CATHOLICS INCORPORATED: CLASS, POWER, AND THE POLITICS OF ASSIMILATION IN NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICA By PATRICK T. MCGRATH A dissertation submitted to the School of Graduate Studies Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in History Written under the direction of T.J. Jackson Lears And approved by _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October 2017 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Catholics Incorporated: Class, Power, and the Politics of Assimilation in Nineteenth Century America By PATRICK T. MCGRATH Dissertation Director: T.J. Jackson Lears This project takes as its subject the integration of Catholicism into nineteenth-century American society, politics, and culture. Adopting a cross-regional approach, the dissertation argues that by midcentury the Church was far better integrated into the American South than the North, and had forged a powerful alliance with the Southern planter elite and the Southern-dominated Democratic Party. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Church increasingly forged an alliance with the growing Irish- American middle-class, whose influence within Democratic politics proved critical to the advancement of Catholic interests. During the Gilded Age the Church itself proved an arena of ideological conflict, as working-class radicals and Irish-American elites sought to define the Church’s relationship to power and poverty. In the 1890s, however, many working-class radicals returned to the Church and embraced Catholic conservatism. At 1900 the Irish-dominated institutional Church defined itself as a bulwark of conservatism, moral order, and “American” values against the threat of secular radicals and liberals. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have accrued countless debts over the past eight years to friends, family, and colleagues. My mother, Margaret McGrath, provided endless encouragement and support, particularly during trying times. My siblings, Timothy and Aileen McGrath, provided models of academic achievement and self-discipline from an early age. My wife’s parents, Andrew Bowes and Catherine McMahon, provided ample support and encouragement during the writing of this dissertation. Their cottage in the Blue Mountains was an ideal place to think and write. I want to thank the members of my dissertation committee for believing in this project and ushering it into existence. Ann Fabian read and commented on endless drafts and provided sharp insights on nearly every page. Paul Hanebrink helped channel my often chaotic thoughts and ambitions into clear and practical plans. James T. Fisher provided stimulating conversation, boundless enthusiasm, and an unparalleled knowledge of Catholic and Irish-American history. T.J. Jackson Lears, who supervised the dissertation, helped me to formulate and sharpen my arguments and ideas through countless conversations, while offering much-needed encouragement during difficult times. I would like to thank the various members of Rutgers faculty who provided guidance, insight, and friendship over the years, especially Temma Kaplan, David Foglesong, James Delbourgo, Camilla Townsend, Paul Clemens, Suzanne Lebsock, Michael Adas, Nancy Hewitt, Steven Lawson, Toby Jones, Peter Silver, Alastair Bellany, Melissa Feinberg, Seth Koven, and James Reed. Dawn Ruskai rescued me from various bureaucratic mishaps. iii My years as a graduate student were blessed with the support of friends and colleagues, especially Ben Resnick-Day, Nova Robinson, Christina Chiknas, Judge Glock, Travis Jeffres, Steve McGrail, Luis-Alejandro Dinella-Borrega, Thomas Cossetino, and Lytton McDonnell. I would particularly like to thank the Brooklyn- Rutgers contingent of A.J. Blandford, Dave Reid, Amy Zanoni, Hilary Buxton, Kaisha Esty, and Hannah Shaw for their company and conversation during long drives to New Brunswick. I am grateful to the many archivists who assisted me over the years. In particular, I would like to thank the archivists at the Archdiocesan Archives of New York, the Burns Library at Boston College, the Philadelphia Archdiocesan Historical Research Center, the University Archives at the Catholic University of America, the St. Louis University Archives and Special Collections, the Spring Hill College Archives and Special Collections, the Archives and Manuscripts Division at the New York Public Library, and the American Irish Historical Society. The project received financial support from the Mellon Foundation and the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at Notre Dame. My greatest debt is to my wife, Julia Bowes. Julia has lived with this project from its inception. Julia has read and commented on drafts, proofread chapters, saved me from endless technological and administrative problems, and sharpened my thinking through countless conversations. But most important, she has filled my life with love and joy. My father, Stephen J. McGrath, did not live to see this project to its completion. But his deep love of history, Irish America, and the Catholic Church suffuse these pages. I dedicate this project to him. