 1834, a mob gathered at the convent, and the mother superior unwisely warned them, “The Bishop has twenty thousand of the vilest Irishmen at his command, and you may read
your riot act till your throats are sore, but you'll not quell them.”

Instead of thwarting the crowd, the woman's words inflamed it. In a short time, the mob had grown, and it was soon out of control. For years, many of the locals had been hearing grotesque rumors of torture chambers and secret dungeons within the convent. The local men were eager to see these papist horrors for themselves and had also come to teach the nuns a lesson. The crowds ransacked the convent. The historian Carmine A. Prioli described the outrage that night: “As the nuns and schoolgirls were spirited away, the carnage continued. While flames roared through the convent, rioters looted and [set fire to] surrounding buildings, including the bishop's house and library. Then they broke into the mausoleum, opened the coffins and mutilated the remains of the dead.”
¹³

The violence inflicted on the Ursuline convent came just days after the prominent New England minister Lyman Beecher had preached the last of a series of virulently anti-Catholic sermons in Charlestown. When Beecher, the foremost Congregationalist preacher of his day, railed about the need to counteract Catholic practices, he probably did not know that some of Charlestown's men, inspired by visions of the Boston Tea Party, had already decided it was time for another Massachusetts mob to settle matters. Although Beecher's sermons have been implicated as one of the spurs of the violence which followed, the evidence suggests that the men of Charlestown had prepared their assault well before Beecher preached his three sermons. Still, Beecher did clearly voice what this Massachusetts community believed. As the Ursuline convent was consumed in flames, local fire companies called to the scene stood by and watched. Of the twelve men arrested for the violence against
the convent, eleven were acquitted, and the governor later pardoned the twelfth.

A seventh-generation Puritan preacher of old Calvinist convictions, Lyman Beecher was born in New Haven in 1775. He attended Yale, where he was a prize student of Timothy Dwight, grandson of Jonathan Edwards. Beecher then began to preach on Long Island, New York. In 1806, he gained recognition for a sermon concerning Burr and Hamilton's duel. To Beecher, dueling was a vice, like alcohol, and he was vehemently opposed to both.

Beecher and his allies led a powerful reform-minded Second Awakening that was behind the creation of such groups as the American Bible Society, the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance, and the American Home Missionary Society, which together with other reform-minded associations came to be known as the “Benevolent Empire.”

Within a short time, Lyman Beecher had become the most prominent Calvinist preacher of his day; and in 1832 he moved to Cincinnati—supposed site of the future Vatican—in order to found the Lane Theological Seminary. A few years later, he wrote
A Plea for the West
, a call to Americans to move west—well before Horace Greeley's more famous advice, “Go west, young man.” Beecher's idea was to plant the banner of Christianity in the new territories being opened up. Part patriotic cheerleading for aggressive expansionist policies, Beecher's plea included a sharply anti-immigrant message combined with anti-Catholic vitriol. He had emerged as a leading voice of Puritan Nativism.

“A tenth part of the suffrage of the nation, thus condensed and
wielded by the Catholic powers,” wrote Beecher, “might decide our elections, perplex our policy, inflame and divide the nation, break the bond of our union, and throw down our free institutions. The voice of history also warns us, that no sinister influence has ever intruded itself into politics, so virulent and disastrous as that of an ambitious ecclesiastical influence.”
¹⁴

Lyman Beecher's antipapal rhetoric made clear what he thought. “Papal puppets” were threatening American freedom.

 

T
HE GREAT WAVE
of anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic hatred and intolerance did not ebb as the nation entered the 1840s. The Bible Riots of 1844 were only the most deadly and visible example of this streak of secular intolerance, fear, and loathing of the foreign that had consistently appeared in American politics and culture.

During the next few years the anger would deepen as the ranks of the immigrants were swollen by events in Europe, and particularly in Ireland. “The blight came upon Ireland suddenly. As harvest time approached in 1845, the crops looked splendid,” an emigrant remembered. “But one fine morning in July there was a cry around that some blight had struck the potato stalks.” The leaves blackened, the tubers quickly rotted, and ‘a sickly odor of decay' spread over the land…. They constituted a novel, unforeseen and mysterious catastrophe, producing the last major famine in European history: an gorta mór, ‘the great hunger,' in Irish.”
¹⁵

In 1846–1855, more than 1 million Irish died—mostly from starvation and diseases brought on by malnutrition. Millions more
emigrated—some went to England; some went to Australia and elsewhere in the British Empire; and more than 1 million came to America.

This great influx of Irish Catholics fueled Nativist suspicion and animosity. Mixed with the era's economic turmoil, the long-standing hatred of Catholicism accelerated the Nativist movement.

But there was another reality. In Andrew Jackson's Democratic Party—or at least in its northern branches—these immigrants were welcomed. In New York City they were transformed into a bloc of loyal voters that would become part of the machine politics of Tammany Hall. Similar political power brokers operated in Boston and other growing northern urban centers.

In the 1840s, after violence failed to stanch the flow of immigrants into America, the Nativist parties attempted to limit the political power of the new Americans. Regional Nativist parties began coalescing around the aims of denying the vote to noncitizens, making citizenship more difficult, and restricting political offices to native-born Americas. One of these parties, the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, was a secret society formed in 1850. As the story goes, when its members were asked about the party they would simply say they “knew nothing.” Thus, Horace Greeley of the
New York Tribune
dubbed them the “Know-Nothing Party.” The name stuck.

In 1856, Anna Ella Carroll spoke for the Know-Nothings and for many other Americans in a book called
The Great American Battle; Or, the Contest between Christianity and Political Romanism
. In it, she wrote: “Roman Catholics are in the political field, fighting against American liberty; the American Party has come out to meet them in this combat!…I say, then, my children, the American
Party has planted its action against this political movement of the Roman Catholic Church in this dear, blood-bought land.”
¹⁶

A
FTERMATH

M
ANY OF THE
newly arrived immigrants saw the army as their best chance of bed and board, and they were often recruited right off the boats. They were accustomed to military life, as conscription in Europe was commonplace. Immigrants soon made up nearly half the enlisted men in the American army and would quickly be given an opportunity to fight for their new country. America was about to embark on its first war against a neighbor. On April 4, 1846, American sentries fired the first shots in the war against Mexico—at an immigrant deserter swimming across the Rio Grande to the Mexican side of the river.