members of the polity on a basis of equal rights with native-born citizens regardless of the country they came from or the religion they believed in, Americans laid the basis for the civic culture that emerged in the early decades of the Republic: Article VI of the Constitution (prohibition of a religious test for holding any office or public trust); the First Amendment (separation of church and state, freedom of religion, freedom of speech); and later the Fourteenth Amendment (equal protection of the laws). But not all of the Massachusetts idea had been lost. The view that entry into political membership should be based on one’s religious affiliation had been defeated, but it would surface repeatedly in opposition to Irish Catholic immigration and naturalization. The view of the Puritans that the settlement of the new land was providential and that the settlers had entered into a covenant with God to create a new life for men and women led to the sanctification of the civic culture by the civil religion. Massachusetts could claim a large share in the origins of the civil religion, including the national motto (“In God We Trust”); the references to divine guidance and inspiration in major presidential speeches; the prayers that open every session of Congress; the references to God in the Pledge of Allegiance and in patriotic songs (“My Country ’Tis of Thee,” “America the Beautiful,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and “God Bless America”). The civic culture was born in Pennsylvania; the civil religion had its origins in theocratic Massachusetts.
By 1845, membership in the civic culture was still limited to white persons, a large majority of whom were Protestants. In the South, about 40 percent of the population was enslaved. Slavery was a massive contradiction to the ideals, principles, and institutions of the civic culture. But slave revolts were put down ruthlessly. Racism—belief in the inherent inferiority of persons of color—enabled most whites to ignore or even rationalize the contradiction. Some faced it and feared its consequences. Tocqueville saw conflict between whites and blacks in the South as inevitable. He called it a “danger” which “perpetually haunts the imagination of Americans, like a painful dream.”116 Grund saw the situation of free blacks in the North as worse than that of enslaved blacks. Whites, he predicted, would drive them to the meanest employment and their eventual ruin.117 The sympathy of Tocqueville and Grund for blacks was distant, even cold, for they were enamored with another story, that of white Americans’ democracy.
Chapter Two
“REINFORCEMENTS TO REPUBLICANISM”
Irish Catholic Response to the Civic Culture
ON THE evening of September 12, 1960, before several hundred Protestant ministers and laymen in the Crystal Ballroom of the Rice Hotel in Houston, John F. Kennedy gave the clearest and most eloquent statement ever made by a presidential candidate on religion and politics in American life. A minister who was present reflected that the meeting had had many of the characteristics of an “inquisition.” Although Kennedy was a fourth-generation American, grandson of a mayor of Boston, son of an ambassador to England, and a U.S. senator who had sworn allegiance to the American Constitution, as a Catholic, he had to prove that he was American enough to hold the presidency.
Kennedy had been reassured by his friend John Wright, Catholic bishop of Pittsburgh, that, contrary to public belief, no public act of a president could lead to his excommunication and that he had not, as a Catholic, sworn allegiance to the Pope. “I am not the Catholic candidate for President,” Kennedy told the clergymen, “I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my Church on public matters, and the Church does not speak for me.” When Kennedy was asked by a minister to appeal to Richard Cardinal Cushing to present his views on church and state to the Vatican so that they might become the authorized views of all Roman Catholics in the United States, the candidate replied, “As I do not accept the right of, as I said, any ecclesiastical official to tell me what I should do in the sphere of my public responsibility as an elected official, I do not propose also to ask Cardinal Cushing to ask the Vatican to take some action.” Applause burst from the audience; the minister rose to state his admiration for Kennedy’s courage, but doubted that the senator’s views represented the position of his church. The candidate shot back: “I believe I am stating the viewpoint that Catholics in this country hold toward that happy relationship which exists between church and state.” The minister responded, “Let me ask you, sir, do you state it with the approval of the Vatican?” Kennedy replied, “I don’t have to have approval.”1
Kennedy shared Jefferson’s view on religious freedom and separation of church and state. Religious freedom had become a main foundation of voluntary pluralism by the 1830s, but its champions had never contemplated a challenge of the magnitude presented by Irish Catholic immigration in the years following the Irish potato blight of 1845–1847. Several of the founders of the new republic who believed so strongly in religious freedom for Protestants held deep and persistent anti-Catholic prejudices. Only thirty years before the Declaration of Independence and twenty-seven years before the passage of the Virginia Statute to Disestablish the Anglican Religion, Virginia’s House of Burgesses prevented Catholics from acting as guardians, or serving as witnesses, congregating in large groups, carrying arms, or even keeping a horse valued at more than five pounds.2 Fear of Catholicism was so great that when Great Britain passed the Quebec Act in 1774 extending toleration to Catholics in Quebec and to French settlers of the Ohio Valley, Alexander Hamilton complained that the English threatened New York with Popery.
The anti-Catholic sentiments of such republicans as John Jay, Patrick Henry, and John Adams were bolstered by the opposition of the Church in Europe to movements for self-government. Jay was astonished that “a British Parliament should ever consent to establish in that country [Canada] a religion that has deluged your island in blood and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder and rebellion throughout every part of the world.”3 In South Carolina, an effigy of the Pope was burned in a bonfire fueled with English tea leaves; in Maryland, a double land tax was levied on Catholics. Boston (where Paul Revere produced anti-Catholic engravings) and other American towns revived the American holiday “Pope Day,” which featured a large parade that ended in the burning of an effigy of the Pope.4
On the eve of the Revolution, Catholics, small in number, were easy to assimilate, according to Crèvecoeur. Writing about life on the New York frontier perhaps only a year or two before Jay’s fulminations against the Quebec Act, he saw “strict modes of Christianity” abandoned because each man, preoccupied with his own land, horses, and produce, lost interest in pushing his religious views on others. “How does it concern the welfare of the country, or of the provinces at large, what this man’s religious sentiments are, or really whether he has any religion at all?” asked Crèvecoeur in a query similar to Jefferson’s remark a few years later that it neither picked his pocket nor broke his leg if his neighbors worshiped twenty gods or no god.5 Confidently predicting that religious indifference and tolerance would grow from generation to generation, Crèvecoeur did not foresee the immigration of huge numbers of Irish Catholics to the growing cities of America.
Crèvecoeur’s prediction held for about forty years. Although public celebrations on behalf of freedom preceding and during the Revolution often included diatribes against the Pope, the virtually unanimous support that the small number of American Catholic leaders gave to the cause of independence and the assistance of France against England inhibited anti-Catholic attacks. The practical requirements of organizing an insurrection and then a revolution also undermined anti-Catholicism. The same First Continental Congress that resented the Quebec Act invited the Quebecois to join with them in fighting the British. Later, Benjamin Franklin, who attempted to involve the Quebecois with the Continental Army, visited Ireland to cultivate the friendship of leaders of the fight for Catholic emancipation there and persuaded Congress to send a message of solidarity to Catholics in Ireland. The Revolutionary leaders were practical men who wanted to win their independence; they had no trouble accepting the help of France, one of the most Catholic nations in Europe.
After the war, American patriots no longer warned that Jesuits were the advance agents of the Pope and conspiring to destroy American liberties; now they denounced the Loyalist newspapers that reflected anxieties born of vanished privileges and status.6 Although