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Acknowledgments iii List of Illustrations vi Introduction: The New York City Draft Riots and the Ambiguities of Americanism 1 Chapter One: The Social Geography of Antebellum Catholicism 16 Chapter Two: Catholic Cavaliers, Protestant Yankees: Cross-Regional Expressions of Catholicism in the Civil War Era ` 68 Chapter Three: Pathways to Power: Religion, Ethnicity, and Political Capital in New York 128 Chapter Four: The Populist Revolution in American Catholicism, 1840-1860 167 Chapter Five: Celts, Catholics, and Capitalists: Irish-Catholicism and the Protestant Ethic 227 Conclusion: Revolt and Reconciliation: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Radicalism 275 Bibliography 288 v List of Illustrations 1.1. Roger Taney 37 1.2. Visitation Convent 44 1.3. St. Louis University 49 1.4. Manhattanville Convent 62 2.1: John Surratt 121 3.1 Rosemary: Or Life and Death 136 3.2. Cardinal McCloskey and John Kelly 144 3.3. John Kelly 146 3.4. Hugh McLaughlin 146 3.5. The “Tweed” Courthouse 148 3.6. James T. Brady 152 3.7. John R. Brady 152 3.8. The Manhattan Club 154 3.9. Charles O’Conor 159 4.1. The “Old” St. Patrick’s Cathedral 168 4.2. John Hughes 175 4.3. St. John’s Church 187 4.4. Carroll Hall 199 5.1. Mary Lee: Or the Yankee in Ireland 242 5.2. An “Old English Mode of Branding Women” 244 5.3. Mary Anne Sadlier 250 5.4. St. Patrick’s Cathedral 268 vi 1 Introduction: The New York City Draft Riots and the Ambiguities of Americanism In the early summer of 1863, at the height of the American Civil War, Orestes A. Brownson publicly accused his fellow American Catholics of mass disloyalty, if not outright treason, against the government of the United States. An esteemed Yankee writer and philosopher who had converted to Catholicism in 1845, the New England-born Brownson had clashed with his fellow Catholics for nearly two decades over the traditions of the Church and their relation to American culture.1 A predominantly foreign- born community composed almost entirely of Irish and German migrants, American Catholics had proved, in Brownson’s view, to be an ignorant peasant folk accustomed to Old World absolutism and pagan superstition—a "foreign" people with "no clear understanding of their religion.”2 But if American Catholics had long proved unschooled in theological orthodoxy and deficient in liturgical practice, under the pressures of rebellion and civil war they had shown themselves to be something far more sinister. They were “people on the side of slavery and disloyalty”—defenders and allies of the slaveholding South. “Go where we will in the loyal States,” Brownson wrote in June of that year, "and we find nearly every Catholic we meet a Southern sympathizer, an intense hater of the abolitionist, and more ready to see the Union divided, or reconstructed, under Jeff Davis … than to see it restored by the extinction of slavery.”3 1 For an overview of Brownson’s life and conversion to Catholicism, see Arthur M. Schlesinger, Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim’s Progress (Boston: Little, Browns, and Co., 1939); Theodore Maynard, Orestes Brownson: Yankee, Radical, Catholic (New York: Macmillan, 1943). 2 Joseph Gower and Richard Leliaert, eds., The Brownson-Hecker Correspondence (Notre Dame, Indiana: The University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 126. 3 Orestes Brownson, “Are Catholics Proslavery and Disloyal,” Brownson’s Quarterly Review 4 (Summer 1863), 378, 369-370. Brownson in the 1840s had been a persistent critic of abolitionism, but by the time of the Civil War he had come to support the antislavery cause; his complicated relationship with slavery has 2 Entitled “Are Catholics Proslavery and Disloyal?” and published in the summer issue of Brownson’s New York-based Quarterly Review, the essay condemned the American Catholic clergy, the Catholic press, and the vast majority of the Catholic laity for publicly defending the institution of slavery and sympathizing with the Confederate cause. For more than a decade, Brownson charged, the clergy and the Catholic press had persistently denounced abolition as the plot of New England fanatics; defended chattel slavery as an institution consistent with, if not favorable to, the traditions of Catholic civilization; and everywhere marshaled their political and social influence in support of the