Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War 0199948674, 9780199948673

Table of contents :
Cover
Missionaries of Republicanism
RELIGION IN AMERICA
Copyright
Contents
The Mexican-American War
Acknowledgments
Missionaries of Republicanism
Introduction
1 The Rise and Influence of Anti-Catholicism, 1834–1844
2 Religion, Race, and Texas Annexation
3 Election, Manifest Destiny, and War
4 Religion and Recruitment
5 Religion and Wartime Politics
6 The American Soldier in Mexico
7 Protestant Leaders and the War
8 Bringing about the Republican Millennium
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Missionaries of Republicanism

RELIGION IN AMERICA Harry S. Stout, General Editor Recent titles in the series: NATHANIEL TAYLOR, NEW HAVEN THEOLOGY, AND THE LEGACY OF JONATHAN EDWARDS Douglas A. Sweeney

FATHERS ON THE FRONTIER French Missionaries and the Roman Catholic Priesthood in the United States, 1789–1870 Michael Pasquier

BLACK PURITAN, BLACK REPUBLICAN The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753–1833 John Saillant

HOLY JUMPERS Evangelicals and Radicals in Progressive Era America William Kostlevy

WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY Women and the Pastoral Relationship in Nineteenth-Century American Culture Karin E. Gedge A. J. TOMLINSON Plainfolk Modernist R. G. Robins FAITH IN READING Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America David Paul Nord FUNDAMENTALISTS IN THE CITY Conflict and Division in Boston's Churches, 1885–1950 Margaret Lamberts Bendroth A PARADISE OF REASON William Bentley and Enlightenment Christianity in the Early Republic J. Rixey Ruffin EVANGELIZING THE SOUTH A Social History of Church and State in Early America Monica Najar A REPUBLIC OF RIGHTEOUSNESS The Public Christianity of the Post-Revolutionary New England Clergy Jonathan D. Sassi THE LIVES OF DAVID BRAINERD The Making of an American Evangelical Icon John A. Grigg

NO SILENT WITNESS The Eliot Parsonage Women and Their Unitarian World Cynthia Grant Tucker RACE AND REDMEPTION IN PURITAN NEW ENGLAND Richard A. Bailey SACRED BORDERS Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in Early America David Holland EXHIBITING MORMONISM The Latter-day Saints and the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair Reid L. Neilson OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES Girl Evangelists in the Flapper Era Thomas A. Robinson and Lanette R. Ruff THE VIPER ON THE HEARTH Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy Updated Edition Terryl L. Givens THE LIFE AND DEATH OF THE RADICAL HISTORICAL JESUS David Burns MORMONS AND THE BIBLE The Place of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion Updated Edition Philip L. Barlow MISSIONARIES OF REPUBLICANISM A Religious History of the Mexican-American War John C. Pinheiro

Missionaries of Republicanism A Religious History of the Mexican-American War

z John C. Pinheiro

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland  Cape Town  Dar es Salaam  Hong Kong  Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

© Oxford University Press 2014 Portions of Chapters One and Five originally appeared in a different form in NineteenthCentury America: Essays in Honor of Paul H. Bergeron. Copyright 2005 by The University of Tennessee Press. Portions of Chapters Four and Six, in slightly different form, originally appeared as “‘Extending the Light and Blessings of Our Purer Faith’: Anti-Catholic Sentiment Among American Soldiers in the U.S.-Mexican War,” Journal of Popular Culture 35 (Fall 2001). Copyright John Wiley and Sons, Inc. A substantial portion of Chapter Eight originally appeared as, “‘Religion without Restriction’: Anti-Catholicism, All Mexico, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,” Journal of the Early Republic 23 (Spring 2003). Copyright 2003 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN 978–0–19–994867–3

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For Lucia

Contents

The Mexican-American War Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Rise and Influence of Anti-Catholicism, 1834–1844

viii ix 1 15

2. Religion, Race, and Texas Annexation

36

3. Election, Manifest Destiny, and War

53

4. Religion and Recruitment

67

5. Religion and Wartime Politics

86

6. The American Soldier in Mexico

109

7. Protestant Leaders and the War

128

8. Bringing about the Republican Millennium

149

Notes

173

Bibliography

203

Index

233

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Acknowledgments

Many people contributed to the successful completion of this book but I am particularly grateful in uncountable ways to Paul Bergeron, Wayne Cutler, and Dan Feller. In 2010 I attended a Lilly Endowment Seminar in Christian Scholarship at Calvin College in Grand Rapids. Under the direction of Harry S. Stout, this seminar gave a major boost to the completion of this project. In particular, it was fellow attendee, Edward Blum, who encouraged me to ask new questions of my research. I  am grateful for the support from my colleagues in the History Department at Aquinas College, Jason Duncan, Bethany Kilcrease, and Chad Gunnoe. Finally, I thank my wife, Cassandra, for her steady encouragement over the long period it took to bring this work to publication.

Missionaries of Republicanism

Introduction

The religious history of the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848 is the story of how anti-Catholicism emerged as integral to nineteenth-century American identity as a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant republic.1 Americans had long wondered whether Providence had blessed them with North America as part of a divine plan to spread republican civilization. In 1846 the overwhelmingly Protestant United States went to war against Mexico, a country that barred all religions save Roman Catholicism. Fighting Mexico forced Americans to negotiate in new ways the deep interconnectedness among race, religion, and republicanism. This process revealed the universality of a peculiarly American anti-Catholicism that heretofore most Americans had unreflectively relegated to an evangelical Protestant subculture. This unifying discourse, which was most fully developed and popularized by Lyman Beecher and thus in this book is called the “Beecherite Synthesis,” transcended section, religious denomination, and political affiliation. It proved to be the most important means of extracting transcendent meaning from the experience of the war. In many conflicts sacred or ideological language might be used as people begin to beat the drums of war. In the case of the Mexican-American War, however, religion was more than an instrument of passion or rhetorical practicality. Indeed, anti-Catholicism shaped Americans’ opinion not just of themselves but also of Mexicans. This process, the proximate beginnings of which started one decade earlier at the time of the Texas Revolution, affected everything from debates over annexation and the civic status of Mexicans incorporated into the United States to the treatment of enemy soldiers and civilians. Anti-Catholic rhetoric constituted an integral piece of nearly every major argument for or against the war and was

2 Introduction

so universally accepted among whites that recruiters, politicians, diplomats, journalists, soldiers, evangelical activists, abolitionists, and pacifists used it. It also was the primary tool used by American soldiers to interpret Mexico’s alien culture. The rough contours of this religion-infused discourse can be traced most immediately to the 1820s, when in the wake of the 1819 Panic and Missouri controversy white Americans struggled to find their footing in an increasingly dynamic but uncertain society. As Catholic immigration to the United States increased and Americans embarked on the era of Protestant revivalism that became known as the Second Great Awakening, anti-Catholicism emerged as integral to Americans’ understanding of how best to preserve their liberties in a more diverse country. Constituent to this future prosperity was the American republic’s seemingly inexorable expansion westward. Within two decades, this popular drive for territorial aggrandizement became known as “Manifest Destiny.” Manifest Destiny held that American Anglo-Saxons, by Providential design and reason of their cultural and racial superiority, were destined to extend themselves and their republican institutions throughout the western hemisphere, if not the world. Americans would accomplish this feat preferably through example, but if necessary by conquest. The liberties held most dear by Americans as the pillars of their republic were their civil and religious freedoms. They elevated these as the distinctive hallmarks of the young United States, the lone republic in a world ruled by despots. Anglo-Saxonism was not so much based on attributes like skin color as it was on unique attitudinal traits that predisposed Anglo-Saxons to be the most effective guardians of liberty. From this innate love of freedom had sprung Protestantism and republicanism—religion and government for free men. American racialist thought in the late Jacksonian period offered as evidence of Anglo-Saxon superiority a history of English and American economic and material advancement. Among the earliest propagators of Anglo-Saxonism in the United States were figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Adams. Yet it was Thomas Jefferson and Jeffersonianism that popularized romantic notions about England’s past and the rosy future of Anglo-Saxons. Whatever their country’s origins in the waning years of the so-called “Enlightenment,” Americans recognized religion as a vital part of their patrimony. They just differed on the value of religious pluralism. Some viewed their country’s proliferating sects with optimism, seeing in them positive evidence of the variety and individualism Alexis de Toquevílle so



Introduction

3

admired about Jacksonian America. For most, however, this pluralism needed to be grounded in the recognition that their country’s religious diversity existed precisely because as a Protestant nation the United States respected freedom of conscience. Following in the tradition of George Washington, more consequentialist Americans simply recognized that “of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports.”2 To Americans not all religions were equal, however, and certain religious groups bore close scrutiny for their perceived potential to endanger public order and civic virtue. Most prominently by the 1840s this included Mormons (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints; LDS) and Catholics. Questions of freedom and morality became more salient not just because of immigration but also, as with slavery, because of territorial expansion. Anglo-Saxonists saw Protestantism as inseparable from their country’s identity as a republic. This made the West a battleground, spiritually speaking at least, as early as the 1820s. By the 1840s Anglo-Saxonism had become as integral to arguments in favor of republicanism and territorial expansion as it was to nativist opposition to Catholic immigration. Racially and religiously different from the largely white Protestant United States, with large swaths of fertile but presumably uncultivated land controlled only tenuously by the government in Mexico City, Mexico served as the most obvious target of this sentiment once Americans concluded that Indians no longer posed a serious threat to westward settlement. This was especially true in the wake of the 1836 Texas Revolution and even more so after the U.S. annexation of Texas in 1845. In his seminal work on nativism, John Higham argues that, “Anglo-Saxonism gave only the slightest inkling of its nativistic potentialities until the late nineteenth century.” Instead, claims Higham, Americans used it “as a way of defining American nationality in a positive sense, not as a formula for an attack on outsiders.”3 A deeper look at the Texas debates, however, reveals that Americans did not wait until the late 1800s to place Anglo-Saxonism at the service of nativism. Moreover, they drew on Anglo-Saxonism to understand Mexico in such a way that only ten years after the Texas Revolution they came to see Mexico as the chief obstacle to American greatness and a counter example to all that was virtuous and sacred about the United States. What was the United States of America? An increasingly common answer by the 1840s was that the United States was all of those things that Mexico was not: free, Protestant, republican, and prosperous. During the

4 Introduction

Texas annexation debates, anti-Catholic themes foundational to American republicanism and Anglo-Saxonism incorporated a growing literature on Mexico that highlighted its religion, helping to form in the American mind a monolithic picture of Roman Catholicism. Whether politicians stressed political, religious, or anti-Mexican themes, what tied their rhetoric together was its rootedness in Americans’ sense of identity as a republican race uniquely blessed by Divine Providence. When Americans’ discussed the Mexican “race” they conflated physical characteristics with Mexicans’ religious and cultural accoutrements. Americans commonly blamed what they perceived as a weak race and its idolatrous religion for their southern neighbor’s political instability and recurrent coups. Indeed, to these American observers, taking civil and religious liberty to a country like Mexico virtually assured the advent of superior religious ideals, for the invariable consequence would be the weakening, if not destruction, of the Catholic Church there. Americans to varying degrees accepted the argument that Protestantism was naturally inclined toward liberty, whereas Catholicism was naturally inclined toward despotism. They well understood that when advocates of Manifest Destiny called for establishing civil and religious liberty in Mexico, these two things implied not only the extension of republican institutions but also Protestantism and the superior Anglo-Saxons who alone had the capability to sustain both. Americans who hesitated to accept nativist claims about U.S. Catholics were more willing to believe similar accusations when made against the non–Anglo-Saxon Mexicans. As for the white Mormons, Americans in a few states went to war with the LDS Church and drove it forcibly into the West (and, in fact, onto lands claimed by Mexico). While the jury was still out on whether Catholics could be good republicans if they were from Germany (possibly) or Ireland (less so), they definitely could not be mature citizens if they were non-white like Mexicans. This opposition of Catholic and black on the one hand and white and Protestant on the other is why one cannot understand mid-nineteenth-century American views on race and religion as though these were separate rather than interlocking categories. The role played by anti-Catholicism during the Mexican-American War was to clarify these preexistent perspectives on race, national identity, and religion. In this book the designation “anti-Catholic” refers not to persons who disagreed doctrinally with Roman Catholic theology, ecclesiology, and eschatology. Therefore, Protestant efforts merely to convert Catholics to a



Introduction

5

Protestant Christian vision of reality cannot qualify as an ideology deserving the name, “anti-Catholicism,” for Catholics of course hoped to convert Protestants, and this alone would not qualify as anti-Protestantism. In the best sense, espousal that one’s religion is right and another is wrong is a matter of taking seriously claims about truth—claims, to paraphrase Aristotle’s Metaphysics, about what is and what is not.4 This presupposes that the conversion of heart and mind—a reorientation toward the truth— is necessary for human flourishing and salvation. The process involves argumentation, exegesis, and the intellect—not to mention grace—and so does not of itself fit the definition of “anti-Catholicism” used in this book. As Philip Jenkins points out in The New Anti-Catholicism, “not every statement attacking a Catholic doctrine or stance is ipso facto a form of bigotry. . . . It is not anti-Catholic simply to assert that the Church’s position on a given issue is dead wrong, nor that Bishop X . . . is a monster or a menace to the public good.”5 Jenkins is speaking of twentieth and twenty-first-century anti-Catholicism but his warning applies to the nineteenth century as well. In the context of the 1830s and 1840s, the label “anti-Catholic” applies to those who maintained that Catholics were not Christians at all, identified the Pope with the “anti-Christ” of the Book of Revelation, propagated false and hateful stories about Catholics, and—perhaps most important in the context of American westward expansion and the Mexican-American War—claimed or believed that Jesuits were leading an immigrant Catholic army into the West as part of a papal-orchestrated takeover of the United States. The endgame of this alleged papal conspiracy was to destroy republicanism at its source. The vast majority of strident anti-Catholics were “evangelical Protestants,” a group one historian calls “the principal subculture in antebellum America.” Like other Protestants, evangelicals believed in the Trinity, emphasized the work of the Holy Spirit in personal regeneration, and stressed the total salvific role of Jesus. But they added to these beliefs a focus on revivalism and demanded more than a mere intellectual assent to these doctrines. Evangelicalism stressed the personal conversion experience and the importance of leading an upright life as part of the individual’s task to perfect himself or herself (and society as well) in light of the imminent second coming of Jesus Christ. Because of their confidence that the parousia and Millennium were near, evangelicals felt no effort should be spared to propagate the Gospel. This proselytism included attempts at converting not only Catholics and non-Christians,

6 Introduction

but also other Protestants who had not been “born again.” The majority of Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, and New School Presbyterians ascribed to evangelicalism, although individual evangelicals belonged to a wide range of Protestant churches. By the 1840s evangelicals had organized several voluntary societies that focused on converting Catholics as a means of preventing a papal takeover. Meanwhile, Sunday pulpits and the religious press featured anti-Catholicism as a recurring and prominent theme.6 In dealing with the pressures of Irish-Catholic immigration, anti-Catholicism and nativism began to combine in the 1830s. The result was a newly coherent and multi-layered anti-Catholic movement. This new composite of xenophobia and anti-Catholicism transcended traditional Protestant disputes with Catholic theology and ecclesiology even as it moved beyond perennial nativist attempts to strengthen naturalization laws. It produced vitriolic rhetoric in print and in lecture halls, led to the creation of voluntary societies bent on educating Americans about the Catholic menace, and induced mob violence against Catholics and their most public structures, churches, and schools. It also lay behind the accusation that Roman Catholics could not be faithful citizens of the United States, because their allegiance to the Pope prevented their full assent to civil and religious liberty. Therefore, to nativists, Catholic immigrants were a dangerous mass of men and women easily controlled by their priests. The fact that most Irish and German Catholics supported the Democratic Party did little to endear them to the Whigs. The chief strategist of the anti-Catholic movement was the Protestant evangelist and social reformer, Lyman Beecher. In the early 1830s Beecher synthesized into one argument American anxieties about westward settlement, economic uncertainty, and immigration by joining them to a theological commentary on what Divine Providence had in store for the future of liberty. This “Beecherite Synthesis” drew strength from, even as it reinvigorated, extant anti-Catholic impulses. It resonated with Americans who already dimly perceived the growth of Catholicism in the United States as a threat. The sense that rising Catholic influence might on the one hand crush a godly mission to the world, and on the other pollute American efforts to build a righteous society, gave clear corporeal form to a previously shapeless fear. In his 1835 book, A Plea for the West, Beecher warned his fellow Americans that their divinely ordained mission to lead the world hinged on “the religious and political destiny” of the trans-Mississippi West. The



Introduction

7

main barrier to this mission was the horde of Catholics immigrating to America. Their religion was inimical to republicanism. Led by foreign priests, this ignorant rabble would “throw down our free institutions.” To make matters worse, Protestant parents passively assented to this future by placing their children in Jesuit schools, where they sat side by side with immigrants. These Jesuits, claimed Beecher, had been trained in Europe to undermine the American republic by indoctrinating the young. Bishops and priests, who refused to assimilate and held complete sway over their pliant flock, now sought to extend Catholic schools and churches into the West. Beecher called on all true Americans to end their complacency and save their republic from creeping Romanism. To do so, he said, they would have to engage in political action to stop the influx of Catholic immigrants. Outside the political arena they would have to enter the West and establish Protestant churches and schools there. Only this battle plan could save the United States and, by extension, republicanism and the world.7 The most strident political answer to Beecher’s plea came in the early 1840s with the formation of the Native American Party. (Throughout this book, the labels “native American” and “Native American” refer exclusively to American citizens born in the United States and to the members of the antebellum political party by that name, respectively.) Native Americans portrayed themselves as an alternative to the Second Party System of Democrats and Whigs and claimed to be concerned only with the civic effects of Catholic immigration. They labeled the Democrats as power hungry and condemned the hopeless factionalism of the Whigs. Only Native Americans, they claimed, were truly non-partisan and patriotic. By 1844 the upstart party was a force to be reckoned with, especially in Pennsylvania. Their most prominent member was Lewis C. Levin, the congressman from Philadelphia who edited the Native American’s main newspaper, The Daily Sun. In the 1844 presidential election, which pitted Kentucky Whig Henry Clay against Tennessee Democrat James K.  Polk for president, Whigs tried to tap into the rising nativist sentiment by choosing Theodore Frelinghuysen as Clay’s running mate. This worried and even briefly befuddled Clay, but how deeply anti-Catholic was Frelinghuysen? Not much, according to Whig Party historian, Michael F.  Holt. Holt argues that Frelinghuysen’s membership in the American Bible Society (ABS), American Tract Society (ATS), and similar evangelical organizations meant that he “suffered guilt by association with men far more prejudiced than he.” This is true, but only to a point. The main aim of the ABS by 1844

