University of New Hampshire University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository Doctoral Dissertations Student Scholarship Spring 2015 Beyond Boston: Catholicism in the Northern New Borderlands in the Nineteenth Century Molly Gallaher Boddy University of New Hampshire, Durham Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation Recommended Citation Gallaher Boddy, Molly, "Beyond Boston: Catholicism in the Northern New Borderlands in the Nineteenth Century" (2015). Doctoral Dissertations. 2189. https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation/2189 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Scholarship at University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. BEYOND BOSTON: CATHOLICISM IN THE NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND BORDERLANDS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY BY MOLLY BURNS GALLAHER BODDY BA, Stonehill College, 2009 MA, University of New Hampshire, 2011 DISSERTATION Submitted to the University of New Hampshire in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History May, 2015 ii This dissertation has been examined and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History by: Dissertation Director, Lucy E. Salyer, Associate Professor of History Eliga H. Gould, Professor of History J. William Harris, Professor of History Kurk Dorsey, Professor of History James O’Toole, Professor of History, Boston College On April 13, 2015 Original approval signatures are on file with the University of New Hampshire Graduate School. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I’d like to offer many thanks to my dissertation advisor, Lucy Salyer, for all of her time and support during my entire PhD program. Her advice and guidance have been invaluable. I’d also like to thank the UNH History Department and Graduate School for their ongoing support. Thanks to the many archives and archivists who helped me complete my dissertation. Special thanks to Robert Johnson-Lally and Thomas Lester at the Archives of the Archdiocese of Boston; Sr. Rita-Mae Bissonnette at the Archives of the Diocese of Portland; Msgr. John McDermott at the Archives of the Diocese of Burlington; the staff at the University of Vermont’s Bailey Special Collections; and the staff at the University of Maine at Fort Kent’s Acadian Archives. Finally, great thanks to many graduate student friends in the UNH History Department and to my always-supportive family. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS …………………………………………………………...................iii ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………….v CHAPTER PAGE INTRODUCTION: AN “AMERICAN” CATHOLIC CHURCH? ................................................1 I. CHEVERUS AND CARROLL: AMERICAN CATHOLICISM’S DIVERSE ORIGINS, 1800- 1825………………………………………………………………………………………………20 II. BISHOP FENWICK’S DIOCESE IN FLAMES, 1825-1846…………………………….......41 III. EDWARD KAVANAGH’S MAINE, 1795-1844……………………………………….......85 IV. FRONTIER MISSIONARY IN A CATHOLIC BORDERLAND: JEREMIAH O’CALLAGHAN AND THE VERMONT CHURCH, 1830-1853……………………………121 V. AN INTELLECTUAL FRONTIER: VERMONT CONVERSION, 1825-1900……………154 VI. DEGOESBRIAND’S VERMONT, BACON’S MAINE AND FITZPATRICK’S BOSTON: THE CASE FOR A UNIQUE NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND CATHOLICISM, 1853 AND BEYOND…………………………………………………………………………………….....191 VII. CONCLUSION: NEW ENGLAND CATHOLICS, A RECONSIDERATION………......223 BIBLIOGRAPY………………………………………………………………………………...228 v ABSTRACT BEYOND BOSTON: CATHOLICISM IN THE NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND BORDERLANDS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY by Molly Burns Gallaher Boddy University of New Hampshire, May, 2015 This study uncovers the religious and ethnic history of northern New England- Maine and Vermont- which has remained for too long on the periphery of scholars’ attention. In 1836, the Vermont Catholic missionary priest Jeremiah O’Callaghan warned members of the New England Catholic Church that “our own Catholicks (are) every where scattered in the woods,” writing not only of the hostile outside Protestant world faced by Catholics in Vermont during the nineteenth century, but also of the difficulty of ministering to such a geographically removed or “scattered” rural population.1 Still today, the story of these northern New England Catholics that O’Callaghan found so hard to reach remains invisible to historians. The extensive literature on the history of the American Catholic Church maintains a strict geographic and ethnic focus. It rarely ventures into the northern borderlands, focusing instead on the more central city of 1 Jeremiah O’Callaghan, The Creation and Offspring of the Protestant Church; also the Vagaries and