Franchot, Jenny

Roads to Rome http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft1x0nb0f3&chunk.id=0&doc.v... Preferred Citation: Franchot, Jenny. Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1994 1994. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft1x0nb0f3/ Roads to Rome The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism Jenny Franchot UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford © 1994 The Regents of the University of California To My Beloved Mother Preferred Citation: Franchot, Jenny. Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1994 1994. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft1x0nb0f3/ To My Beloved Mother ― xiii ― ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe a debt of gratitude to the many people who have helped to bring this book into being. First I wish to thank the English Department faculty at Stanford University, where I began this project as a dissertation. The encouragement and guidance I received while a graduate student there was critical to this undertaking. I especially want to acknowledge Professor Jay Fliegelman, who not only directed the dissertation but who has continued to share his brilliance and his humor, encouraging me at crucial moments to take heart and complete the book. I also wish to thank my colleagues in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. In particular, James Breslin, Frederick Crews, Catherine Gallagher, Stephen Greenblatt, and Steven Knapp have all forwarded the progress of this book by their friendship and warm support. I also owe a particular debt to Mitchell Breitwieser for his deeply attentive reading of this work at an earlier stage that opened new perspectives upon the project. In other departments of the Berkeley campus, Margaretta Lovell in Art History, Dell Upton in Architecture, and Larry Levine in History have all been valued colleagues. My especial thanks to Dell Upton for sending me items of nineteenth-century "Romanism" discovered during his own research travels. Farther afield, Norman Grabo of the Department of English, University of Tulsa, has been an irreplaceable friend and mentor who long ago introduced me to the splendors of American literature. 1 of 320 5/21/2006 4:40 PM Roads to Rome http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft1x0nb0f3&chunk.id=0&doc.v... I owe a very particular debt to one scholarly friend who kept this project going when it threatened to languish into private contemplation. Walter Herbert of Southwestern University read the manuscript ― xiv ― at an early stage and used it as an opportunity to encourage my intellectual growth and our friendship; in several respects, this book in its final form has emerged from his mentorship and his own profound insights into human motivation that have helped me considerably to understand antebellum Protestantism. I wish to thank my research assistants who have cheerfully helped me track down many volumes: Anna Chodakiewicz and Carolyn Guile. Two students of mine, Sandra Gustafson and Lori Merish, have also proved to be not only wonderful but patient colleagues as I worked my way through Roads to Rome . The quality of their own work has many times been an inspiration and encouragement to me. During my teaching career at Berkeley, a Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities Fellowship allowed me valuable leave time and the opportunity to converse with scholars from refreshingly different disciplines. A Regents Junior Faculty Research Grant and a Committee on Teaching Minigrant also helped toward completion of the book. I also wish to thank the following institutions for their permission to reproduce documents or pictures in their possession: the Massachusetts Historical Society; the Yale Art Gallery; the Worcester Art Gallery; the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; the Boalt Law School Library, University of California, Berkeley; the Stowe-Day Foundation; the Archives of the Sisters of Charity, Emmitsburg, Maryland. The production of this manuscript has been enabled by two wonderful word-processors, Shayna Dubbin and Melinda Colón. Shayna Dubbin especially entered into this project with great generosity of spirit and dedication of her time. At the University of California Press, Doris Kretschmer and Stephanie Fay have been very helpful editors. I wish particularly to thank Stephanie Fay for the patient and scrupulous attention she has devoted to the manuscript. In addition, I wish to thank Andrew S. Robertson, M.D., for his care and friendship, which have greatly enabled my ability to complete this work. Nancy Ruttenburg of the Department of Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley, has been a close friend to me and this book for several years. Her friendship has given me the strength to survive what have at times seemed insurmountable challenges. My husband, Thomas C. Dashiell, and our daughter, Lily, have often wondered when this book might be done. But they have always asked ― xv ― with patience and affection and given of themselves whenever and however they could. Finally, I wish to add that my mother, Janet Kerr Howell, is the guiding spirit behind this project. Truly this book comes from those days she devoted to me as a child, listening to my thoughts and sharing her own. She continues to be my greatest teacher. ― xvii ― INTRODUCTION This book argues that anti-Catholicism operated as an imaginative category of discourse through which antebellum American writers of popular and elite fictional and historical texts indirectly voiced the tensions and limitations of mainstream Protestant culture. The project began from my reading of the New England reformer Orestes Brownson, author of a trenchant analysis of class conflict in antebellum America entitled "The Laboring Classes"—an essay whose focus on class conflict as a source of social and ethical injustice in antebellum America was virtually unique for its time. Within five years of writing that essay, Brownson converted to Roman Catholicism and embarked on a lifetime career as embattled spokesman for the Catholic church in America. How was it that a thinker renowned for his radical politics, fierce rationalism, and impatience with religious orthodoxy could adopt a faith deeply suspected by Protestant America for its absolutism, "Jesuitical" conspiracies, and immigrant challenges to a largely Protestant work force?[1] Was Brownson morally unstable, a man whose ideological shifts 2 of 320 5/21/2006 4:40 PM Roads to Rome http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft1x0nb0f3&chunk.id=0&doc.v... from Presbyterianism through Transcendentalism and into Roman Catholicism signaled a familiar, if unenviable, need on the part of wearied post-Enlightenment thinkers for an irreducible certainty? Or did Brown-son's conversion signify more than an eccentric (and, to many of his New England contemporaries, perverse) example of the turn toward a mysterious interiority, a phenomenon evasive to culture, obedient rather to psychological imperatives connected to culture only through the private exigencies of biography? In answering this question, I found that many others emerged. What was the Protestant, and more precisely New England, perception of Roman Catholicism in antebellum America, and how did it determine the ― xviii ― understanding of a rapidly expanding American Catholicism? Was that perception reducible to the coherence of an ideology variously inflected by class affiliation, gender, race, and region but not fundamentally altered by them? Exactly what functions did the Protestant image of Roman Catholicism as the "foreign faith" lodged at the heart of American Christendom serve in articulating and organizing a Protestant middle-class identity? Why, finally, was that identity so fragile? As the famous Congregational minister Horace Bushnell warned in his sermon alleging papal conspiracies at work in the American West, "Nothing is necessary to make room for Romanism, but to empty us of all opposing qualities."[2] Why was such a self-emptying seen as potentially so effortless, so imminent? Roads to Rome developed as my attempt to answer these questions. Catholicism (both anti and pro) functioned as a powerful rhetorical and political force during the antebellum decades. The antebellum Protestant encounter with Rome, located along a wide range of cultural enterprises, from intensely private spiritual quests to widespread nativist movements, presents itself as a necessarily interdisciplinary object of study. To uncover the cultural importance of the theological debate fiercely waged between American Protestants and Catholics, this book analyzes a range of generically disparate texts: histories, domestic novels, pulp fiction, poetry, correspondence, and canonical literary narrative. From 1830 to 1860 various events brought Catholicism to the attention of Protestant Americans: the English Catholic Emancipation Bill of 1829, Irish immigration to America during the 1840s, urban labor riots that divided along religious (as well as class) lines, the Mexican-American War of 1846, the rise of the nativist and Know-Nothing movements, and, finally, tourism to Catholic Europe, made possible by the new steamship travel. While markedly distinct social practices, these events nonetheless produced a coherent discourse in which "Romanism" functioned as metaphoric construct and surrogate for Roman Catholicism. That construct embraced not only the Roman Catholic church as a historical institution in nineteenth-century America but also

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