8 Introduction

was to answer Beecher’s “plea for the West,” and it, along with the ATS, was the most anti-Catholic of all the major missionary societies. This was “guilt by association,” but not in the sense Holt means, as if Frelinghuysen belonged to an umbrella organization that contained a few bad apples. Rather, Frelinghuysen was a leader in associations who advertised their missions in predominantly anti-Catholic language and imagery.8 The choice of Frelinghuysen as Clay’s running mate has puzzled historians as much as it puzzled Clay. The predominating conclusion is that Frelinghuysen was meant to woo nativists who were loosely tied to the Democratic Party or former Whigs who now were Native Americans. Richard Carwardine thinks that the “mere nomination” of Frelinghuysen sent “a clear signal to anti-Catholics of Whig intent.” Ray Allen Billington explains Frelinghuysen’s nomination by pointing to Whig anxiety over recent Native American electoral successes in New York and Philadelphia, as well as their expansion into places like Boston and Charleston, South Carolina. Indeed, Billington points out that Pennsylvania Whigs had to offer statewide offices in exchange for Native American support for Clay. Frelinghuysen was central to this horse trading.9 Polk ended up besting Clay by a hair, thanks to New  York, where accusations of Whig nativism increased Irish-American support for the Democracy just enough to eke out a win for the Tennessean. Whigs blamed Clay’s loss on Catholics. So while historians have generally credited the anti-slavery Liberty Party for siphoning off Whig votes in New York, most have not factored in the other half of what contemporaries saw as an “alliance of the foreign vote, & that most impracticable of all organizations, the abolitionists.”10 Abolitionists would have been surprised to hear of their alleged collusion with Catholics. One aim of Missionaries of Republicanism is to explain why by exploring the interplay during the Mexican-American War between anti-Catholic sentiment and abolitionism. Abolitionists were not just evangelicals but ones who usually had their hands in any number of reform movements, including anti-Catholicism. On the one hand, the war might work for good by opening a closed Catholic country to Protestantism. On the other hand, abolitionists immediately concluded in May 1846 that “Mr. Polk’s War” was just a thinly disguised attempt by Southern planters to spread slavery. Which, then, was the greater threat to the Gospel and the purity of the American republic: slavery or Catholicism? And how might thinking on race be affected if the non-whites in question were Catholic Mexicans, not African-American Protestants?



Introduction

9

The connection between religion and race, and the degree to which they are indelibly tied together in American history, has been taken up most prominently by historians Edward Blum and Tracy Fessenden. Blum’s focus is late nineteenth-century America, but two of his conclusions are applicable to the antebellum period. First, any history of American racialism must take into account the profound impact of religion on race and national identity. Second, war has more often than not been the great maker and unmaker of American identity. Blum convincingly demonstrates that “Protestant Christianity in the North helped to forge a new sense of white American nationalism after the Civil War that sanctified segregation of African Americans and their political disfranchisement.” Religion became the link reconnecting North to South as Americans rebuilt a shared sense of nationhood. This in turn helped make way for the U.S.  entrance onto the world stage. Blum claims this “white ethnic nationalism” had prevailed prior to the war and argues that its primacy of place in American identity by the late nineteenth century was more a matter of recovery and reaffirmation than the building of an entirely new racial ideology. The wartime “triangular racial and sectional structure” of white northerners, white southerners, and blacks gave way after the war to a simple dualism of white and black. The immediate antebellum experience was binary in a different sense because in the 1830s and 1840s it was not yet starkly between white and black. Rather, it was more of a complex web that prevented white unanimity about race solely because of religion. The category of Protestant implied white and maybe Anglo-Saxon but to radical abolitionists it also allowed for the inclusion of blacks. Catholic, however, might not have meant black but neither did it necessarily imply white in terms of belonging to the category of people who deserved full social and civic equality. For their part, Democrats hoped to bring Irish Catholics into their party. Typically, then, Americans divided whites with Catholics and Mormons on one side of the fence and native-born Protestants on the other. This is because most antebellum white Americans conceived of their whiteness within a deeply religious worldview shaped by Anglo-Saxonism and its presumptions about republicanism. Put succinctly, Catholic was dangerous, uncivilized (i.e., unrepublican), and foreign whereas Protestant was white, civilized (i.e., republican), and American.11 With good reason some historians have challenged the notion of using whiteness studies with regard to the Irish. They point out that “if an Irish immigrant laborer in the United States had been asked to identify himself

10 Introduction

racially, it is hard to imagine how he could have said anything other than white.” Besides this fact of self-identification, Irish-Americans could vote, marry outside their ethnic group, own guns, and sit on juries. Black and Asian Americans could not do these things. Over the long haul, violence against Catholics, as Patrick Mason points out, “paled in comparison to racial and political violence targeting African-Americans.”12 “Whiteness” just does not say enough where antebellum America is concerned, because what the Irish as Catholics had to do to become as “white” as Anglo-Saxon Americans was to show themselves fully capable of republicanism. This was an impossible task. During the Jacksonian Era, nothing short of ceasing to be Catholic and becoming Protestant would have done the trick. As Matthew Frye Jacobson shows, the language of whiteness actually changed because of Irish immigration, with use of the term “Anglo-Saxon” overtaking “white” by the late 1850s. The experience of the Mexican-American War was key to this evolution. As Missionaries of Republicanism shows, the Protestant triumphalism inherent to Anglo-Saxonism required defining not just the Irish but also Catholics more generally out of what it meant to be an American. The war made this even easier, since Mexicans were not only Catholic but non-white in color and non-English in ancestry.13 Coming on the heels of over ten years of heightened anti-Catholic activity, the war held explosive religious implications from the very beginning. By 1844 the great majority of Americans, but especially evangelicals and expansionists, looked to Mexico as a nation destined to fall before a great Anglo-Saxon Protestant advance. Meanwhile, a few months before Polk’s election anti-Catholicism turned violent in Philadelphia as mobs incited by Native American Party leaders and a few local evangelical Protestant clergymen burned homes, churches, and schools in Irish Catholic neighborhoods. Such riots were uncommon and the vast majority of Americans condemned them. This condemnation, however, does not mean that the suspicion most Protestant Americans harbored against foreign-born Catholics went away. Consequently, when war broke out with Mexico, American Catholics jumped at such a clear opportunity to accentuate their patriotism by fighting in the army. Events would not be kind to their cause. As an American army led by General Winfield Scott marched inland from Vera Cruz to Mexico City in May 1847, over 5,000 people gathered in Philadelphia to lay the cornerstone for the newly rebuilt St. Augustine Church. The new building sat atop the ashy remains of the old one burned three years earlier. In his



Introduction

11

keynote speech the Rev. Dr. James Ryder of Holy Cross College took the opportunity to refute the accusation “that no Catholic would bear arms against a Catholic nation” like Mexico. He pointed to the many faithful Catholic soldiers “in the field of operations.” What Ryder could not foresee was that in a few short months an entire battalion of mostly Irish Catholic deserters would be captured by Scott’s army near Mexico City. Called the San Patricios and led by John Riley, most were hanged as traitors or branded on the face for desertion.14 Thanks to several scholarly monographs, music by popular Irish bands such as the Chieftains, and even a major motion picture, the story of the San Patricios remains the most famous (or, alternatively, infamous) incident involving Catholics during the Mexican-American War.15 While no historian doubts that religion was a motivating factor for the San Patricios, they do debate the degree to which this was so. Dennis Joseph Wynn, for example, argues that the soldiers deserted because of harsh army discipline and discrimination, with religion being of little consequence. Other historians, like John Porter Bloom, insist that the former Americans among the San Patricios did not join the Mexican army because they hated Protestantism and the United States; the deserters’ foreign-born status and Catholic religion simply made the transition easier. Disagreeing with both is Peter F. Stevens, who alone makes use of Riley’s letters in British and Mexican archives. Stevens argues that anti-Catholic nativism drove immigrant soldiers like Riley to desert. According to Stevens, the Irish likened the U.S.  attack on Mexico to that of England’s occupation of Ireland:  another instance of Anglo-Saxon Protestants subjugating an “inferior” Catholic population.16 The capture and punishment of the San Patricios may have been dramatic, but the questioning of Catholic loyalty was just one small part of religion’s interplay with the war. Just when the Philadelphia riots threatened to sideline the more vitriolic wings of the anti-Catholic movement such as the Native Americans, the war came along to offer something other than what Richard Hofstadter called “the pornography of the Puritan” as rhetorical ammunition against the Roman Catholic Church.17 Anti-Catholic preachers could now use caricatures of Mexican superstition to illustrate Roman Catholic depravity and the need for Protestant missionary work; nativist politicians could offer up anarchic Mexico as an example of what America might become if dominated by immigrant or even native-born Catholics; and Anglo-Saxonists could bolster their argument that only republics resting on Protestant bedrock and ruled by Anglo-Saxons could

12 Introduction

prosper. Along with analyzing the content of this newly enhanced rhetoric, this book aims to gauge the extent to which it reflected a deeply held, anti-Catholic ideology, and the extent to which its use represented mere expediency. Native Americans exploited the war to advance a wide variety of objectives. These aims included attacks on President Polk, whom they labeled as pro-Catholic but criticized for starting the war in the first place. Surprisingly, the Native Americans supported annexing all of Mexico in the name of Manifest Destiny. This might seem to run counter to the fear that Catholic immigrants were pawns of priests or the Democratic Party and dangerous to American institutions. After all, Native Americans advocated incorporating into the United States millions of Catholic Mexicans! The party dismissed this apparent contradiction by exulting in the harm done to Catholic power in North America and by appealing to Protestant triumphalism. For many evangelicals the war presented a real moral quandary:  did the obvious unjustness of the Mexican-American War mean that all of its consequences necessarily had to be evil? Some actually welcomed the war as an opportunity to improve and convert Catholic Mexico. Even those who protested the war’s legitimacy, including abolitionists and anti-slavery advocates, reluctantly agreed by 1848 that one good in the otherwise evil war was the likelihood of missionary work among Catholics who lived on lands the United States might annex. Here was an idea with potential to transcend sectional divisions among evangelical Protestants. Consequently, most took a moderate stance between ardently pro-war and anti-war views. This position allowed them to approve of the results of the war for anti-Catholic purposes while at the same time condemning the conflict. Already in 1847 some Protestant controversialists were using the war to enhance their standard anti-Catholic arguments. By the time of the peace treaty in February 1848, the subject of the war had joined the literature of the anti-Catholic movement, as writers mined the conflict for fresh but convincing examples that demonstrated the threat and errors of Roman Catholicism. Many Americans experienced Catholicism for the first time as soldiers in Mexico. In doing so, they tested preconceptions that had been shaped by popular books on Mexico and anti-Catholic literature, sermons, and rhetoric. This process resulted in romanticized admiration for a few but in most it produced revulsion. A  small but significant number of Americans vandalized churches and committed atrocities against



Introduction

13

Mexicans. In their ruminations on the war and descriptions of Mexican culture these Americans turned to the most robust and widely understood vocabulary available, that of anti-Catholicism. They pronounced Mexico their “Promised Land,” referred to “the enterprising blue-eyed Saxon” as “the chosen people of the age,” and compared Mexicans to Canaanites who had to be removed to make way for God’s favored people. They made abundant use in their journals and letters of common anti-Catholic terms like “Romish,” “Popish,” and “Priestridden.”18 In this manner, the published journals, letters, and memoirs of Americans who participated in the war became the newest addition to the anti-Catholic literature that began its rise in the 1830s and peaked in the 1850s. Taken together, these writings held that the Catholic Church stunted the economic and social evolution of every country it dominated and that it depended solely on power, intrigue, and ignorance to flourish. Soldiers blamed Mexico’s political and social troubles on a mix of racial and religious inferiority. Indeed, racial inferiority, they argued, inevitably led to religious inferiority. Soldiers’ depictions of Mexico during and shortly after the war reinforced American fears of massive European Catholic immigration and strengthened the heretofore tenuous conspiracy theories involving President James K. Polk’s collusion with the Catholic Church. President James K. Polk was no fan of nativism and did not view the war through a religious lens. He did, however, recognize that anti-Catholicism in the United States could transform the conflict into a religious war. He likewise assumed that Mexico’s generals and bishops might be willing to engage in religious demagoguery against Protestant Americans. To counter this potentiality Polk consulted American bishops and sent two Catholic chaplains with the army into Mexico. Both of these actions were controversial. But the president’s most domestically unpopular action was to have the War Department order U.S. soldiers to respect conspicuously the Mexicans’ religion and holy places. Hopefully all this good will would keep American Catholics loyal to the war effort and prevent the conflict from degenerating into a prolonged insurgency rooted in religious tensions. In spite of Polk’s best efforts the war proved auspicious for those seeking examples of Anglo-Saxon, Protestant superiority and Mexican, Catholic inferiority. Many of the histories, novels, and other literature written about the conflict during the immediate post-war period contained stark instances of anti-Catholicism. With liberal revolutions breaking out across Europe in 1848 and the papacy itself threatened, Americans saw the

14 Introduction

defeat of Mexico within the context of worldwide republican ascendency. Blessed with an enlarged West, evangelicals, anti-Catholic and moderate alike, turned to the same region that had occupied such a prominent place in their minds since the 1830s. Hoping some day to reach Asia and the Pacific islands through California’s ports, they headed with great zeal into the Mexican Cession to convert Catholics, Mexicans, Indians, and un-churched American settlers. The religious history of the Mexican-American War unearthed the widespread influence of anti-Catholicism in American culture by revealing territorial expansion, Anglo-Saxonism, republicanism, and anti-Catholicism to be inseparable parts of one ideology of American exceptionalism. The fight against Mexico was Manifest Destiny in action, and it opened up innumerable possibilities for anti-Catholic forces. Expansionist ambitions during the war combined almost effortlessly with American suspicions that the Catholic Church, having already impeded Mexico’s economic, social, political, and religious progress, aspired to do the same to the United States. An American victory might regenerate Mexico by firmly establishing the republican values of civil and religious liberty there. More important, a successful American campaign inevitably would increase United States territory. Anglo-Saxons could then settle those new lands, carrying with them republicanism, Protestantism, and the superior fortitude to make full use of both.

1

The Rise and Influence of Anti-Catholicism, 1834–1844 Cast your eyes over South America and Mexico. . . . Had the ignorance, vice, atheism, and priestcraft of those wretched republics, at this present time, been the curse and scourge of the old thirteen states, in ‘76, neither the wisdom of the old Congress, nor the skill and tact of the glorious Washington . . . could have prevented us from being devoured and annihilated by the British lion! William C. Brownlee1

Thirty years after the ratification of the United States Constitution, a mysterious group of women in dark, flowing robes disembarked at Boston, Massachusetts. Catholic nuns belonging to the Order of St. Ursula, they quietly but quickly established a religious house and school on Mount Benedict in nearby Charlestown. The history of the region could not have been lost on the sisters as they began to live and work in close proximity to the birthplace of the American Revolution. Overlooking Charlestown, the convent, in the eyes of Unitarians and Roman Catholics, stood as a living symbol of the religious freedom guaranteed to Americans since the addition of the First Amendment to the Constitution in 1791. But to some Bostonians, the convent was not a celebratory model of America’s civil and religious freedom but in fact presaged the death of those liberties. It was an awakening symbol of an impending papal takeover of the American republic, led by shrewd Jesuits and wily nuns, such as those perched like vultures atop Mount Benedict. Such conspiracy theories found few willing ears at first. In 1834, however, a mob marched on the convent and school, ushered the nuns out into the night, and burned both buildings to the ground.

