American Catholics and the quest for equality in the Civil War era

Prologue: All should have an equal chance -- Introduction -- The Mexican-American War and Catholic loyalty -- The remaking of the Catholic community and nativist backlash -- The slavery crisis and the Taney Court -- The elction that rent a nation -- War fever -- First season of war -- Grand campaign...

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1. Verfasser: Curran, Robert Emmett (VerfasserIn)
Format: UnknownFormat
Sprache:eng
Veröffentlicht: Baton Rouge Louisiana State University Press 2023
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Zusammenfassung:Prologue: All should have an equal chance -- Introduction -- The Mexican-American War and Catholic loyalty -- The remaking of the Catholic community and nativist backlash -- The slavery crisis and the Taney Court -- The elction that rent a nation -- War fever -- First season of war -- Grand campaigns -- Slavery and the shifting goals of the war -- The war comes to the Catholic heartland -- Emancipation -- 1863 : the war in the East -- 1863 : the war in the West -- Defining a nation amid an undending war -- 1864 : roads to Atlanta and Richmond -- Catholic agents and the international dimensions of war -- Sherman, Ewing, and Sheridan save Lincoln -- Final campaigns : from the Carolinas to Appomattox -- Assassination and war's end -- The failure of self-reconstruction -- The remaking of the South -- Reconstructions in West and North -- The making of the Catholic ghetto -- Redemption -- Epilogue: Catholic and American -- Aftermaths
"Emmett Curran's masterful treatment of American Catholicism in the Civil War era is the first comprehensive history of the denomination in the North and South before, during, and after the war. It is the story of how the momentous developments of these decades impacted the Catholic community and how Catholics contributed to the reshaping of a nation that survived the greatest threat to its preservation that it has ever faced. It is also a significant part of the story of how the revolution that the war touched off remained unfinished, indeed was turned backward, in no small part by Catholics whose pursuit of "equality" was marred by a truncated vision of who deserved to share in its realization. Throughout early American history, most Protestants considered Catholics to be internal aliens, incapable of becoming full citizens because faith trumped nationality in determining their ultimate allegiance.
By the mid-nineteenth century, conversions and immigration threatened to make them the nation's largest Christian denomination, a prospect particularly alarming to evangelical Protestants. By the late 1840s, most Catholics were foreign-born urban dwellers in the North. That startling demographic change revitalized a nativism that became a major political force, in large part by depicting Catholics as a danger to the republic. In the political realignment of the 1850s over immigration and slavery, Catholics became the backbone of the northern wing of a Democratic Party committed to both. During the Civil War, Catholics on both sides took pride in their transnational religious allegiance, a bond transcending sectional conflict. Most Catholics also shared a commitment to slavery. Northern Catholics initially supported the war since its goal was to preserve the Union, not abolish slavery.
Catholics in the border states became part of the minority favoring the Confederacy, but for many northern Catholics, Lincoln's emancipation proclamation, in violating the property protections that the Constitution provided, delegitimized the war. In the press, in secret organizations, and in the streets, Catholics increasingly denounced the centralization of power and suppression of civil liberties to which the Lincoln administration resorted. Resistance to the war by Catholics became increasingly violent, culminating in the New York City riot of July 1863. Catholics became vital members of the Sons of Liberty and other organizations which sought to force a peace settlement by whatever means necessary. They were also part of the conspiracy to kidnap President Lincoln, which morphed into the president's assassination. That complicity exacerbated charges of disloyalty that Catholic resistance to the war had stirred over its latter course.
Beschreibung:x, 458 Seiten
24,3 cm
ISBN:9780807179307
978-0-8071-7930-7