Guarding the Civic Culture: What to Do About Catholic Immigration
By 1820 there were 200,000 Catholics in the U.S. Hostility arose, particularly after the first provincial council of Catholic bishops in 1829 urged the establishment of Catholic schools in each community to be supported by public funds as were the secular common schools, and as unemployment in Ireland stimulated the exodus of slightly more than 200,000 immigrants to the U.S. during the decade of the 1830s. Exhortations to Catholics by Protestant ministers to read the Protestant Bible, to discover the Gospel, and to witness for Christ were frequently linked to attacks on the papacy as a symbol of tyrannical power.
From the perspective of Protestant militants, the Roman Catholic church was an enemy of freedom because it did not accept churches as voluntary associations or the idea that an individual encounter with God without the intervention of priests and sacraments was the way to salvation. The Catholic church could not claim to be free from the authority and dictation of foreigners who were seen as enemies of personal liberty and of the institutions that had been designed to protect and extend it.
Yet, Tocqueville wrote of religious peace in the United States in 1833 and, from a European perspective, he was largely right. In 1835, Roger Taney, a devout Roman Catholic, was appointed and confirmed as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. But the general religious harmony of the 1830s was marred by incidents in Philadelphia and in other cities and would be shattered in the next two decades when the potato blight of 1845–1847 left hundreds of thousands dead or starving in Ireland. The number of immigrants jumped from 200,000 in the 1830s to 781,000 in the 1840s and 914,000 in the following decade. The vast majority would not even have qualified as immigrants in the 1980s, on several grounds—poverty, illness, and no family relations. But the mid-nineteenth century American appetite for settlers and laborers was insatiable.
Most Irish crowded into wretched tenements in the cities or shacks in the marshlands or outlying districts, and were frequently plagued by disease and drink. Many entered almshouses, mental institutions, and prisons (by mid-century, more than half of the criminal offenses recorded in the U.S. were committed by immigrants, mostly by the Irish). Often willing to work at hauling heavy loads, cleaning stables, and sweeping streets for wages lower than those acceptable to many native-born Americans, they would have provoked the antagonism of poor, unskilled native workers even if they had not practiced a “foreign” religion with its statues, crucifixes, and ornate vestments.
There was street fighting in several cities between poor Catholics and Protestants in the 1830s and 1840s, burning of churches, and stoning of houses. But cheap labor was badly needed to work in the factories and mines, to build the bridges and roads, and to serve as domestics in the homes of the affluent. If upper- and upper-middle-class Whigs wanted the Irish to do the dirty jobs, leaders of the Democratic party wanted their votes. The Democratic platforms of 1840, 1844, 1848, and 1852, employing the language of the civic culture, praised “the liberal principles embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence and sanctioned in the Constitution, which makes ours the land of liberty, and the asylum of the oppressed of every nation” in opposition to nativist efforts to lengthen the waiting time of newcomers for naturalization and to restrict their privileges as citizens.8
By 1850, the Irish constituted 42 percent of the foreign-born population in the U.S. The Catholic population reached two million. One thousand priests served nearly fifteen hundred churches and Mass stations, ruled by a hierarchy of thirty-five bishops, mostly Irish; the Irish became a target of Anglo-American Protestant attacks. Anti-Catholic agitation between 1830 and 1850 was based on a mixture of xenophobic, sectarian, and economic, as well as ideological fears, but it was often couched in patriotic slogans about the defense of Americanism. “They come here ignorant and poor, without a knowledge of our institutions,” intoned The New England Magazine in 1834.9 A U.S. House of Representatives Report in 1838, speaking of the new Irish immigrants, insisted, “The character of our free institutions was not adapted for such citizens; nor did the framers of those institutions contemplate the nature and mental character of the bulk of those who have since blotted our country.”10
Some of the Americanizers were confident that even though the Irish belonged to a church that seemed idolatrous and were used to servile dependence, they could adapt to American society if given the opportunity. A Dartmouth professor speaking before the 1841 annual meeting of the New England Society (a fraternal, charitable organization open to native-born New Englanders or their sons resident in New York) argued that the “common institutions of government and education” in the U.S. created a uniform national character that obliterated differences of class, region, and even religion.11 The common culture—he did not call it the “civic culture”—would make immigrants into Americans. But others were just as certain that the avarice of employers for cheap laborers and the lust of Democratic party leaders for servile followers threatened the foundations of the American republic.
The American inventor and painter, and the first president of the National Academy of Arts and Design, Samuel F. B. Morse, tried to sound an alarm in 1835 with a pamphlet, Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States Through Foreign Immigration, that pointed to the immigration of Catholics as a dire threat to free institutions. He reminded readers of Jefferson’s worry that foreigners would bring foreign principles of government with them and might render American legislation into “a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”12 In days past, immigration had not been threatening, argued Morse, because immigrants had come “from the ranks of the learned and the good, from the enlightened mechanic and artisan, and intelligent husbandmen.” Forgetting the large numbers of paupers and convicts who had emigrated from Europe throughout the seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries, Morse maintained that Europe had sent “real lovers of liberty, to the benefit of America.” But “now,” Morse claimed, “emigrants are selected for a service to their tyrants, and by their tyrants, not for their affinity to liberty, but for their mental servitude, and their docility in obeying the orders of their priests.”13
It was an argument that spurred the rise of the native American movement, whose leaders called for a long residency requirement for immigrants before naturalization. Some proposed a constitutional amendment to keep naturalized citizens from holding office. Still, few nativists argued that immigration should be stopped altogether. Immigrants were needed as workers. The principal goal of the Americanists was to allow the Irish full citizenship only when they were ready to participate in a republican form of government. One member of Congress, a representative of the American Republican (nativist) party from Pennsylvania, urged that “we be faithful to our own creed of freedom, … by asking that the alien shall be naturalized in mind, in heart, in soul, by a residence sufficiently long to wean him from his first love, and engraft on his understanding the knowledge that dignifies a free man.”14 The problem, from the nativist point of view, was, in Morse’s words, “that popery is opposed in its very nature to Democratic Republicanism; and it is, therefore, as a political system, as well as a religious, opposed to civil and religious liberty and consequently to our form of government.”15
Many Americans were appalled when Monsignor Gaetano Bedini, who had helped squelch the uprisings of 1848 and 1849 in Italy and who was associated with the resurgence of monarchy there, was sent to settle a controversy within the Catholic communities of Buffalo and Philadelphia on whether church property should be legally held in trusteeship by the laity or, as Rome directed, by the clergy. Here was Bedini, an official of the Roman Catholic church, telling American citizens what they should do. He was burned in effigy in Boston and Baltimore, manhandled as he entered the bishop’s carriage in Pittsburgh, and saved from possible assassination in Wheeling, West Virginia, only by quick action of several hundred armed Irishmen who guarded him and the churches of the city.16
The Americanist