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Violence of this magnitude would have been unthinkable even a decade earlier, when the United States still enjoyed a fairly stable arena for religious liberty. The Revolutionary War had largely dampened religious tensions in the name of presenting a united front against English tyranny. Fighting for republican government and liberty against a foreign, Protestant monarch carved out space for Catholics in the unfolding American story. The alliance between the Revolutionaries and France furthered this. Catholics founded their first churches in Boston and New York in the 1780s. Even so, in that same decade seven of the thirteen states passed laws ensuring that only Protestants could hold elective office. Once the Constitution forbade religious tests, most states quickly repealed these laws and moved to disestablish their state churches. New York, however, did not repeal its anti-Catholic laws until the early 1820s. Massachusetts waited until 1833 to disestablish the Congregational Church. Still, most Americans grew up reading derogatory, hand-me-down stories about Catholics. What is fair to say is that between the 1790s and 1830s Americans just did not see the Roman Catholic Church or the pope as an immediate or serious threat to the American Experiment in self-government. Cultural anti-Catholicism remained but it was unorganized, not critically important to what it meant to most white Protestants to be an American, and certainly not profound enough to encourage the kind of violence faced by the Ursulines in 1834.2 Within ten years of the founding of the Ursuline convent near Boston, however, anti-Catholicism coalesced into one cohesive movement that brought together elite-directed voluntary societies, religious voices both in print and in the pulpit, lurid novels about priests and nuns, and popular unrest against Irish-Catholic immigrants. The rapidly developing discourse on which this movement depended provided Americans with a common vocabulary and shared categories of thought that allowed them to understand themselves, their role in the advancement of civil and religious liberty, the heretofore mysterious ways of Providence, and the meaning of America. At the dawn of the 1830s this public anti-Catholic discourse was still in its formative stages. A  small number of anti-Catholic newspapers circulated in New  York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore, but these struggled to survive with a fairly small readership. These same eastern cities hosted public debates, a form of entertainment that had been rising in popularity since the 1820s. In these debates prominent evangelical Protestants went up against leading Roman Catholic clergymen. This editorial and forensic rhetoric fostered the development of some of the



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first anti-Catholic voluntary societies in the United States, most of which sought to convince Americans that the Catholic Church was engaged in an unholy drive to topple the republic through deceptively benevolent institutions such as schools. During this time anti-Catholic strategy shifted from a reliance on Scripture-based apologetics and moderated debates over ecclesiology or soteriology to demagoguery and the outright defamation of Catholics. This new strategy, in building popular opposition to Roman Catholic immigration and Catholic institutions and practices, effectively established anti-Catholicism as a major public discourse when Americans talked about not just religion, but also their civil liberties and national purpose.3 The purpose of this chapter is to analyze how this nascent anti-Catholicism, at first so inwardly directed at the United States, even to the point of violence, began a major transformation that eventually culminated in an outward focus on Mexico. Longstanding as well as new themes in evangelical Protestant rhetoric, popular anti-Catholic literature, nativist political activity, and anti-Catholic violence shaped and tried to guide this evolution. This in turn set the stage for an interpretation of the Texas Revolution as an event that proved fully coherent only through a religious lens. Importantly, all this activity gave Americans the most effective means of dehumanizing Mexicans to make way for military conquest. The first major act of violence this newly invigorated anti-Catholic movement produced was the burning of Charlestown’s Ursuline convent and school in 1834. By 1830, the school had attracted financial support from some of Boston’s wealthiest citizens, so much so that preachers took to their pulpits to warn against such an imprudent investment. Lyman Beecher, arguably second in preaching fame at the time to the more radical Charles G.  Finney, another Presbyterian evangelist, led the fight. Beecher believed Catholicism sapped all virtue from its adherents. Like most of his contemporaries in the early republic, Beecher concluded that Roman Catholicism was inimical to republicanism. This is nothing with which Thomas Jefferson or others in the founding generation would have disagreed. They simply took it for granted that Roman Catholicism was part of mankind’s childhood superstition, something that first Protestantism and then the Enlightenment had striven to overcome. However, where Beecher parted ways with the founders was in his post-Enlightenment conclusion that U.S. republican institutions were “not borrowed from Greece or Rome, but from

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the Bible.” Calling the Bible “the anchor of republics,” Beecher foresaw a great mission for the United States: dispelling the religious darkness of “Pagan, Mahometan, and Papal lands,” by “revolutions and convulsions” if necessary.4 Therefore, he warned, the Ursulines were not simply a misguided though harmless sect of women. Whether they knew it or not—and Beecher thought they did—the sisters aimed to undermine republican government and throw civilization back to the so-called “Dark Ages” of mind-shackling superstition and barbarism. Consequently, he urged parents not to support the school. Inspired by Beecher, Congregationalists founded a rival school in 1831, in part to ward against Unitarian influence, which Beecher also railed against from the pulpit. In 1832 Beecher departed Boston to take up the presidency of Lane Theological Seminary. In the meantime, prominent Bostonians continued to send their children to be educated by the Ursulines. This combination of successful, unmarried, celibate women operating a thriving Catholic institution struck like a hammer against New England custom. Catholic or not, these women threatened the traditional religious, political, and gender structures of Massachusetts. Soon, a fresh barrage of anti-Catholic propaganda reinforced old suspicions among Boston’s lower classes that strange acts were committed daily behind the convent’s walls. Beecher returned to Boston on a speaking tour in 1834. In the past two years Beecher had become convinced of the singular importance of the West, not only for the future of Americans but also for the future of Protestantism and the world. One year earlier, a number of abolitionist students, due to Beecher’s single-mindedness about the West and opposition to their cause, left Lane to found Oberlin College. Among the evils threatening American society, slavery to Beecher just ranked lower than the Catholic menace. He now hoped to recoup his losses and earn funds to support Lane’s newly refocused mission to evangelize the West. When a mentally ill nun ran from the Ursuline convent one evening in 1834, citizens of Charlestown and Boston were primed for action. The nun returned to the convent the next afternoon, but within a few days her “escape” had been transformed into stories of dungeons and abominable cruelties at the convent. Not inconsequentially, Beecher ramped up his series of sermons in Boston warning about the dangers Roman Catholic immigrants posed to the United States, especially west of the Mississippi River. In the nighttime hours after his final sermon, on August 11, 1834, a



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crowd composed almost entirely of men attacked the convent and school, burning both to the ground.5 Beecher denied responsibility for the riot, and in terms of direct culpability he was telling the truth. He had not called from the pulpit for violence against Catholics, in Boston or anywhere else. Nor had he marched with torch in hand to the convent and cheered on the arsonists. But his listeners might have wondered how establishing a few Protestant schools in the West could halt the massive erosion of virtue, piety, and liberty he so colorfully described. What, then, was the connection between Beecher’s sermons and the attack against the Ursulines? Envy, fear, and New Englanders’ feeling of inferiority when compared with their Puritan forebears played some part in the violence. The almost exclusively male rioters were drawn from Boston society’s lower classes. These men already resented the wealthy Boston elite, blaming them for their own relative lack of prosperity. That these elites would also send their children to an alien, Catholic school only deepened these feelings. The rioters resented the fact that unmarried, female Catholics (i.e., the Ursuline sisters) seemed capable of flourishing when they as native-born males could not. Thus, they turned to destructive violence as the only method sure to cut the cancer out of Charlestown society.6 Envy and fear no doubt helped feed the fury of the Charlestown arsonists, but neither would have been effective without the most important factor of all:  the distinctively American anti-Catholicism elucidated by Beecher. In his sermons Beecher had woven together a seamless discourse incorporating American anxieties about westward settlement, economic uncertainty, and immigration with a theological commentary on what Divine Providence had in store for the future of civil and religious liberty. This drew strength from, even as it reinvigorated, an extant anti-Catholic impulse. Anti-Catholicism, which had arrived in New England from Europe two centuries earlier, had been mostly dormant as a social force since the American Revolution. This new climate of religious bigotry, painstakingly cultivated most prominently by Beecher, resonated with Bostonians who already dimly perceived the Ursulines as a threat. Now they could understand the successful convent and school as a bald rejection of their Puritan past and a usurpation of their promised future of freedom and prosperity. The sense that rising Catholic influence might, on the one hand crush New England’s godly mission to the world, and on the other pollute American efforts to build a righteous society, gave clear corporeal form to a previously shapeless fear.

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Missionaries of Republicanism

Fearing the adulteration of their founding mission was not a new concern for New Englanders. Led by John Winthrop and John Cotton, their Puritan ancestors had left Europe to establish a Christian culture not enervated by tyrannical and immoral Catholic ways. In an effort to encourage persistence in this founding Calvinistic vision of a pure Christian society, Samuel Danforth famously complained as early as 1671 that “unbelief. . . and malignant passions” threatened this Puritan “Errand into the Wilderness.” In the 1830s Bostonians believed it was no coincidence that their ancestors had led the way in the American Revolution, first as a rowdy mob and then as soldiers fighting in the name of liberty. Notably, they sought liberation not just from England but from the influence of Catholic, French-speaking Quebec, which claimed territory as far south as the Ohio River Valley. The men who burned the Ursuline school were not political philosophers or theologians, but they knew enough to be convinced that civil and religious liberty were not separate matters. They also were convinced that Roman Catholicism threatened both. On this premise, and with some envy thrown in for good measure, the Boston men of 1834 proved themselves worthy of their ancestors, striking a blow for both God and liberty.7 In 1835 Beecher published his series of Boston sermons under the title, A Plea for the West. The book was the fullest expression of Beecher’s anti-Catholic views. In it he attempted a grand synthesis of deep-seated notions about American exceptionalism with nativist impulses and several strands of anti-Catholicism. He invented little, but synthesized much, and A Plea for the West set the American anti-Catholic standard. The book became so nationally popular that it shaped the parameters and content of the American debate about immigration and Roman Catholicism on into the twentieth century. Its quick success underscores the already pervasive nature of anti-Catholicism in early to mid-nineteenth-century America. With A Plea for the West, Beecher turned American eyes away from Europe and toward the trans-Mississippi West. Beecher warned that the American mission to lead the world, which had been given them by Providence, hinged on “the religious and political destiny” of the West. The main barrier to this mission was the horde of Catholics immigrating to America. Guided by foreign priests, this ignorant rabble threatened to “throw down our free institutions.” To make matters worse, Protestant parents passively assented to this future by placing their children in Jesuit schools, where they sat side by side with immigrants. These Jesuits, claimed Beecher, had been trained in Europe to undermine the American



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republic by indoctrinating the young. Bishops and priests, who refused to assimilate and held complete sway over their pliant flock, now sought to extend Catholic schools and churches into the West. Beecher called on all true republicans and Protestants to end their complacency and accomplish two goals: stop Catholic immigration through legislation and establish Protestant schools and churches in the West.8 The inventor Samuel F.  B. Morse took this Beecherite Synthesis a step further in Foreign Conspiracy and Imminent Dangers, both published in 1835. The former was a detailed, argumentative book and the latter was a collection of essays Morse had written for the newspaper he had founded with Arthur Tappan in 1827, the Journal of Commerce. Both books came with glowing recommendations from a number of New York ministers and newspaper editors, who then supported Morse the next year when he ran on a nativist ticket for mayor of New York City. His mayoral hopes were a dismal failure but his books, written in part to drum up electoral support, were not. Whereas Beecher accused only Jesuits, priests, and bishops of ill intent, Morse implicated all Catholics in a vast conspiracy to destroy civil and religious liberty. The Pope and Catholic kings of Europe could not send a real army to accomplish this feat so they plotted instead, according to Morse, to flood the United States with “priest-ridden troops of the Holy Alliance, with their Jesuit officers well skilled in all the arts of darkness.” Their purpose was to undermine Protestantism and republicanism in America, claimed Morse, and thereby harm the republican cause everywhere: “Popery, while it is the natural antagonist of Protestantism, is opposed in its whole character to Republican liberty.” As evidence for his theory, Morse relied on the fact that most Catholics in the United States were foreigners. Thus, he declared, it was foolhardy to grant the foreign-born equal political rights with native-born Americans.9 Timing was auspicious for Morse’s foray into organized anti-Catholicism, and not just because he followed on Beecher’s heels. The Society of Jesus, which had been suppressed in the 1770s only to be restored in 1814 by Pope Pius VII in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, once again found itself expelled from Spain in 1835. This fact lent credence to Morse’s theories, for if expelled, where would the Jesuits go? The answer, said Morse, was that the Jesuits—who in Anglo-American anti-Catholicism were second in their diabolism only to the Pope—would go to the United States.10 Funding for the Jesuit subversion of the United States would come from what Morse argued was a Rome-Vienna cabal whose public face

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was the Leopold Association, a missionary society founded in 1829 to spread the Catholic faith to non-Catholic countries. Even though the Leopold Association was less effective worldwide than a similar French society called the Association for the Propagation of the Faith, it came under stronger fire from Americans because in large part it had been formed to help struggling Catholic dioceses in the United States. All its members were subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who saw the United States as a fertile but undeveloped missionary field. Through the Leopold Association, they had begun to send very small sums of money to most American dioceses by the early 1830s. Some of these funds helped Bishop John Hughes found St. John’s College (later renamed, Fordham University) in 1841, which shortly thereafter the Diocese of New  York handed over to the Society of Jesus. American Protestants complained periodically about the Leopold Association, but it was Morse who popularized it as a grave danger to civil and religious liberty when he tied it to Jesuits, immigrants, and the West.11 Thus, as with most effective conspiracy theories, there was an element of truth in Morse’s accusations. Austrians were sending money to the United States to spread the Catholic faith there. The Society of Jesus was interested in a greater presence in the United States and in founding more universities in places like New York and Boston. Moreover, Leopold Association money found its way into the latter effort. But where Catholics saw this all as the fruit of religious freedom and a happy consequence of free competition in the public square, Protestants like Beecher and Morse seem to have been sincere in likening any increased Catholic presence as an invasion orchestrated from abroad bent on undermining religious and civil liberty. What united Beecher’s and Morse’s anti-Catholic theories transcended their conspiracism, warnings about the West, and specific policy recommendations. First, their conclusions about the Catholic menace were founded on a belief that Providence had reserved a special role for the United States in world history and that the great spirit of improvement in early nineteenth-century America was part of this great, divinely guided drama. Second, each appealed to definitions of liberty and republicanism with which even their most untutored Jacksonian contemporaries would have been familiar. To Americans, the most important difference between their country and those of Europe was that their federal system successfully balanced the need for order with the preservation of liberty. Americans tended to define liberty by listing those things they



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wished to have liberty from. These included freedom from an established religion, from the arbitrary rule of another (especially a king or aristocracy, but it might be any far-off institution like the Second Bank of the United States, for example), and from censorship. Thus, liberty was not so much one thing as it was a collection of rights and freedoms. These, along with the requisite duties that came with an ordered liberty under a virtuous populace, are what kept tyranny at bay. Morse and Beecher, by fusing theological and Enlightenment anti-Catholicism with nativism and evangelical impulses, simply exchanged the threatening power of the King of England, nobility, and American Tories, for that of the Pope, Catholic clergy, and immigrants. The Beecherite Synthesis thus returned to an even older bogeyman in the struggle between liberty and power. In so doing it refined and popularized a conspiratorial ideology that could be used as a common front against all Catholics. As Morse put it, “Absolutism and Republicanism” were “convertible terms” for “Popery and Protestantism,” respectively. This conglomeration of prejudice, in turn, trickled down to the general population via sermons, speeches, and a vast literature that impugned the virtue of Catholics. It would take some time, however, before Americans became equally convinced that the West would in fact be the promised battleground between the oppression of Catholicism and a practical civil liberty that required Protestantism to survive.12 Just as had their ancestors at the time of the American Revolution, Americans of the 1830s believed that republican government could only preserve liberty if it was rooted in a vigilant and virtuous citizenry. This virtue involved the acceptance of one’s civic duty and a self-sacrificial readiness to oppose factionalism and personal gain if it meant the betterment of the common good. Importantly, the virtuous person used liberty responsibly, recognizing that the other side of the coin from liberty was duty. Therefore, the irresponsible or easily corrupted did not deserve civic equality simply by being born white or male, for only truly independent men could possess the virtue to withstand demagoguery from without and selfish ambition from within. This balance of liberty and order was so tenuous that it created another hallmark of American republican thought, a general opposition to rapid social change that went beyond Edmund Burke’s warnings about the damage to societal order caused by imprudent innovation.13 Even before the popularization of the Beecherite Synthesis and the rise in concern about Jesuits and the Leopold Association, Pope Gregory

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XVI had already given Americans what seemed to be convincing proof of Catholic hostility to liberty. It came in Mirari Vos, an encyclical issued in 1832 that condemned “Liberalism and Religious Indifferentism” in the wake of yet another revolution in France. This latest French turmoil saw nuns and priests murdered by the thousands, northern Italy and the Papal States invaded, and conservative royalists in France and the Italian peninsula terrorized even after promising governmental reforms. In this climate, Gregory admonished the “shameless lovers of liberty” for placing ideals like freedom of speech, conscience, and the press above civil order and religious truth. Such extreme libertarianism, Gregory argued, “spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it.” Gregory disagreed that publishing a “flock of errors” could be “sufficiently compensated by the publication of some book which defends religion and truth.” Indifference to mankind’s highest purpose (i.e., to know God), not a rightly ordered love for truth, lay behind appeals to “liberty of conscience,” according to the pope. Quoting Augustine of Hippo, he added that, “the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error.”14 Pope Gregory went on to encourage Europeans to remain loyal to their monarchs while shoring up “the mutual concord between temporal authority and the priesthood.” Authority itself was under attack by the revolutionaries, and so he quoted St. Paul: There is no authority except from God; what authority there is has been appointed by God. Therefore he who resists authority resists the ordinances of God; and those who resist bring on themselves condemnation. This was no detached political philosophy on Pope Gregory’s part. Although based on Scriptural commentaries by Thomas Aquinas, it really was more immediately driven by the bloody experience of Catholic clergy and religious in Europe since 1789. When Gregory spoke of princes protecting the Church or its adherents from radical zealots bent on death or plunder, he spoke from personal experience with actual events since the Jacobin Reign of Terror. The alleged results or ideals of liberalism did not concern the pope; its actual consequences did.15 Whereas one can argue that in the context of European affairs Pope Gregory’s critique of liberalism’s dangers and consequences was



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legitimate, American Catholics realized that European norms did not always apply in republican America because tradition, custom, and social conditions were not the same. The United States had no national church, no monarchs, and no history of religious wars outside spillover incidents in the American colonies like Leisler’s Rebellion during the so-called “Glorious Revolution.” American culture, law, and the U.S. Constitution bore witness to this history. Irish Catholics had fled Ireland in part because it lacked civil and religious liberty and immigrated to the United States, which professed to have both. To Irish immigrants, it seemed a sad irony, then, that Anglo Protestants, who denied them religious and civil liberty back in Ireland, sought to do so in America as well. American Catholics, whether native or foreign born, addressed the relationship of their faith to republican government and religious liberty in different ways, all of them unconvincing to American Protestants. Beginning with Orestes Brownson in the 1860s and culminating with John Courtney Murray’s project nearly a century later, Catholics embarked on a serious attempt to formulate an orthodox, unified understanding of the ways in which Catholicism was well suited to republicanism and even more complementary to it than Protestantism. This effort culminated in “Dignitatis Humanae,” the Declaration of Religious Freedom promulgated in 1965 at the close of the Second Vatican Council. In the 1830s, however, Catholic leaders like Bishop John Hughes offered no explanation but simply dismissed charges that the Catholic Church was opposed to religious liberty. John England, the bishop of Charleston, ignored Mirari Vos entirely, noting that the pope was not the only teacher of the faith. For several years the Dominican priest Henri-Dominique Lacordaire had formulated arguments about God and liberty that Gregory now seemed to reject. England, in the Catholic Miscellany (the first Catholic newspaper in the United States, which he had founded in 1822) and elsewhere, pointed out that American Catholics had no temporal allegiance to the pope, since they lived not in the Papal States but in the United States. Ignorance of Catholic teaching, buoyed by bigoted textbooks in American schools, lay at the heart of attacks on the Church in America, not outright hatred. Few if any Protestants actually read the Catholic Miscellany, but England’s work was instrumental in incorporating republicanism into American Catholic identity even as anti-Catholic Protestants were defining Catholics out of terms like “American” and “republican.”16 If Roman Catholicism was inimical to republican government, and if the foundation of republicanism lay in Protestant Christianity and