Heresies of John Henry Hopkins, Protestant Bishop; and of other False Teachers. To Which is Added a Treatise of the Holy Scriptures, Priesthood and Matrimony (Burlington, Vermont: Printed for the Author, 1837), iii. vi Boston, the apparent site of New England Catholicism’s “birth” with the arrival of Irish Famine- era immigrants. Yet, I argue that well before Boston emerged as the powerful center of New England Catholicism, rural Catholics, independent missionaries, and struggling bishops built the Catholic religion in the northern borderlands despite a dire lack of resources and a crippling absence of central authority. In close proximity to Canada, French-Canadian, Native American, and English-speaking Catholics lived in a malleable religious world, one not divided by the firm parish, diocesan, or national boundaries that would later come to define the structure of American Catholicism. An Irish-led, urban-centered, geographically rigid model of “American Catholicism” was not a foregone conclusion. In fact, before this time, the very idea of “American” Catholicism was a fluid one. New England Catholicism’s expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century owed as much to the practice of the religion in Canada and the northern borderlands as it did to Irish immigration. Drawing on frontier and borderlands studies, my dissertation is situated within an increasingly important historical framework that allows us to reconsider the rigidity of national boundaries and instead envision a broader idea of American history. Here, the story of the borderlands’ connection with Canada suggests that “American Catholicism” is more correctly “North American Catholicism.” This dissertation moves away from a limiting or “parish boundaries” concept of ethnic and institutional history, describing instead a transnational, open region where Catholic laity and clergy alike shaped their faith to fit their needs, despite (or even because of) living on the institutional and geographic margins of both the United States and the Catholic Church. Evidence in the form of personal diaries and correspondence between early vii bishops and missionary priests shows that northern New England was home to many Catholics in need of sacraments long before the expansion of Boston Irish Catholicism. 1 INTRODUCTION: AN “AMERICAN” CATHOLIC CHURCH? In January of 1811, the French émigré priest John Cheverus, the first bishop of the newly created Diocese of Boston, made Bishop Joseph-Octave Plessis of Quebec his Vicar General. This allowed Plessis to function as “almost-bishop” of Boston when Cheverus was unavailable, giving the Sacraments and acting as an administrator throughout New England. Though Cheverus was now an American bishop, under the watch of Archbishop John Carroll of Baltimore, Quebec was Boston’s closest Catholic neighbor. Catholics outside of Boston were so few and scattered that the Diocese covered all of New England, and northern New Englanders often had more contact with French-Canadian missionaries than American ones. In certain regions, Catholics might not even consider themselves either “Canadian” or “American.” Northern Maine was still contested territory, and its formal political border with New Brunswick would not be finalized until 1842. As Cheverus explained to Plessis, the New England diocesan boundaries drawn by Rome made cooperation between the two bishops necessary. “I will try to obtain from Baltimore a copy of the Bull indicating the limits of the different dioceses, and I will try to have it sent to you,” Cheverus wrote to Plessis in French, the native language of both men. He went on to explain that the two regions were closely linked, noting “My diocese touches yours East by the district of Maine towards the frontier of New Brunswick, North by the State of Vermont, and in the Northwest of the district of Maine on the frontier of Canada. My diocese comprises the whole of New England, namely: Massachusetts and Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont.” To complicate matters further, “The Diocese of New York, which 2 also touches yours, embraces all the State of New York and New Jersey.”1 For North American Catholics, America and Canada were bound together not only by geography and history, but also by religion and overlapping churches. Though New France received its first bishop, Laval, in 1658, the boundaries between Quebec and what would soon become the northern United States were less than clear.2 New England Catholics grew up in the shadow of the Canadian Church, just as southwestern Catholics had found themselves in the orbit of the Mexican Catholic Church from the time of sixteenth-century Spanish missionaries.3 Before major European Catholic immigration to the United