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its hermeneutics, then Americans had a duty to oppose the former and strengthen the latter in order to keep their country free. Indeed, this might be the chief of those obligations on the other side of the coin from liberty. This real, felt sense of duty might seem far-fetched, easily getting lost amid the strident religious bigotry, conspiratorial nonsense, and incendiary language of the anti-Catholic movement. Yet to oppose the one particular religion that promised to squelch all others and weaken Americans’ hard-won civil liberties seemed perfectly consistent with the principle of religious freedom and not at all hypocritical to a growing number of Americans by the mid-1830s. That is, limiting the freedom of Catholics, especially those recently arrived from a European monarchy with no experience of self-government, actually ensured religious freedom, and in doing so it preserved civil liberties as well. The truth of this paradox seemed as sensible and as uncontroversial as confining criminals to jail in order to protect the community from further crime, as opposed to letting them roam free in the name of liberty, hoping all the while that they might morally regenerate on their own. There were two major reasons that so many Americans found the Beecherite Synthesis immediately intelligible, if not convincing. First, by the time they were adults they already possessed an imagination formed by anti-Catholic imagery, with its associative vocabulary and thought categories. Schoolbooks, grammars, and childhood stories early on prepared them to enjoy the “pornography of the Puritan” and more serious sermons as adults.17 Beginning in the early 1830s, more and more such books appeared as the Catholic presence in America grew. Personal experience with Irish and German immigrants required little processing by this imaginative filter before emerging as further evidence that Morse’s seemingly outlandish arguments were close enough to the truth to cause concern. This was especially true in New England but increasingly typical elsewhere in the country, particularly in cities or areas that had experienced evangelical revivals during the event that came to be known as the “Second Great Awakening.” A type of perfectionism along with an emphasis on the proximity of the parousia and the Millennium were the hallmarks of this movement. Importantly, the Awakening spread outward from New England and established itself particularly in those areas heavily settled by New Englanders, like the “Burnt Over” district of New York, so called because of the widespread religious fervor there. One consequence of the rise of evangelical Protestantism in the United



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States was the proliferation of reform efforts. Besides anti-Catholicism these included temperance and immediate abolitionism. Each of these in its own way was an effort to put the United States’ house in order before the return of Jesus Christ. The Awakening itself, as a Christian movement, represented but the largest part of an even wider search by Americans for spiritual meaning, personal understanding, and purity in the commonwealth. The fervor with which this struggle was carried out was seen in everything from the growth of what became the Seventh-Day Adventists and Joseph Smith’s founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and communes like Brook Farm or Oneida. In the end, though, it was the rise to prominence of the Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians that proved to be the Second Great Awakening’s most important consequence when it came to Jacksonian formulations about the meaning and ultimate purpose of America. The second major reason that so many Americans found the Beecherite Synthesis convincing was related to this evangelical revivalism but rooted in a much older sense of American mission that had found its most cogent form during the Revolutionary War. The fires of war had imbued liberty with a sacred character for Americans, particularly in New England. John Winthrop had hoped that the Massachusetts Bay Colony might be a catalyst to the conversion of Europe, a “a city on a hill.” In the American Revolution, many New Englanders became convinced that the new United States had its own eschatological role to play. The building blocks of this uniquely American civil religion remained, waiting for Beecher and Morse to put them together in a way that made sense to Jacksonians. Alexis de Tocquevílle, who thought Americans were unable to separate their Christian millennialism from their nation’s politics, saw this all quite clearly. Now this dimly held sensibility started to become instantiated further in American culture as U.S. citizens moved westward, carrying with them, Beecher hoped, a new errand into the wilderness.18 The Beecherite Synthesis just rang true to Jacksonian ears, as Americans reflected on their history and tried to make sense out of both the volatility and the promise of their contemporary world. Fairly typical was the belief that Catholics paid homage to a foreign potentate whom Protestants identified with the anti-Christ, were controlled like so many marionettes by their bishops, and slavishly obeyed orders given by priests in the dark of confessionals. The worst of vices abounded in monasteries, convents, and among those religious who staffed Catholic schools.

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Catholics also engaged in idolatry, worshipped in a foreign language, and overall just smacked too much of the Old World and too little of the New. As Morse pointed out, in such a perfidious system even native-born Catholics with good intentions could not help but be corrupted. If left unchecked the result would be not just the death of democracy in one country among many. Rather, Catholics would enervate the one nation where the true gospel went hand-in-hand with civil and religious liberty and where all humanity looked for help to usher in the millennial reign of Jesus Christ. The stakes could not be higher. In this acrimonious milieu, fact mixed easily with fiction, and in 1836 the combination of the two became a best seller. That year a story appeared involving a convent of diabolical nuns remarkably similar to the Ursuline escapee episode, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery at Montreal. The book’s reputed author, Maria Monk, claimed to have witnessed murder at her convent. She also claimed to have suffered torture at the hands of priests and nuns before her daring escape from the convent. Critics, including her mother and impartial Protestant clergymen who visited the Montreal convent in question, denied her claims. In fact, the Rev. J. J. Slocum had led a cadre of New York area Protestant ministers in writing the fanciful tale. Debate over the veracity of Awful Disclosures continued through the late 1830s and unqualified belief in “Maria Monk” became a sort of litmus test of one’s support for the anti-Catholic cause.19 In 1840 the production of anti-Catholic literature and newspapers surged thanks to the culmination of fights over Bible reading in the public schools of Philadelphia and New York City. The dispute arose when New York City instituted a policy making only the Protestant King James Bible available to students. For the next three years Catholics tried to overturn this policy in order to allow their children to read the Catholic Douay-Rheims Bible. By 1843, finding no other recourse, Bishop John Hughes started what eventually became a separate, parallel Catholic school system based in the city’s parishes. Hughes even tried to get Catholic tax monies diverted from public schools to Catholic schools. According to Hughes, since New York City’s schools were de facto and now de jure Protestant, Catholics should not have to pay to support them and their own schools at the same time. This effort failed but cemented Hughes’s reputation as a controversialist. His ideal of parochial education, however, became the norm by the 1880s, when in another era of heightened anti-Catholicism bishops called on every Catholic parish in the United States to have its own school.



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In Philadelphia in 1842, Catholics took a less controversial tact than those of Hughes’s diocese. Led by their newly appointed bishop, Francis Patrick Kenrick, they sought either to excuse their children from Bible reading or to compel the use of an approved Catholic Bible alongside the King James. Local politicians supported this compromise as a reasonable way to deal with religious plurality in public schools. The city’s evangelical Protestant leaders, worried already about growing Catholic political influence, responded by forming the American Protestant Association (APA) to counter Kenrick’s efforts. Ignoring the reasonable compromise of having Catholic children reading from one translation and Protestant children reading from another, the American Protestant Association attacked the compromise as a conspiracy to destroy religious freedom and “exclude the Bible from public schools.”20 The year 1844 proved to be a formative one in the evolution of the American anti-Catholic movement. The movement was fast becoming so politicized that soon it promised to be inseparable from rising anti-immigration sentiment. Americans already steeped in anti-Catholic presuppositions and nervous about the growing Irish immigrant presence did not require much convincing to believe the APA’s accusations about Philadelphia Catholics. Along with Hughes’s controversial actions in New  York, the schools controversy seemed finally to substantiate the arguments of Morse and Beecher while making “Maria Monk” more believable. Nativists in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston responded by forming political parties focused on Bible-reading in schools and built on the dread of a foreign, Catholic menace. These new partisans, calling themselves Native Americans in New York and Philadelphia and American Republicans in Boston, sought a variety of remedies for America’s ills. One of these, echoing the Alien Acts of 1798, called for a substantial increase in the residency requirement before an immigrant could be naturalized. The new nativist parties also opposed the right of foreign-born men to hold elective or appointive office. Previously, only the presidency, as per the U.S. Constitution, had been reserved exclusively for native-born Americans. Nativist partisans dismissed the Whigs and Democrats as too soft on immigration, and in some cases, of outright collusion for an immigrant vote they saw as pliant and easily corruptible. Only the nativist parties, they said, could stand strong against foreign attempts to disrupt the American order. The year 1844 also was pivotal for the Native American Party due to a pair of deadly riots in Philadelphia instigated by party leaders in the wake

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of the schools controversy. The first riot occurred on May 6 when Native Americans held a mass meeting near a Catholic school in the Irish-Catholic neighborhood of Kensington. Approximately 3,000 spectators gathered to hear Lewis C. Levin, who was positioning himself to run for Congress as a Native American. When rain began to fall organizers moved the rally into a nearby market place, where a small number of Kensington’s Irish residents turned out to meet them. Fistfights and gunfire ensued and one nativist was killed. After nightfall, nativists marched to a Sisters of Charity seminary intending to burn it down but an armed Irish mob turned them away while killing one of them.21 The next day, several thousand nativists rallied outside of Independence Hall, where they hailed their dead as martyrs and then headed to Kensington. There, they burned houses and set St. Michael Church ablaze. The following night, finding Kensington protected by the city militia, the nativist mob burned St. Augustine Church, which had been John Hughes’ first parish as a priest of the Philadelphia Diocese. With the remnants of St. Augustine smoldering just a few blocks from Independence Hall, Philadelphia’s mayor finally declared martial law, ending the three-day riot.22 Labor unrest and ethnic tensions contributed to this unprecedented outbreak of mob violence but the most significant role in this riot belongs to religion.23 The Native Americans did not begin their first rally in a vacant field next to a Catholic school by sheer coincidence. Moreover, many had joined the nativist cause in the first place because of the recent Bible controversy. Questions of employment paled when compared to the fear that Catholics might bring down the republic by de-Christianizing the nation’s schools. The only possible result of such a radical move, the APA was saying, would be the loss for good of American civil and religious liberty. Perhaps most important in assessing the primary cause of the violence is that, at the time, both Protestants and Catholics widely acknowledged its source as deep religious hatred. Catholics argued that Native Americans had goaded Catholics into violence, tracing the nativist penchant for brutality to the Charlestown riot ten years earlier. In this they were correct, for immigration and the visibility of Irish-Catholics made violence all the more likely among Americans who for over ten years now had listened to increasingly hyperbolic warnings about Catholic foreigners. The Native Americans adopted the anti-Catholic rhetoric of evangelical Protestants and used it to instigate physical rather than apologetic damage. Nevertheless, they fervently believed in this alloy of patriotism, republicanism, and evangelicalism because it allowed them to carve out a



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narrower but more strident American identity. A Philadelphia nun understood this fact well when she called the rioters “nothing but a party of Protestants leagued against the Catholics under the name of the Native Americans.” When anti-Catholic evangelicals denounced the rioting as the act of drunken working class men, Catholics were quick to point out that alongside the “ribaldry” of the nativist rioters, “there was a concert of Evangelical denunciation going on against [Catholics] in many of the pulpits of the city.”24 Leading Philadelphia Protestants tried to dampen this outburst of anti-Catholic fervor but did so too late; the genie was out of the bottle. They blamed the mob action on the dangers of “Romanism” and denied responsibility for the violence but at the same time denounced the Native Americans as uncivilized. Nativists could not have agreed more with the first sentiment but of course bristled at the latter. In Philadelphia they spread the rumor that “a popish priest was seen to leave the vicinity within an hour of the riot” and blamed the conflagration on “a vindictive, anti-republican spirit” among “the alien population of. . . Kensington.” They also accused Irish-Catholics of trampling the American flag during the riot. By setting up their party first as protectors of the Bible and now as guardians of the Stars and Stripes, Native Americans portrayed themselves as the only trustworthy defenders of American republican values. They predicted future troubles if foreigners continued to extinguish the constitutional rights of native-born Americans. As far away as Boston, nativists demanded: “Why should the Native American party avoid a district inhabited by Irishmen as if it was infected with the plague?”25 Independence Day in 1844 brought more fatal rioting to Philadelphia. Over 5,000 Native Americans marched through the city, holding aloft a banner “on which were represented figures of an open Bible and a dead serpent. The word was passed. . . that this symbolized the power of the Roman Catholic Church, now utterly extinct.”26 Catholics responded by placing armed guards outside their churches. The next day, the local militia tried to confiscate arms at one such location, St. Philip de Neri Church in Southwark. Parishioners refused to leave, fearing that authorities would offer no more protection than they had at Kensington two months earlier. Negotiations ensued. On July 6 the militia and parishioners struck a deal:  if the parishioners would withdraw, the militia would guard the church. As the mostly Irish parishioners departed, however, a mob surrounded them and beat one nearly to death. Meanwhile, Native American Party members armed themselves and made a show of guarding the

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church to demonstrate that they opposed the use of violence in their cause. When the militia asked them to leave, the Native Americans refused. Militiamen eventually fired into the crowd, setting off a general riot that left twelve dead and over forty wounded. Even though the church escaped harm, Native Americans faced renewed criticism for being at the center of another deadly riot. Politically, however, there was no damage done. An alliance with the Whig Party allowed the Philadelphia Native Americans, including Levin, to win three out of four of the city’s congressional seats and most of its Pennsylvania Legislature seats. In return, the Whigs won the governorship, one congressional seat, and most local offices. Clearly, denunciations of violence did little to stifle the popularity of the nativist cause.27 Philadelphia was not the only scene of Native American activity in 1844. Just prior to that year’s elections, New  York party leaders warned that the United States would end up like southern Europe if it did not soon end its “intellectual and spiritual thraldom” to papal influence. The New York Native Americans implored voters to put aside their sympathy for the European poor who hailed from “monarchistic and aristocratic governments” and instead attend to their own interests. With no present political crisis in New York City akin to the 1840–1843 melee between Bishop Hughes and Protestant leaders over school Bible usage, the Native Americans campaigned on accusations that New York’s Democratic politicians had sold themselves to the foreign vote. On this platform, the New York Native American Party won the mayoralty in 1844, along with a majority of city council seats. Apparently, Samuel F. B. Morse had made his foray into New York City politics one decade too soon.28 In Boston the American Republican Party could afford to be more openly anti-Catholic than its counterpart in New  York City. The role of immigrants in the Democratic Party’s political machine there and the uncompromising stance taken by Bishop Hughes against threats to church property had kept violence out of Catholic-nativist disputes. But Boston’s American Republicans issued a call to arms in the style of the Declaration of Independence, reiterating the warnings of Morse and Beecher and combining them with new grievances against the Pope in a stunning fusion of patriotism and religion. Unlike their brethren of 1776, these Bostonians declared independence not from the English Crown but from a “Papal power” they claimed was strangling the United States. This was a ludicrous claim, of course—the Pope was barely able even to hold onto Rome at this point in time—but believable to those reared on



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anti-Catholic rhetoric. Boston’s American Republicans accused the Pope of interfering with the American school system; of sending Jesuits to undermine American political institutions; of having “commenced the introduction of image-worship” in the United States; and of organizing Catholics into a voting bloc. Echoing Thomas Jefferson’s more famous Declaration, American Republicans also complained that the Pope “keeps among us, in time of peace, standing armies of the Church” in the form of a flock over whom priests, “the sworn subjects of a foreign prince,” have “absolute control.” He was, furthermore, “sending hither swarms of foreign convicts, idlers and paupers, the refuse of Europe, to control our elections, fill up our poor houses, and harass our people and eat out their substance.” In the end, the Pope hoped to establish “an absolute religious and political tyranny over these States.”29 Beyond its creativity in linking the American Revolution to the fight against the global Catholic conspiracy, the Bostonian declaration merits interest because it added a new element to the growing civil-religious discourse: [The Pope] has permitted in the neighboring States of Mexico and Equador, new constitutions to be formed, by which the Roman religion of the pope, is, by law, established, as the only religion, to the exclusion of all others, thus giving practical proof of the still unchangeable bigotry and intolerance of Popery. Mexico, the Catholic nation nearest to the United States, had now entered the Native American imagination as damning evidence of Roman Catholicism’s consequences. One reason nativists mentioned Mexico was due to the backlash they had faced following the Philadelphia riots. Finding that Americans could not stomach sustained violence against foreigners living in their midst, they instead redirected anti-Catholic impulses toward a more distant enemy, which few Americans had experienced or met.30 The Native Americans and American Republicans were not just anti-immigrant parties using anti-Catholic rhetoric simply because the newest immigrants happened to be Catholic. As Native American behavior during the Mexican-American War would soon demonstrate, these partisans were more shaped by a particular religious worldview than anything else. The party’s social and political views were inseparable from its religious views but not like three equal strands of a tightly wound rope. A more appropriate metaphor would be that of a growing tree, stretching

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its limbs in all directions but rooted in the fertile soil of anti-Catholicism. No matter which branch one might examine, without taking into account trunk, root, and soil, any interpretation would be hopelessly flawed. If anti-Catholicism was a flourishing tree by 1845, then it was Lyman Beecher and Samuel F. B. Morse who were most responsible for nursing it back to life and making it grow. Beecher had led evangelical Protestants in adopting republican language and locating the origins of American self-government in the Bible. The effort to understand the mysterious ways of Providence could not be conducted without also negotiating one’s own role, as well as America’s, in the advancement of civil and religious liberty. As Beecher explained, the American mission to lead the world into a republican millennium could be traced to the original Puritan errand into the North American wilderness. Its success now hinged on “the religious and political destiny” of the West. The only real barrier to republican advancement was not a strictly political one, it was religious: the Catholic Church, whose adherents were immigrating to America in droves. This nascent American anti-Catholicism, emphasizing civil and religious liberty and best synthesized by Beecher into a distinctively American modality focused on the West, did not fade from the scene after the summer rioting in Philadelphia any more than it had remained buried in the ashes of the Ursuline convent ten years earlier. Indeed, in spite of widespread condemnation of this violence by most American ministers, evangelicals only became more uncritical in their use of the newly refined anti-Catholicism. Importantly, what made this discourse immediately intelligible to Americans was that its vocabulary, thought categories, arguments, and evidence appealed to extant anti-Catholic impulses and deeply rooted notions of liberty. While evangelicals Protestants were refining a civil-religious discourse that depended for its intelligibility on a peculiarly American anti-Catholicism, nativist political leaders were adopting Christian symbolism and religious terminology during the schools controversy of the early 1840s. By the advent of nativist political parties in 1844, nativists had come to see the ultimate goals of their movement in religious terms. They were not a violent, illiterate mob, but rather patriots who wanted a “purified ballot-box” and “the free use of the Bible.” It was “the Pope of Rome” who opposed these laudable goals and had sent his minions to expel the Bible from public schools. Policy and legislative arguments by nativists rose and fell on one primary assumption: republican institutions had originated in the Bible. Since Catholics rejected



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the Bible in favor of human traditions, they had to oppose republicanism if they wanted to remain authentically Catholic. This was why, Native Americans said, Catholics opposed reading Scripture in public schools. Evangelical Protestants had long doubted that one could be a good American and a good Catholic at the same time. Beecher had proclaimed that Catholicism was inimical to civil and religious liberty. Native Americans simply took this a step further by proclaiming that this meant no person could be a good Protestant American and not be a nativist.31 But what if the Catholics who endangered American liberty were neither native-born nor immigrants? What if they lived not in the United States but south of the border in Mexico? These not entirely new questions suddenly turned pressing in 1844 thanks to the proposed annexation of Texas. The Texas controversy moved Mexico to the center of debates over the meaning of America and its future for the first time since the Texas Revolution of 1836. The last, crucial element in the now mostly complete American civil-religious discourse was about to be added, and the Beecherite Synthesis would prove integral to it.

2

Religion, Race, and Texas Annexation I have visited no other Catholic country; but to one educated in the unostentatious purity and simplicity of the Protestant religion, there is something very striking in the pomp and pageantry of the Catholic ritual as it exists in Mexico, and I must say something equally revolting in its disgusting mummeries and impostures, which degrade the Christian religion into an absurd, ridiculous, venal superstition. If such things are not practised in other Catholic countries, why, then the priests of Mexico are alone responsible; but if these things are not confined to Mexico, the sooner and more generally they are exposed the better. Waddy Thompson, Recollections of Mexico 1

During the Texas Revolution in 1836, Old School Presbyterian and controversialist Robert J.  Breckinridge accused Mexico of participating in a Jesuit plot to stop American immigration to Mexico’s northern frontier. Breckinridge claimed the Mexican Constitution’s guarantee of Roman Catholicism as Mexico’s exclusive religion was merely the first step in the Pope’s drive to enslave the Americas. Because Breckinridge accused the Pope’s Mexican minions of blocking America’s preordained, continental destiny, he implied that immigrants, who as Lyman Beecher and Samuel F. B. Morse taught were likewise controlled from afar by the Pope, were every bit as dangerous as Mexican Catholics across the border. In this way, Breckinridge strengthened the growing link between Mexico on the one hand and the Beecherite Synthesis of nativist and anti-Catholic causes on the other.2 By the early 1840s nativists and anti-Catholic evangelical Protestants were working in tandem, though still oftentimes unintentionally, to



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cultivate a culture of religious bigotry. This benefited both their causes and occurred as each stepped up their contrast between Mexico and the United States. Another important factor was the Bible disputes in New  York City and Philadelphia, which led to an increased use of specifically religious rhetoric by nativists. Evangelical Protestants, too, had come to recognize the utility of nativist political arguments. What better way to prove that Beecher’s claims about U.S. Catholics were not just paranoid rhetoric than to point not to “Maria Monk” or John Foxe’s nearly three hundred year old Book of Martyrs but to the seemingly uncontestable example of backward Mexico? The debates over Texas annexation positioned this new grievance against Mexico to overtake more traditional concerns about Roman Catholicism. By 1845, evangelicals and nativists had succeeded in placing the Beecherite Synthesis at the service of Whig and Democratic politicians who recognized that it resonated with their constituents. The New  York Protestant Reformation Society, whose members had ghost written the “Maria Monk” tale, led the way in inserting Mexico into the cause of anti-Catholic nativism. This association’s most influential lights included John McLeod, William C.  Brownlee, and L.  Giustiniani. All three blamed Mexico’s instability on its lack of Protestantism. “The progressive spirit” was to be found only in “Protestant countries.” They also confirmed what many Americans already believed, namely, that for the United States to remain a republic and to retain divine favor it must remain Protestant. “Civil and religious liberty are twin sisters,” McLeod proclaimed, “and Christianity is the mother of both. Protestantism has released them together from the chains of Rome.” Americans needed to act quickly to ensure that Jesuits would not ravage the United States the way they had ravaged Texas prior to its independence. Apparently, these men did not know that the Society of Jesus had been suppressed in Mexico since 1767 (and, in fact, Jesuits did not get provincial status there again until 1907).3 The Texas debates, which started in May 1844 after President John Tyler submitted an annexation treaty to the Senate, pulled this religious anti-Mexican rhetoric out of its evangelical and nativist subculture and placed it in the mainstream of American political discourse. In early May the Native American Party had faced heavy criticism by Whigs and Democrats following the first round of Philadelphia rioting, but its warnings about foreign Catholics nevertheless found a strong voice among Congressmen of both parties from every region of the country. By the time

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of the second and more deadly Philadelphia riot in July 1844 the Texas debates had ended, but not before devotees of the Second Party System had discovered an effective, new framework for talking about westward expansion and American progress. Three main arguments emerged in favor of bringing Texas into the Union as a state with a constitution that protected slavery:  religion, race, and republicanism. What connected each to the other was anti-Catholicism. Some proponents of Texas annexation were more explicitly anti-Catholic or racialist than others, but when examined as a group the influence of the Beecherite Synthesis on their ideas of Providence and America’s future emerges as the most important factor in how they tackled the sticky questions of Texas annexation. All believed republican principles would regenerate North America. Most accepted without question that Mexicans were too barbarous or superstitious to rule over Anglo-Saxons or even to live among them. Some combination of race and religion had left Mexicans incapable of sustaining republican government. It only remained for politicians to package these assumptions thoughtfully in order to win the day. Implicit anti-Catholicism promised one effective means for Southerners to appeal to Northerners who, though reluctant to add another slave state to the Union, might still vote to do so if only to protect the same Bible that Catholics had threatened to remove from Yankee schools. Southern Democrats denounced Mexico’s constitutional protection of Roman Catholicism as an affront to religious liberty, a tactic requiring no direct denunciation of Catholicism to work. As Alabaman James Belser pointed out, if the United States annexed Texas, Americans could finally take their Bibles there and live “under a government which tolerates all religions and legalizes none (whether Protestant or Catholic).” Belser well knew that the more nativist Whigs would not vote for Texas annexation no matter what, while the growing numbers of immigrant Irish invariably voted Democratic. This appeal by Democrats to the anti-Catholic impulse, done in the name of religious liberty to please Protestants without alienating Catholics, just might be enough to induce northern support for annexing a new slave state in the name of freedom.4 Highlighting the anti-Catholicism within Anglo-Saxonism was one means of using religion to defend the South’s “peculiar institution.” This could be done in ways not so circumspect, yet the strategy remained the same: to secure northern Democratic support for Texas annexation by defining America as white and Protestant. Senator Robert J. Walker, an ardent



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expansionist from Mississippi, excelled at this. Walker blamed Mexico’s political violence on its “cruel, ambitious, and licentious priesthood.” An equal amount of danger, however, came from Mexico’s unenslaved black, indigenous, and Mestizo population. Given the chance, Walker predicted, the “fanatical colored” Mexicans would establish the Inquisition in North America and tempt slaves in Louisiana and Arkansas to rebel.5 During the Texas controversy religion moved to the fore as a key marker when it came to defining the American “race.” By the mid-nineteenth century Americans already applied the malleable term “race” to everything from ethnicity and religion to nation, language, and skin color. Rarely did “race” stand entirely alone for Americans without being intertwined with religion and republicanism. What had begun amid the tension between native white Protestants and immigrant Irish Catholics was furthered by the national debate over Texas annexation. Even though a few, like Senator Walker, did warn about the dangers posed by an “ignorant and fanatical colored population,” in most cases the concern voiced was not in a simple black versus white paradigm or that of a race war based on skin color. Rather, racialist comparisons were expressed primarily as Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism, with its concomitant anti-Catholicism and filial piety. So when Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton argued that Anglo-Texans and Mexicans simply could not live under the same government because of “natural and moral causes,” the insurmountable differences he had in mind were not so much biological as they were cultural and religious. For Benton, the Texas fracas was but one aspect of a larger “conflict of necessity between two races.”6 Democratic congressman John W.  Tibbatts used this argument to attack his fellow Kentuckian, the Whig senator, Henry Clay. Tibbats supported Texas annexation because it promised to “extend the principles of civil and religious liberty, for they march pari passu with the migrations of the Anglo-Saxon race.” But anti-annexation Whigs like Clay did not just oppose the grand territorial destiny of the United States. According to Tibbats, they also were hypocrites in doing so. And so the congressman quoted a statement by Clay from 1820 urging Americans to settle Texas: The question was, by whose race it (Texas) shall be peopled. In our hands, it will be peopled by the sons of freemen, carrying with them our language, our laws, and our liberties; establishing on the prairies of Texas temples dedicated to the simple and devout modes of

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worship of God, incident to our religion; and temples dedicated to that freedom which we adore next to them. In the hands of others, it may become the habitation of despotism and slaves, subject to the vile dominion of the inquisition and superstition. To be fair to Clay, these words from nearly twenty-five years earlier had encouraged the settlement of Texas, not its annexation, but such details matter little among partisans seeking to vanquish their opponents. More important in understanding how anti-Catholicism undergirded expansionist sentiment is that Tibbatts, with so little comment, connected civil and religious liberty to the Protestant Anglo-Saxon (i.e., “white” race). He did not make an argument because there was no need for him to do so. Tibbatts simply repeated what most Americans—including the Henry Clay of 1820—uncritically accepted as common knowledge.7 The widely held assumption by white Americans that an Anglo-Saxon republic was synonymous with a Protestant one, and that in fact both were needed to inculcate virtue and for a republic to flourish, was nothing new. It dated all the way back to arguments used by Federalists in 1787–1788 to explain how such a vast republic containing nearly every language and major religion on Earth could resist the centrifugal forces inherent not just in representative governments but especially in large, diverse countries. The only other nations in the world of equal or greater size, Russia and China, required the strong hand of autocrats to maintain order. Proponents of the Constitution responded to this in the Federalist Papers. John Jay accentuated not the variety of local culture and predilections in the United States but what the great majority held in common. In “Concerning Dangers from Foreign Force and Influence,” better known as Federalist #2, he argued that Americans could hold together their far-flung union precisely because God had blessed them with homogeneity in all the crucial aspects of life: Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs. By the “same religion,” Jay without a doubt meant Protestant Christianity, which is why in the 1780s and 1790s he sought to bar Catholics from



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voting and public office in New York. Indeed, thanks in good measure to Jay, until 1806 a special oath of allegiance was required of foreign-born Catholics in New York who wished to hold public office.8 The cultural homogeneity identified by Jay could, if writ large, wash over important local and regional differences. Yet if factionalism on the island of Great Britain could rip the English apart in civil wars and political crises, it was not an illegitimate question to ask whether similar civil disturbances might happen on a continental scale. Even in 1787 the borders of the American republic already stretched over a distance as vast as that between Constantinople and London. So much real estate to spare made disunion an easy and bloodless solution to intractable sectional disputes. Thus, even if Jay was correct that the United States was composed mainly of ethnic English Protestants, could it hold together and respect liberty at the same time? It was James Madison who provided the answer to this, predicting in Federalist #10 (wrongly, as it turned out) that, “faction would balance faction.” In effect, the United States would buck the historical trend of short-lived republics because no one faction ever could totally oppress another. In such a diverse country there would always be a balance of power, because of so many competing factions. George Washington agreed. In his 1796 Farewell Address—some of which was based on an early draft of Madison’s—he encouraged Americans to avoid regionalism and instead view every part of their country as contributing its own economic, moral, and political genius to the larger machine. He also commented on his confident belief that Providence had great things in store for Americans if they could but keep together in union, the “main prop” of their liberty. The question of what one might do about a large “faction” like that of Roman Catholics, whose faith was inimical to republicanism, simply did not arise in the 1780s and 1790s as anything more than a modest anxiety left over from hatred of the 1774 Quebec Act. Indeed, it was Washington himself who had made sure to stamp out the contagion of virulent anti-Catholicism from the ranks of the Continental Army. Only in the wake of the Second Great Awakening and increased immigration did Catholics appear as more than a theoretical threat to those were not stridently anti-Catholic. Whereas in 1800 there were only around 30,000 Catholics living in the United States out of a population of 5.3  million, making them 1.7% of the total, by 1840 there were 600,000 Catholics out of 17 million, a total of 3.5%. The United States went from having one

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Catholic diocese in 1810 to ten in 1830, the year after the first Provincial Council of Catholic bishops was held at Baltimore. By this time there were over a dozen Catholic seminaries and colleges and the number of monasteries and convents was approaching forty. Add to this schools and hospitals and the brick and mortar signs of Catholic growth were unmistakable. The newer state of Ohio, which counted zero Catholics in 1810, had twenty-two parishes, each with its own priest.9 With greater numbers came the possibility of greater political influence, and so American Protestants faced several important questions. Were these new Catholics cut from the same cloth as John England? Had Catholics behaved well in the past only because they were tiny in number? Should these new, fresh-off-the-boat Catholics be included among Madison’s factional balancing act? Could one believe in and make use of Anglo-Saxonist arguments in such a way as not to be anti-Catholic? Could Jay’s list of American commonalities really be expanded to include men and women with no history of self-government, let alone Catholics? Clearly, Jay himself had not thought this to be the case. Finally, did the whiteness of European Catholics or the non-whiteness (or, alternatively, blackness) of Mexican Catholics matter with regard to questions of American identity? The proposed annexation of Texas placed these questions front and center. Timing was key, for the Texas debates followed on ten years of increased anti-Catholic sentiment and the absorption of immigrant Catholics into the Democratic Party. Importantly, they also coincided with the Southwark and Kensington riots. In the Texas debates of May and June 1844 Northern Democrats treaded carefully, hoping not to alienate the growing Catholic immigrant population who voted for them. Yet they turned to Anglo-Saxonist arguments to support Texas annexation, invoking “Providence” and the “destiny” of Americans to erect “temples dedicated to liberty. . . over the graves of the Montezumas.” One predicted that republican institutions would eventually reach “to Patagonia’s snow-invested wilds.” Although he refused to speculate on whether these future republics would join the American Union like Texas, Indianan William J. Brown assured his fellow representatives that “their destinies will be guided by Anglo-Saxon hands.” Indeed, according to Brown only devout Protestant Anglo-Saxons could cultivate the virtue needed to sustain republican government.10 Jacksonian democratic ideology depended practically on more and more farmland for virtuous yeomen but appeals to Anglo-Saxonism worked equally well if not better than demagogic demands for new



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agricultural bottomlands. To see “Saxon blood humiliated, and enslaved to Moors, Indians, and mongrels” was more than enough reason for some Democrats to support annexation. “Our race of men,” concluded Pennsylvania senator James Buchanan, “can never be subjected to the imbecile and indolent Mexican race.”11 For Buchanan and Sidney Breese of Illinois, this was simply a matter of filial piety. Breese deemed it natural that people of “our own blood and lineage—of kindred institutions, manners, laws, customs, religion, and language” would want to join the United States. Mimicking the account of Creation in the Book of Genesis, Breese’s counterpart in the House, John A.  McClernand, urged Congress to protect “the bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh.” Why? Because Anglo-Saxons had the common destiny “to civilize and Christianize the world.”12 Whereas these men saw Texas as annexable because it was sufficiently Anglo-Saxon, anti-annexation Whigs from Northern or border states claimed Texas was either too Mexican or too black. In either case, it was not white enough and its inhabitants could claim nothing on John Jay’s list of crucial American commonalities. Whigs thus had in common with their Democratic opponents a dependence on Anglo-Saxonist, religious language.13 Kentucky Senator James T. Morehead warned that if the United States could admit “white foreigners” then it could also welcome “black foreigners” as American citizens. Senator William L. Dayton of New Jersey pointed out that German and Irish immigrants had received citizenship in the Republic of Texas after a residency of only six months. As nativists had for a long time pointed out, such people still owed “allegiance to the sovereignties under which they were born” and could not be trusted as U.S. citizens. Moreover, under the plan of annexation “representation would be given for Mexican peasants, and Indians now admitted to citizenship in Texas.” Worst of all, Texas’s entry into the Union would set a precedent for “the extension of the representation of negro population,” because under Mexican law blacks held citizenship in the areas of New Mexico that Texas claimed.14 The extent to which Whig and Democratic politicians believed their own rhetoric is impossible to gauge with complete accuracy but certain factors are very telling. For example, these politicians did not abandon their parties for the Native American Party nor were all their speeches commonly nativist. Further, many were meticulously careful in distinguishing among the Catholics of Mexico, American-born Catholics, and immigrant Catholics, three groups that adamant nativists lumped

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together as a monolithic menace. In general, Whigs could afford to be more nativistic than Democrats, who in northeastern cities were coming to depend on the Catholic vote. What is safe to conclude is that these professional Jacksonian politicians recognized and tapped into a pervasive anti-Catholic strain in American culture that predated the Beecherite Synthesis but had been given new life by it. Similarly, territorial expansion brought up important questions about the dangers of diversity and distance. Most white Americans could self-identify with providential Anglo-Saxonist rhetoric. This fact is what made nativist and anti-Catholic demagoguery so flexible that proponents and opponents of Texas annexation could use it in every region of the country. There was no more universally understood discourse on which to draw than this. In one sense, then, Jay had not been too far off the mark in 1787 with his comments about an American cultural consensus. The use of Mexico as a counter-example to America’s greatness as an Anglo-Saxon, Protestant power gained new force thanks to the debate over Texas, but its immediate origin lay in the sources used by politicians: popular historical and travel literature about Mexico. Books such as these first appeared around the time of the Texas Revolution, but in 1843–1844 publishing houses tried to capitalize on the public’s demand for all things Texan or Mexican by releasing several first-hand accounts of Mexico. By this time the civil-religious climate was such that these new books made abundant use of contemporary anti-Catholic themes to denigrate Mexico. This helped further to form an impression of Mexico that made it intelligible to many Americans only through an anti-Catholic lens. Like most travel literature of this period, these books appraised their subject (that is, Mexico) in terms of race, culture, politics, and religion. Geographers and travel diarists portrayed themselves as (and probably believed themselves to be) detached observers of a foreign land writing objective, anthropological accounts. These writers aimed at an audience wider than the narrow nativist and anti-Catholic readership. They also wrote for more learned readers than those typically attracted to titillating tales like Maria Monk. This allowed these books to convey many hallmark ideas of American anti-Catholicism without the burden of the nativist label. As with the politicians in the Texas debate, these authors embraced the foundational claims of the Beecherite Synthesis without facing accusations of zealotry or violent Native Americanism. Their travel stories about Mexico were rarely written with an anti-Catholic didactic purpose in mind



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but they nevertheless fanned the fires of suspicion about Roman Catholics by offering convincing evidence to support the most outrageous nativist accusations. As early as 1836, the year of the Texas Revolution, famed adventurer Charles Joseph Latrobe had laid the groundwork for American literary conceptions of Mexico with The Rambler in Mexico. Latrobe blamed the feebleness of the Mexican government on its Spanish past and “the Roman Catholic religion in its blindest and most revolting form.” Mexico’s republic was a facade and its “mongrel” idolaters were incapable of self-government. Latrobe did not write his book on Mexico as a detached but impassioned scholar interested in knowledge for knowledge’s sake. He intended The Rambler in Mexico to be a primer for advocates of Texas independence. In 1844 congressmen used Latrobe’s account for a different but not unrelated task: supporting Texas annexation by citing its statistics to bolster claims of Mexican inferiority.15 While the elite men in Congress may have worn through the pages of Latrobe looking for scientific evidence of Mexican inferiority—an inferiority that highlighted religion—it was William H. Prescott’s immensely popular History of the Conquest of Mexico that most shaped popular perceptions of Mexico. History of the Conquest of Mexico went through numerous editions beginning in 1843. Besides being a good writer, Prescott also possessed an entrepreneur’s impeccable timing. Written in a grand and entertaining style, Prescott’s book described the rise of the Aztec Empire and its fall at the hands of Spanish conquistadors. Prescott was less admiring of the Aztecs than Latrobe was, and he explained Cortez’s easy military victory as a consequence of problems endemic to Aztec culture. In particular, Prescott cited the Aztecs’ tyrannical religion and its integral connection to governmental despotism. “In this state of things,” he argued, “it was beneficently ordered by Providence that the land should be delivered over to another race, who would rescue it from the brutish superstitions.” Prescott thus subtly encouraged Americans to see themselves as God’s latest instruments in the ongoing salvation of Mexico.16 Prescott had some positive, albeit qualified, things to say, about the Catholic Church’s legacy in Mexico. He pointed out that the Spanish conquest, at the very least, brought Christianity to the Aztecs, even if it also brought the terrors of the Inquisition with it. He admitted that Roman Catholicism had “decided advantages” over “the cold abstractions of Protestantism” when it came to proselytizing “the rude child of nature.” The “dazzling pomp” of Catholicism, along with its use of statues and

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other material accompaniments, lent itself to easy adaptation by native Mexicans. Unlike most of his U.S. contemporaries, Prescott even acknowledged that Catholics did not worship their “material representations of the Divinity,” but he maintained that “this distinction is lost on the savage.” The best “weapons of the Church” in winning over the natives, however, were its “spiritual weapons. . . of love and mercy.” These allowed the Catholic clergy to gain inordinate power. (The claim that Roman Catholics sought to lull Americans into a false sense of security through their benevolence and charity was an old one, having been made most recently by the New York Protestant Association.) Sadly, the conquistadors ignored these positive elements of Catholicism, said Prescott, when they imposed religious obedience on the Aztecs. Yet somehow, probably thanks to kind friars and missionaries, Mexicans still developed a real love for their church and clergy.17 After describing these initial good effects of Roman Catholic Christianity on Mexico’s indigenous peoples, Prescott grew more negative. He asserted, for example, that a uniquely Spanish bigotry allowed “the spirit of Christianity” in Mexico “to evaporate.” Unlike the “purer Christianity” of the nineteenth century, the conquistadors’ Roman Catholicism lacked substance. In the end, the Catholic Mexico of the Spaniards ended up the same as the pagan Mexico of the Aztecs: a despotic, theocratic state.18 Prescott’s work in many ways was a well-intended attempt at scholarly objectivity in its appraisal of the good and the bad in Mexico. But the upshot of his argument was that the combination of Spanish rule, Catholic hegemony, and the lingering effects of autocratic Aztec culture—not biology, climate, or latitude—bore primary responsibility for having made Mexicans incapable of self-government. On the one hand, then, race was unimportant, but only if by race one meant skin color or common ancestry. Prescott seemed to be saying that it was not the non-whiteness of the mestizo majority and Indians that mattered so much as it was Mexicans’ long tutelage under oppressive religions. This history had left them without the ability to appreciate or respect human freedom. Mexicans had been capable of pure Christianity in the beginning but over the centuries had been enervated by Catholicism. In effect, the whiteness of the Spanish had not been enough; religion mattered more. Prescott did not comment on whether Mexicans might now be evangelized, become Protestant Christians, and pull themselves out of the mire on their own. In the religious and intellectual environment of the 1840s, American readers were left to conclude that only the vibrantly



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Protestant, Anglo-Saxon American could break Mexico’s spiritual and political chains.19 Whereas Prescott merely laid out evidence that Mexico’s was an obstacle to progress but left solutions to the reader, New Orleans Daily Picayune correspondent George Wilkins Kendall argued that the time had come for Anglo-Saxons to rejuvenate Mexico. Kendall published a book in 1844 that, because it was a personal narrative of the well-known, ill-fated 1841 Santa Fe Expedition, helped shape American public opinion of Mexico nearly as much as Prescott’s. The Santa Fe Expedition, for the first time since the Texas Revolution, had propelled Texas into U.S. newspaper headlines. Texas President Mirabeau B. Lamar, hoping to extend Texan control over Santa Fe while ensuring that Texas absorbed the lucrative trade that traversed the Santa Fe Trail, had sent out the expedition in 1841. With Kendall keeping a record of their journey, 321 men set out in June. The expedition quickly found itself without a guide, nearly starving, and under Indian attack. In the fall of 1841, Mexican forces captured and marched them all the way to Perote near Vera Cruz, where they were imprisoned. The Mexicans released most of the captives in April 1842 following diplomatic negotiations with the United States and Texas. Kendall blamed Mexico’s economic troubles on Catholic bigotry against industrious, hard-working Protestants. Mexico’s “crafty priesthood” came in for special indictment. Kendall lampooned priests for their “nonsensical mummeries” and Indian influences. As for Mexico’s future, he invoked Providence: The day is gone by when a priest-ridden population, governed by a military despotism, can make headway in the great race of advancement which has been commenced by Anglo-Saxon toleration, and by the civil and religious liberty which the latter race enjoy. Kendall predicted that Mexico would be regenerated only by one of two ways. “A thorough and radical revolution. . . in the very nature of the inhabitants” could do the trick but a wholesale population change was clearly impossible. Therefore, the second option was the only real one: Mexico would have to fall “into other hands.” Showing that he thought Americans should be these “other hands,” Kendall meticulously weighed the benefits and drawbacks of possible American invasion routes into Mexico.20 The Catholic Church also came under fire in influential works on Mexico written by Brantz Mayer and William Stapp. Both men reflected

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a broad consensus among American expansionists about Mexico, for if they did not offer the same solution, they nevertheless identified the same problem: Roman Catholicism. Their books provide an instructive contrast that explains why congressmen, whether or not they supported annexing Texas, resorted to anti-Catholic language and racialist caricatures to make their case. In Mexico as It Was and as It Is, published in 1844, Mayer recounted his experiences as Secretary of the Legation to Mexico between 1841 and 1843. He ridiculed priests as the “Pope’s eunichs [sic]” and criticized their “tasteless and barbaric” rites as patently Indian. For Mayer, then, Catholicism in Mexico was hopelessly brutish more because it was Indian than anything else. Only Anglo-Saxon immigration, therefore, could provide a stable republican government in Mexico. One apparently had to be white and prepared by Providence to be able to live out Protestant principles. In this case, religion mattered less than race, insofar as Mayer could separate the two.21 For Stapp, religion trumped race. In his journal of the Mexican capture of the Mier expedition in 1842, Stapp condemned Mexicans’ “religion” as “of a part with their political darkness,” and their priests as “insatiable in avarice.” Like Mayer, he criticized what he saw as the Church’s inordinate wealth, although unlike Mayer he did not ascribe the Mexicans’ love of their religion to charitable priests. In fact, Stapp actually lamented Catholic benevolence because it had “won for it the hearts of the unenlightened mass.” Because Stapp saw no solution for Mexico that did not include the Church’s complete destruction, he called for revolution.22 These writers might have differed in what they emphasized when explaining Mexican inferiority, but as a whole their diagnosis stayed within the bounds of a broader argument that highlighted an amalgam of race and religion. They could not conceive of a Mexican race, white or non-white, European or Indian, exclusive of Catholicism. Likewise, they could not conceive of a non-Protestant Anglo-Saxon. Racial categories like Spaniard, Aztec, Mexican, mestizo, and Indian held meaning only in light of the integral role played by the Catholic faith in defining each. Whether the Mexicans’ Catholicism was the cause or symptom of their nation’s civil instability and alleged inferiority mattered little. The competing arguments did not all have to agree, since each pointed to the superiority of Anglo-Saxons and Protestants and the inferiority of Mexicans and Catholics. These books inevitably affected American perceptions of Roman Catholics living in the United States not just because people read them



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but also because politicians exploited their collective depiction of Mexico as a nation of pliant ignoramuses befuddled by superstition. These books’ warnings about the Catholic Church’s adeptness at indoctrinating unsuspecting Mexicans through works of benevolence recalled the accusations against the Ursuline sisters before their convent had been sacked in 1834. The Mexican government’s establishment of Roman Catholicism presented Americans with sufficient proof that Catholics really did hate religious liberty. Successive revolutions already seemed evidence enough that Mexicans lacked the virtue needed to be free citizens, and the American literature on Mexico confirmed this. Little prodding was needed to imagine that the United States might one day resemble Mexico if Catholic immigration and political influence continued unchecked. Indeed, Beecher had predicted nothing less in A Plea for the West. Lyman Beecher’s fusion of political nativism and traditional anti-Catholicism with Americans’ longstanding habit of seeing their future in the West had thus taken on new life by the spring of 1844. During the annexation debates, anti-Catholic themes foundational to American republicanism and Anglo-Saxonism incorporated a growing literature on Mexico that underscored its religion, helping to form in the American mind a monolithic picture of Roman Catholicism. Whether politicians stressed political, religious, or anti-Mexican themes, what tied their rhetoric together was its emphasis on the West and its rootedness in Americans’ identity as a white Protestant and republican race uniquely blessed by Divine Providence.23 In the early 1840s, Catholics were not the only group deemed dangerous to the republic. White Protestants and Catholics believed black Americans to be incapable of self-government. But neither saw blacks as an immediate threat in the same way that some Protestants were coming to see Catholics. Regardless, most blacks were enslaved in the South. Even for Northern whites, this was a happy fact, which explains why so many in the North condemned abolitionism, since it promised to upend the Northern social system along with that of the South. Laws in Northern states kept close tabs on African-Americans, barring interracial marriage, exempting blacks from militia service, and in some place disallowing the ownership of weapons.24 The only major, non-Catholic threat, according to white Americans in the North, was the community founded by Joseph Smith, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), more commonly known as the Mormons. The LDS Church, whose members were uniformly white, was

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a bigger outsider in American culture than the Catholic Church, but not because Mormons were feared to be incapable of self-government. Rather, fear of Mormons seemed based on the fact that they had proven all too capable of regimentation and discipline. Mormons faced persecution not just due to their metaphysical claims or controversial practices like polygamous marriage. Indeed, they endured grave difficulties and condemnation even before Smith in 1841 announced a revelation from God allowing polygamy. Eccentric communities like Oneida or Brook Farm had faced far less persecution. What made Mormons a threat was their ability to organize, succeed, and prosper outside the prevailing white Protestant paradigm, much like Jewish Americans. The same could not be said, however, of Oneida or Brook Farm.25 In 1838 warfare dwarfing the era’s anti-Catholic riots had broken out in northwestern Missouri between locals and Mormon settlers. After a clash between the Missouri militia and the Mormons, Governor Lilburn Boggs issued a directive, saying that “Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State.” It is easy to see how this came to be known as the “Mormon Extermination Order.” Boggs also ordered Brigadier General Alexander Doniphan of the Missouri militia to capture and execute Smith. Doniphan, who believed the Mormons were acting only to defend their homes and livelihood, refused. Instead, he jailed Smith and then allowed him to flee to the newly chartered Mormon town of Nauvoo, Illinois. There, in 1839, Smith formed the Nauvoo Legion, over which he presided as lieutenant general. Catholics had never dared such a feat. In 1844 this Mormon militia found itself involved in another so-called “Mormon War.” When Illinois Governor Thomas Ford asked Smith to surrender and disband his legion, however, Smith agreed. On June 27, 1844, while in jail awaiting trial, Smith was hauled out by a mob and killed. Between 1845 and 1846, the new Mormon leader, Brigham Young, led an LDS exodus of thousands westward into the high desert area of Utah around the Great Salt Lake, a region claimed by Mexico.26 Like the ancient Romans before them, Americans believed representative government required virtuous men and women capable of performing the duties that came with their liberty. Otherwise, republics quickly degenerated first into demagoguery, then anarchy, and finally despotism. If citizens could not order their souls and thereby use their freedom rightly, how could they hope to govern a nation? In his Farewell Address, George Washington had argued that only a virtuous citizenry with a morality rooted in religion could protect liberty because only such a population



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would be capable of valuing it. Washington believed this public piety could be maintained under all types of Christianity or Judaism. Neither Catholics nor Mormons could find anything in these republican formulations with which to disagree, but in the early 1840s neither had yet carved out space for their communities in a universally accepted American identity. The events of 1844 confirmed the view of America contained in the Beecherite Synthesis by helping Americans tie together apparently unrelated strands into a common civil religious sentiment that also had something to say about race. Blacks might be dangerous to the American Experiment in ordered liberty or incapable of self-government, but most were enslaved in the South or severely restricted in the North. Thus, they posed no real threat. Meanwhile, Joseph Smith, Jr., was dead, the latest “Mormon War” over, and the LDS led by Brigham Young had fled into the far west to attempt the absurdity of making a go of it in the desert. Catholics remained as the only major, visible threat to republican government. What is more, the danger they posed was international in scope and they kept coming ashore in larger numbers. Catholics might not have an army like the Nauvoo Legion, even if their leaders did wear uniforms of a sort. But they did have convents, schools, and churches, all signs of their potential to build a much larger force. This might seem far-fetched, but by 1844 it passed the threshold of possibility for most Americans, who had just witnessed the Mormon War. The example of the Mormon War aside, the Beecherite argument that republics needed a Biblical foundation that only Protestant Anglo-Saxons could protect primarily found its confirmation in Catholic Mexico’s civil strife. Along with idolatry, superstition, and the Pope’s despotic power, a lack of Protestant Bibles there had supposedly been the main obstacle preventing republican institutions from taking a firm hold. Had not Bishops Hughes and Kenrick tried to remove Bibles from public schools in New York and Philadelphia? Moreover, as long as priests and bishops took oaths in support of the Pope, they could never be patriotic citizens of any nation, including the United States. Did not Mexico also offer an example of a nation where the clergy fattened themselves on the monies and labor of their own people? This thought process followed its logical course to a fuller definition of just what a true American was. The idea that the United States was providentially destined to occupy North America and spread republican government resonated with white Americans in 1844. A quick glimpse at a map revealed that any expansion outside of Oregon had to come at the expense

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of Mexico. Literature on Mexico successfully shaped American views of their southern neighbor as a decrepit pseudo-republic cursed by despotism and superstition. This literature complimented popular lurid stories about priests and nuns and fit nicely with older ecclesiastical and theological arguments against the Catholic Church. The important fact is not so much that the anti-Catholic discourse typified in the Beecherite Synthesis boosted or harmed the chances of Texas annexation but that this discourse was so universally intelligible to Americans when they talked about Texas, westward expansion, and the destiny of the American republic. Politicians on both sides of the Texas fight had drawn heavily from this rhetorical arsenal. Unable to approve the annexation treaty, however, Congress departed Washington for its summer recess. That summer, politicians jockeyed for positions in advance of the approaching federal election cycle planned for November and early December. All knew that the Texas question would somehow impact the presidential contest and all knew that in an age of democracy it was never too early to start shaping public opinion. Meanwhile, anti-Catholic groups and even popular publishers rushed to capitalize on the upcoming elections as an opportunity to teach their fellow Americans the truth about Mexico and to find transcendent meaning in the westward movement of the United States. The elections would be a referendum on Texas annexation, yes, but they also would make a profound statement on what Americans believed Providence had in store for their country as an island of liberty in a despotic world.

3

Election, Manifest Destiny, and War For this blessed mission to the nations of the world, which are shut out from the life-giving light of truth, has America been chosen; and her high example shall smite unto death the tyranny of kings, hierarchs, and oligarchs, and carry the glad tidings of peace and good will where myriads now endure an existence scarcely more enviable than that of beasts of the field. Who, then, can doubt that our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity? John L. O’Sullivan 1

As Congress departed for its summer recess on June 8, 1844, following the Senate’s failure to approve the Texas annexation treaty, Americans faced their most consequential political decision since 1820. In that year Congress, led largely by Henry Clay, had drawn a line along the southern border of the new state of Missouri at 36’ 30°. This latitudinal line stretched westward from the Mississippi River through the remainder of the Louisiana Territory. Only states south of the line could enter the Union with constitutions allowing slavery, and the only area south of the line was the Arkansas Territory out of which would be formed Arkansas and eventually Oklahoma. This was a much smaller region than what lay north of the line, where only free labor states could enter the Union. Congress intended this dubiously Constitutional measure to ensure the stability of the Union. For over two decades it seemed as if the Missouri Compromise had been successful. But now another slave state beckoned out West, the Republic of Texas. Although on most maps all of Texas lay below the Missouri Compromise line (and in any case had not been part of the Louisiana Purchase, though oddly enough some Democrats argued it had been in an effort to gin up support for “winning back”

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what John Quincy Adams had “given away” by treaty with Spain in 1819), by 1844 its proposed annexation still had split Americans politically and ideologically. If this was not trouble enough, even though Texas had been independent of Mexico and internationally recognized as such for eight years, Mexico still claimed it as its own. Mexico also had never retracted its threat of war in the event that the United States annexed Texas. Even if Mexico might recognize independence and annexation it disputed the Republic’s southern border and the Nuevomexicanos of the Mexican frontier province of New Mexico rejected its western boundary. With federal elections doubling as a referendum on the wisdom of annexing Texas, Whigs and Democrats realized they would have to choose carefully their positions and presidential candidates. This was less true of the new upstart group of anti-slavery advocates calling itself the Liberty Party. The role that the new nativist political parties might play in states like New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts was even less clear. In the meantime, President John Tyler still had several months left in his term, time enough to do something consequential on his own. President Tyler began the summer on a happy note by marrying Julia Gardiner, a significant event to be sure. Though Tyler was getting along swimmingly with his new bride, he had been on the outs with his own Whig Party almost from the moment he had assumed the presidency on April 4, 1841, following the sudden death of President William Henry Harrison. Later that year Tyler had vetoed Henry Clay’s bill to renew the Second Bank of the United States, leading to a flight from his administration by every cabinet member save Secretary of State Daniel Webster. When Webster resigned in 1843 a frustrated Tyler replaced him with Virginian Whig Abel Parker Upshur. But Upshur soon died so Tyler brought in South Carolina Democrat John C. Calhoun, just one month before the national Whig Party convention. By then the president already had vetoed another Bank bill, this time after giving every signal that he would sign it. In between he had vetoed a tariff bill and tried hard to add Texas to the Union. In this manner, the Southern Whig had followed a course as fatal as any Democrat’s to every part of Clay’s American System. In so doing, Tyler had ended any chances that he might run as a Whig in 1844.2 On May 1 Whigs convened in Baltimore and nominated Clay to be their presidential candidate. Their choice was partly the product of Clay’s long history stretching back to the Missouri Compromise of seeking to stifle the



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spread of slavery westward. As titular leader of the party Clay already had taken a stand against Texas annexation but did not seem strongly opposed to it. Hoping to obfuscate matters further, nervous Whigs avoided the issue entirely and made no mention of Texas in their party platform.3 For Clay’s vice presidential running mate, Whigs nominated former U.S. senator and New Jersey native Theodore Frelinghuysen, a Reformed Christian leader widely respected by evangelicals and viewed as a man of upright character. In the 1830s he had joined a chorus of Northern evangelicals in opposing Indian Removal. He also opposed slavery on moral grounds. Frelinghuysen was no abolitionist—no national Whig candidate could be, since most Americans viewed abolitionism as fanatical—but instead backed colonization as the most prudent way to rid the United States of the stain of slavery. This moderate stance was one important factor in his nomination. A free state Whig (or a mostly “free state” Whig, since the gradual emancipation of New Jersey’s slaves was still under way in 1844) was needed to balance the ticket, and the delegates recognized this. Undeniably, it was Southern votes that put Frelinghuysen over the top at the convention, proving that the evangelical leader, even in spite of his support for anti-slavery, was more palatable than his nearest competitors, New Yorker Millard Fillmore, John Sergeant of Pennsylvania, and John Davis, Daniel Webster’s nemesis from Massachusetts. As Northern delegates split their votes among all four men, nine out of ten Southerners went for Frelinghuysen.4 At the time of his nomination, Frelinghuysen was president of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and vice president of the American Sunday School Union, as well as the American Colonization Society. (In 1846, he added the presidency of the American Tract Society (ATS) to this list.) In addition to this, he presided over New York University and was heavily involved in the temperance movement and with the American Bible Society (ABS). In short, Frelinghuysen’s prestige in the vibrantly reform-minded America that emerged from the Second Great Awakening ranked him among Protestant lights such as Charles G. Finney and Lyman Beecher.5 Most of the organizations to which Frelinghuysen belonged advertised their missions in predominantly anti-Catholic language. It is not the case that Frelinghuysen merely belonged to an umbrella organization that happened to contain a few bad apples. The ABS and ATS were the most anti-Catholic of all the major evangelical voluntary societies. By 1844 the main aim of the ABS was to answer Beecher’s “plea for the West.” Unlike with abolitionism, Frelinghuysen saw little reason to disavow nativism,

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since most Americans did not view restrictions on immigration negatively. Frelinghuysen connected republican government to Protestantism and also believed that Catholicism was inimical to civil and religious liberty. Many delegates rightly concluded that Frelinghuysen might be their best bet to woo nativists who were loosely tied to the Democratic Party or who had left the Whigs for the Native American Party. Still smarting from the spring 1844 Native American electoral successes in New  York and Philadelphia, Whigs had good reason to worry about Native American inroads in Boston and in Charleston, South Carolina. Since Frelinghuysen himself avoided fanatical anti-Catholic language, Whigs gambled that he could attract nativists without tarring the party with the extremism of someone like Lewis C. Levin.6 Just days after the Whig convention, Frelinghuysen cemented his anti-Catholic credentials with a speech at the American Bible Society’s annual meeting. Timing was everything, for Frelinghuysen’s speech came just days after the first round of Philadelphia rioting, where nativist demagoguery over the Bible in schools had launched violent mobs into the streets. At the ABS meeting speakers lambasted the Catholic Church in harsh language. Frelinghuysen did not, but to Bishop John Hughes this was a weak defense. The bishop publicly criticized Frelinghuysen, saying that while the ruins of Catholic churches and neighborhoods were still smoldering in Philadelphia, “it was not time to be making speeches calling on Protestants ‘to live by the Bible or TO DIE FOR THE BIBLE.’ ”7 At first, leading Whigs were not sure what to make of the convention’s choice of Frelinghuysen. Candidly, Clay admitted to Frelinghuysen, “Your nomination took me by surprize.” Still, Clay told him “it was an agreeable surprize.” The need of the nativist vote might help explain Frelinghuysen’s nomination, but the presidential nominee remained circumspect about wading too deeply into the waters of nativism. Indeed, he told Frelinghuysen that out of “a reluctance to throw new issues into the existing contest,” he would maintain “silence” on immigration. Clay’s “silence” on immigration, though, came only after a summer of hand-wringing over whether to make his true opinions known. In May, Clay would only say privately that he would divide the foreign born into “three classes”: • “Those who are already naturalized.” • “Those who are now in the U.S. but not yet naturalized.” • “Those who may hereafter arrive in the U.S. or may arrive after the passage of a new law of naturalization.”



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According to Clay, the first class “should enjoy all the privileges and protection. . . of native Citizens, subject only to Constitutional exceptions.” The second could be naturalized according to current law. But Clay believed “further restrictions upon naturalization ought to be imposed” on all new immigrants. By June he had prepared a list of what these “considerable additional restrictions” ought to be. These included a federally imposed limit on states’ “power to naturalize,” “particular tribunals,” and “further extensions of the probationary period.” Yet he continued to worry about how this stance might affect his electoral chances. He did not want to be seen as “opposed to all foreigners.” By September, Clay finally decided that “after much consideration” he ought to say nothing “on the subject of the Naturalization Laws and the Native American party” because “public opinion is much divided” on the issue.8 In the 1840s among American Protestant denominations, concern about ecclesiological purity usually trumped other disputes. Especially among Calvinistic thinkers, this question revolved around how pure one’s church had to be and what one needed to do to help it remain pure. Translating this into solicitude for the American republic, the question became one of a purer nation that still aspired to be John Winthrop’s “city on a hill.” In their own unique ways, Roman Catholicism and slavery sullied the United States in the eyes of God. An evangelical could belong to several societies and clubs committed to combating both. But when it came to political parties a person could ascribe only to one. Just as there was a spectrum of denominations to which one could belong, ranging from more mainstream to the very exclusive, so, too, were the partisan options. For a strong subset of evangelicals, the Whig and Democratic Parties, as vast moderating coalitions, simply would not do. This sentiment was the major driving force behind the creation and early success of the Native American Party. Like nativists, abolitionists also had their own, single-issue party in 1844, the Liberty Party. Whereas the Native Americans did not run a presidential candidate, the Liberty Party, founded just four years earlier, did. Its nominee was former Democrat, James G. Birney, a native of Kentucky who now resided in Saginaw, Michigan. Although few, including members of the Liberty Party, expected him to win, the expectation was that he might demonstrate the growing power of anti-slavery and its most radical variant, immediate abolitionism. In practice, the Liberty Party’s main task was tearing down Clay, since most Democrats were so openly pro-slavery. Clay, though a planter, walked a murky line on the expansion

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of slavery westward. So the task for Whigs was clear: cobble together an Electoral College majority in a climate where religious fervor was increasingly draining the party’s base by drawing off evangelicals interested in national purification. Unlike these evangelicals, John Tyler had not left his own party; it had effectively expelled him. Cast adrift without a party, President Tyler briefly toyed with founding a Southern-based one of his own with a pro-annexation platform. This hope faded when, in late May, Democrats nominated a Southern candidate energetically in favor of territorial expansion, James K. Polk of Tennessee. If Frelinghuysen had been a surprise to Clay, Polk was a surprise to nearly everyone. Only his biggest supporter, Andrew Jackson, had expected the victory. Like their opponents, Democrats also looked northward for a vice presidential candidate and nominated a Pennsylvanian, George M.  Dallas. One clear goal of Dallas’s nomination was to capture the Catholic vote in Northern cities. Timing helped, for the first of two major anti-Catholic riots occurred that May in Dallas’s hometown of Philadelphia in the interim between the Whig and Democratic conventions. Democratic leaders asked Americans whether the violent Native Americans were the type of folks one wanted in an electoral coalition anyway. By implication, this was also a criticism of Frelinghuysen. As for Polk, Whigs mocked him as a political nobody, but they were disingenuous in doing so. Polk had in fact served in the U.S. House of Representatives during Jackson’s presidency, where he worked hard for Old Hickory during the Bank War. He also had held the august post of Speaker of the House from 1835 to 1839. Polk had left Congress in 1839 only to serve as governor of Tennessee. His time as governor came to an end in the Whig tide of 1841. In 1843 he lost another gubernatorial bid. Despite all this, at the Democratic convention Polk emerged as the compromise candidate between former president Martin Van Buren and Lewis Cass of Michigan—the first so-called “Dark Horse” candidate in American history.9 In Pennsylvania and New York Native Americans cooperated with the Whigs in state and federal elections, while Birney actually said publicly that Polk would make a better president than Clay. Along with Frelinghuysen’s candidacy, this made voting Democrat in 1844 an anti-, anti-Catholic vote by default. Still, even without Democratic demagoguery, few immigrants, especially Catholic ones, would have voted Whig. The most likely potential



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loss for Whigs were native-born Catholics turned off by Frelinghuysen’s subdued anti-Catholicism and horrified by the Native Americans’ violence. All these machinations over nativism aside, the only major issues of the presidential campaign of 1844 turned out to be Texas and the usual Jacksonian era disputes over central banking and tariff rates. By far the starkest divide between the Whigs and Democrat was that the former opposed Texas annexation and the latter favored it. Opinion on Texas seemed as partisan as everything else in the Second Party System.10 Frelinghuysen attracted nativists and outside the presidential race the Whig bargain with the Native Americans worked to some extent. Despite his American Colonization Society activities—or, rather, because of it— Frelinghuysen failed to attract radical abolitionists in sufficient numbers. Yet if a more abolitionist Whig had been nominated, Whigs might have maintained Native American support but they would have lost the South. In the end, the Whigs did as best as they possibly could in 1844. Clay finished less than 2% behind Polk in the popular vote and Clay would have won the election with just one third of the Liberty Party’s 15,814 votes in New York.11 Whigs found the election results inexplicable without reference to the Catholic vote. Millard Fillmore blamed Frelinghuysen’s nativism for driving “the foreign Catholics from us” in New  York. Frelinghuysen lamented an unintentional but nevertheless unholy “alliance of the foreign vote, & that most impracticable of all organizations, the abolitionists.” Seventy-seven-year-old John Quincy Adams added “the Pope of Rome” to the list of villains. The future president, Fillmore, perhaps summed up the prevailing Whig sentiment: “May God save the country, for it is evident the people will not.”12 With Polk’s victory, the now lame duck Tyler renewed his push to annex Texas. This time he did so by Congressional resolution, not treaty. Unlike a treaty, which required the consent of two-thirds of the Senate, a resolution only needed a simple majority. The worst-kept secret in Washington City was that the president elect was in town working furiously as a booster for annexation among Democrats. Polk’s strategy of using cabinet and other federal appointments as leverage paid off. On February 28, 1845, Congress passed a joint resolution that combined competing plans. It approved annexation but gave a long list of conditions that had to be met first, including the settlement of “all questions of boundary that may arise with other governments.”13

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These “other governments,” of course, referred to Mexico. Its Texas policy changed as often as its leadership but Mexico’s position by 1845 was that it would accept Texas independence if the republic stayed outside the American Union. President José Joaquín Herrera toyed with a price tag for Texas independence, but this led to his overthrow in December 1845 by Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga. Earlier that same year Paredes had helped oust Antonio López de Santa Anna. Now he successfully tapped into Mexican discontent about U.S. efforts to annex Texas, providing a perfect opening for France and England, each of which wanted Texas to stay out of the Union. French and English diplomats fought hard to win Mexican recognition of Texas independence, betting that an independent Texas facing no threat of war from Mexico would be more likely to reject annexation. In reality, the boundary disputes between Texas and the Mexican states that bordered it to the west and south were the real sticking points from Mexico City’s perspective, not independence or annexation. President Tyler signed the resolution on March 1 and sent it on to the Republic of Texas, where it faced a series of hurdles likely to take a year to resolve. In the meantime, Florida entered the Union on March 3. The next day, James K.  Polk became the eleventh president of the United States. His first order of business was to settle a boundary dispute with England over the vast Oregon Territory, which covered all the lands from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific coast between 42° and 54°40’ North Latitude. Even as Polk embarked on this diplomatic brinkmanship with Britain, he did not take his eyes off Texas. Tyler had still left him much to do where the southern border of the United States was concerned. Privately, he hoped to add California to the mix as well. The men Polk chose for his cabinet mirrored his expansionist ambitions and at least two evinced alignment with Anglo-Saxonism. James Buchanan, who just months earlier had declared that the United States should annex Texas because “imbecile and indolent” Mexicans should not rule “our race of men,” left the Senate to become Secretary of State. Polk tapped another senator, Robert J.  Walker, for Secretary of the Treasury. During the Texas debates Walker had been a lot more precise about the cause of Mexican inferiority: he had blamed it on the Catholic Church.14 Most Americans realized that if the United States did not protect Texas from Mexico by annexing it then England would likely form some sort of alliance with Texas. Obviously, Americans preferred the former. Texas, of course, possessed a third option:  maintaining its independence and somehow earning recognition from Mexico through European diplomatic



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intervention. President Polk set about through secret agents to encourage Texians to choose annexation. This effort included letting Texians know that the U.S. government considered the Rio Grande (i.e., Rio del Norte), not the Rio Nueces as claimed by Mexico, to be Texas’s southern and western border. Meanwhile, he stationed troops near Texas, poised to enter the moment annexation became official in order to deter or to fight Mexican troops who were massing south of the Rio Grande.15 On July 4, 1845, a convention in Texas approved annexation. Almost immediately, the Mexican public cried for war. Polk responded by sending to Mexico the American diplomat, John Slidell, whom the now deposed Herrera had invited to settle indemnity claims and the Texas boundary disputes. In November Texas submitted a new constitution to Congress for statehood approval, which Congress passed on December 22. Texas was now a state and “on equal footing” to the other states, as Polk put it. Official transfer of governmental functions and the arrival of Congressional representatives and senators, however, took some time and dragged on into the spring of 1846.16 It was during these summer months of 1845, when so much still seemed up in the air about Texas, and when in the minds of Americans its annexation lacked the inevitability that historians later ascribed to it, that Democrats revisited Beecher’s anti-Catholic discourse. In the process, they coined the term, “Manifest Destiny,” which afterward came to signify the nineteenth-century American drive to absorb as much territory as possible in the belief that Providence had clearly revealed this to be God’s will. Americans of course were not the first people, and would not be the last, to believe themselves not merely exceptional but also uniquely favored by God. The content, vocabulary, and theological roots of Manifest Destiny rhetoric, however, make it critical to measuring the extent of anti-Catholicism in the United States during the 1840s. Without understanding that, one cannot hope to make sense out of the religious history of the Mexican-American War. In an article published in 1839, “The Great Nation of Futurity,” Democratic journalist, John L. O’Sullivan, labeled the United States, “the nation of human progress.” The United States, he said, “was the beginning of a new history,” and bore none of the past’s burdens. “America has been chosen” by God, proclaimed O’Sullivan, for “a blessed mission to the nations of the world.” Drawing heavily from the progressivist assumptions of English Whig history, liberalism, Christian millennialism, and the Enlightenment historical narrative of a mankind slowly growing into

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adulthood, O’Sullivan saw no obstacles in the way of “our onward march” into “the expansive future” where all aristocrats and monarchs would fall by the wayside. What was this mission? “Our mission,” said O’Sullivan, “was to develop freedom of conscience, freedom of person, freedom of trade and business pursuits, universality of freedom and equality. This is our high destiny, and in nature’s eternal, inevitable decree of cause and effect we must accomplish it. All this will be our future history, to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man—the immutable truth and beneficence of God.” Although O’Sullivan’s list mentioned God it lacked the two central goals that John Winthrop had had for the Massachusetts Bay Colony 210 years earlier:  a purified Christian church and the salvation of souls. Whereas Winthrop’s ultimate goal had to been to convert Europe, O’Sullivan’s was to fulfill America’s destiny as a free and continental republic. O’Sullivan’s vision seemed to endorse the expansion of freedom for freedom’s sake, revealing O’Sullivan to be what Pope Gregory XVI had in mind when he condemned “shameless lovers of liberty” who made freedom the proper and only end of humanity.17 It was in his reaction to the debate over Texas during the summer of 1845 that O’Sullivan penned what became one of the most famous American essays of the nineteenth century:  “Annexation.” According to O’Sullivan, by trying to stymie Americans’ westward growth at the Texas border, England and France were blocking “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” Meanwhile, Whigs were ignoring the “common duty of Patriotism” to support enlarging what Thomas Jefferson once called the “Empire of Liberty.” Opponents of Texas annexation thus obstructed not only God’s plan for the United States but also blocked the global triumph of republicanism. “California will, probably, next fall away from the loose adhesion which, in such as country as Mexico, holds a remote province in a slight equivocal kind of dependence on the metropolis. Imbecile and distracted, Mexico never can exert any real government authority over such a country.” While O’Sullivan stopped short of advocating outright conquest, he did point out that, “the advance guard of the irresistible army of Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down upon it, armed with the plough and the rifle, and marking its trail with schools and colleges, courts and representative halls, mills and meeting-houses.” O’Sullivan was a second



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generation Irish-American from a Catholic family but one could hardly tell by his unabashed Anglo-Saxonism. Although he may have become more religious later in life, in the 1840s the Democratic Party and Enlightenment liberalism seem to have been his religion. What is most striking about O’Sullivan’s rhetoric is not its Anglo-Saxonism, accusations that anti-expansionists were unpatriotic and unChristian, and predictions of American greatness. None of these were new. Rather, what is of critical importance is that O’Sullivan combined all these and wistfully predicted that Mexico would soon bear the brunt of them.18 In early 1846, amid this increased focus on Mexico, publishing houses rushed to meet the high demand for new books on Mexico. Former minister to Mexico Waddy Thompson published his influential Recollections of Mexico and Mayer issued a new edition of Mexico as It Was and as It Is. But non-best sellers such as Thomas Farnham’s Mexico represented a good cross-section of American opinion, too. Farnham argued that racial miscegenation had left Mexicans incapable of virtue. “Mexico,” said Farnham, “must eventually be peopled and governed by another race,” preferably American Anglo-Saxons.19 Former consul Albert M.  Gilliam concurred about Mexicans’ lack of virtue but this is why he opposed the annexation of any Mexican territory other than California and whatever lay north of the Rio Grande. As with Mayer’s diplomatic past, Gilliam’s recent experience as U.S. Consul at San Francisco lent added weight to his memoir, Travels. Gilliam admitted that he had never entered a Mexican church (nor even a Catholic church) before his visit to Perote during the writing of his book, yet he wondered why the Pope had not purged “the Catholic religion in Mexico of heathen and heretical doctrines and festivities.” He derided Mexican rites as superstitious and full of “pomp and show.” Peremptorily defending himself against charges of anti-Catholicism, Gilliam claimed that he merely wrote scientifically about Mexican politics and religion. The two, he said, were helplessly intertwined. Yet this was no objective anthropological study of culture, for Gilliam urged his readers to “uproot and overthrow the whole system, and on its ruined foundation erect a plan of pristine pureness, upon the truth as it is.”20 While the minor positions of Gilliam and Mayer gave legitimacy to their books, the lofty position of Waddy Thompson as minister to Mexico ensured that his Recollections became the most quoted book on Mexico during the Mexican-American War. Like nativist and evangelical critiques of Mexico, Thompson’s drew on the Black Legend and compared the English colonists in America with the Spanish in Mexico. The English colonies

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had evolved into a republic with civil and religious liberty, whereas Mexico had descended into a theocratic despotism.21 A land of impressive mineral and agricultural wealth was wasted on such an inferior race, according to Thompson. As evidence for Mexican inferiority, he thought descriptions of their Catholic “processions, ceremonies, and mummeries” best served his purpose. Perhaps, Thompson mused, Mexicans were just too ignorant to grasp Protestant teachings and their “degraded” Catholicism was all that their feeble minds could understand. For this reason, Thompson like Gilliam opposed Americans governing Mexico as part of an empire. Mexicans, said Thompson, “are as ignorant as the cattle which graze their wide plains and die.” This fact would make the nation’s political regeneration impossible.22 Thompson’s book was as nativist as it was racialist. Of Mexican religion and Roman Catholicism in general, he declared: I have visited no other Catholic country; but to one educated in the unostentatious purity and simplicity of the Protestant religion, there is something very striking in the pomp and pageantry of the Catholic ritual as it exists in Mexico, and I  must say something equally revolting in its disgusting mummeries and impostures, which degrade the Christian religion into an absurd, ridiculous, venal superstition. If such things are not practised in other Catholic countries, why, then the priests of Mexico are alone responsible; but if these things are not confined to Mexico, the sooner and more generally they are exposed the better. Thompson’s warning was implicit but clear:  the United States might someday resemble Mexico if all Catholics behaved like their Mexican coreligionists.23 Recollections cemented the use of Mexico as a key weapon in the nativist fight against Catholic immigration. At the same time it had a profound impact on the American soldiery during the Mexican-American War. Among a small but sizeable criminal element, Thompson’s book helped pave the way for atrocities by dehumanizing the enemy. In the meantime, its account of Mexico’s clerical wealth inspired visions of plunder. It would take little time for recruiters to catch on to the propaganda value of this latter fact. Thompson claimed he did not support armed conquest. These protestations were disingenuous, however, as he amply demonstrated throughout



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his book. For example, he wrote that he was certain “that our language and laws are destined to pervade this continent.” He also predicted the eventual Anglo-Saxon dominance of North America. Likening “our own Indians” to “the Indian race of Mexico,” Thompson asserted the latter would likewise “recede before us.” The republican rhetoric of empire in Thompson’s Recollections left the reader with little doubt that one way or another, the white Anglo-Saxons of the United States would colonize Mexico. Inevitably, this meant Protestantism would supplant Catholicism there. Left to the reader’s reflection was the status of Catholicism in the United States, for what good would it do for Americans to republicanize Mexico and populate it with white Protestants only to see their own country sullied and its virtue attenuated by Catholic immigrants?24 John L. O’Sullivan in some ways accomplished more in “Annexation” than all these books put together, because he gave Americans a handy term on which to hang their expansionist hat:  “Manifest Destiny.” The complex threads that composed the discourse first synthesized by Beecher and then modified during the long debate over Texas annexation came together under the hand of O’Sullivan, finalizing the inseparability of anti-Catholicism and Anglo-Saxonism from American expansionist sentiment. The subtle reworking of the Beecherite Synthesis by Manifest Destiny advocates gave Americans the most universal and effective means yet of understanding themselves and their unique role in the world. It did so by spelling out the shape of the Catholic menace, relocating it for the time being in Mexico, and reinforcing the divinely ordained American role in the advancement of civil and religious liberty. By 1846, America’s identity seemed most intelligible only when defined in contradistinction to Mexico:  Protestant, not Catholic; Anglo-Saxon not Indian/Mestizo/ Spanish (i.e., white not nonwhite or black); republican not tyrannical; industrious not slothful. Literature by the likes of Thompson and Gilliam only needed to reinforce this with evidence of Mexican inferiority, for readers already took American superiority for granted. Americans did not, of course, hold the Anglo-Saxon British in such low esteem, even if the United States continued to push northward on the continent as well. And so on April 18, 1846, after a year-long, acrimonious debate in the U.S. Senate, Congress finally approved a notice to abrogate the treaty sharing the Oregon Territory with Great Britain. But they did so in unthreatening language welcomed by the British. The end of the Oregon dispute was clearly in sight and it did not involve war. Word of an agreement between British and American diplomats also arrived

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from London, and Polk quietly agreed to the terms. To the dismay of ardent expansionists, Polk settled at the 49th parallel rather than 54º40’. Significantly, the American portion included the valuable Columbia River basin. With the issue of the Northwest now settled, expansionists looked to the real prize directly south of Oregon, California. This time they and the president were in full agreement:  one way or the other, California must join the United States. As expansionists quickly set their sights in the West on Mexico, so, too, did evangelicals and their many voluntary associations. In so doing, they responded to O’Sullivan’s predictions about California and finally seemed to be answering Beecher’s plea for the West. The two-year-old American Protestant Society (APS) was one such organization that shifted its focus to Mexico and the West. Not surprising, the APS counted Lyman Beecher among its leaders. Other guiding hands included Edward Beecher, George B.  Cheever, Henry P.  Tappan, John Dowling, and Samuel Burchard. In its magazine, the American Protestant, the APS published horror stories of life in Catholic countries (even before the war this included Mexico) and reports of the movements of the “Mystery of Iniquity, Mother of Abominations, and Man of Sin” in America. The APS compared the original thirteen English colonies of the New World with former Spanish possessions, concluding, “Romanism exerts a baneful influence on the industry and prosperity of a country.” Pointing to Mexico as a harbinger of things to come if Americans did not act quickly, the APS begged Protestants to evangelize American Catholics before the United States ended up like Mexico.25 The APS would get its chance sooner than even its most fevered rhetoricians could have hoped. On May 9 news arrived that on April 25 American and Mexican troops had fought a battle in the disputed territory between the Rio Nueces and the Rio Grande. “American blood has been shed on American soil,” Polk told Congress in his war message. After a heated two-day debate, Congress declared war on Mexico on May 13.26 The Beecherite Synthesis, now wholly absorbed into calls to fulfill America’s Manifest Destiny, promised to be flexible enough to attract recruits, denigrate Mexicans, and support conquest. It soon proved the most effective tool Americans had to make sense out of the war that was upon them.

4

Religion and Recruitment We’re the boys for Mexico Sing Yankee Doodle Dandy, Gold and silver images, Plentiful and handy. Churches grand, with altars rich, Saints with diamond collars, (That’s the talk to understand,) With lots of new bright dollars. The Song of the Volunteers 1

Before anyone in Washington City learned about the skirmish that took place on April 25, 1846, two bloodier and much larger battles had already occurred, one at Palo Alto and the other at Resaca de la Palma. The U.S. Army under General Zachary Taylor also had completed the fortifications for what was then called Fort Texas across the Rio Grande from the city of Matamoras. With fifteen-foot thick earthen walls that towered nine feet high over a moat, the fort was strategically placed on the river and designed to be strong enough to hold out for several weeks against the guns of Matamoras. On May 1 church bells in the Mexican city rang as priests blessed the cannon one by one. The next day, General Mariano Arista unleashed his artillery on Fort Texas.2 Taylor was at Fort Isabel when the bombardment began. Trusting to superior American artillery and Fort Texas’s defenses, he calmly remained there until May 7. Marching with an army of around 2,400 men, on May 8 Taylor met Arista’s army near Palo Alto on the plains above the Gulf of Mexico west of Fort Isabel. The American army’s new “flying artillery”— very mobile guns light enough to relocate quickly during battle—devastated the Mexicans. Arista left the field of battle when he realized further charges would be suicidal. He did not, however, abandon his attempt to keep Taylor away from Matamoras. Instead, he moved to a stronger defensive position at Resaca de la Palma north of Fort Texas. Battle ensued on

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May 9. This time it was as costly for the Americans as for the Mexicans. Nevertheless, the Americans routed Arista and moved on to lay siege to Matamoras. Less than ten days later, Taylor moved in and occupied the city without firing a shot.3 Back in Washington City President James K.  Polk, Secretary of War William Marcy, Congress, and the nation’s governors were deeply engaged in a contentious battle of their own: fighting over how best to strengthen the army. This would include some increase in the size of the regular army, which numbered only around 5,500 soldiers, along with a major call up of volunteers from existing state militia units and newly formed companies. The citizen soldier tradition meant that Americans trusted volunteers more than regulars and that hastily training volunteers during wartime was preferable to a large professional army. Americans in the 1840s still placed too high a value on individual liberty and state sovereignty to stomach a standing army of any appreciable size. The one potential downside of this policy was that while volunteers might perform well on the field of battle they were not used to the illiberal discipline required for an army. As recruiters sought to entice men to volunteer to go fight the Mexicans, they did so within a milieu shaped by strident Manifest Destiny rhetoric. In many conflicts, sacred or ideological language might be used as people begin to beat the drums of war. The contextualization of American expansionism within the discourse of the Beecherite Synthesis was such that in the case of the Mexican-American War American recruiters drew on specifically anti-Catholic, Anglo-Saxonist rhetoric. This interplay between religion and recruitment was just the beginning of American attempts by Protestants and Catholics to negotiate the meaning of the war. By May 19 Congress had doubled the number of privates in the regular army, created Company A  of the U.S. Engineers, and added a new regiment of Riflemen. This came only after a contentious debate mostly along Whig-Democrat lines, although Democratic Senator John C. Calhoun headed a faction that voiced concern about the threat by Polk to the Constitutional separation of powers. These additions expanded the regular army to just 15,540 men, hardly enough for a major war against Mexico. Congress thus authorized Polk to request up to 50,000 volunteers from the states. These volunteers would serve for up to twelve months, a duration considered by Americans in 1846 to be a long term of enlistment. This number was in addition to the 5,000 or so Taylor had already requested from Louisiana and Texas.4



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American leaders believed this larger army would be sufficient to establish a defensive line across the northern Mexican frontier in order to separate it from the more populated areas of Mexico to the south of the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts. This strategy, Polk reasoned, would demonstrate to Mexico that it could no longer hold on to its northern frontier. The president hoped that Mexico would respond by selling Alta California and granting recognition of Texas annexation with a border at the Rio Grande. By this time it was obvious that this would probably necessitate New Mexico’s annexation as well. General Stephen Watts Kearny would be responsible for taking New Mexico and, along with the U.S. Navy, California. Taylor would continue as commander of the army south of the Rio Grande. Polk was prepared to invade central Mexico and take the capital if Mexico did not sue for peace. This might be done over land from the north but more likely could be accomplished from some point along the gulf coast near Vera Cruz. In that case, Polk, Secretary Marcy, and General-in-Chief Winfield Scott all agreed that an even larger army would be needed. At the time war broke out, nearly one-quarter of the regular army was foreign born. Of these, most were either German or Irish immigrants. By some estimates, one out of five regulars was Roman Catholic. This is not so much because there was no nativism or anti-Catholicism in the regular army but because immigrants had joined the army as a means of becoming American and serving their new country while earning a paycheck with room and board. Even after the Mexican-American War started, immigrants remained more likely to join the regular army because they often found themselves locked out of local volunteer units, which were dominated by Protestants. A few responded by forming their own ethnic volunteer companies, a feat only possible in cities with high concentrations of Irish or Germans. When Irish Americans did so, the word “green” usually figured in their company’s name. Religious bigotry and nativism might have made the regular army a de facto option for foreign and even native born Catholics, but for Protestant volunteers religion rarely ranked high among their reasons for going to war. Few signed up out of some desire to defeat Mexico merely because it was Catholic. Still fewer joined up to evangelize Mexicans. Instead, they cited reasons common to enlistment in most wars: patriotism, the defense of national honor, a sense of duty, the necessity of inflicting a just punishment, and the desire to assert masculinity. In some cases, the attraction was simply the steady salary the army offered. Although small at $7.00

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per month, it at least ensured room and board for the period of enlistment.5 Contrary to the citizen soldier ethos, most regulars expressed these same patriotic sentiments. Although he much later in life wrote that the Mexican-American War was unjust and unrepublican, in 1846 a young Ulysses S. Grant vigorously claimed: “I would volunteer to come to Mexico as a private if I could come no other way.”6 Volunteers and regulars alike had misgivings about conquest and about playing a direct role in the extension of slavery westward. Just like General Winfield Scott, many had political differences with the Democratic Polk Administration. Yet both groups argued that defending one’s country took precedence over policy questions. Soldiers summed up a more jingoistic variety of patriotism with the phrase, “Our Country, Right or Wrong.”7 The editors of the Daily American Star, one of several newspapers published in Mexico by American soldiers, later elevated the phrase “Our Country, Right or Wrong” to such a high place in the American civil religion that it called it an “idea of patriotism. . . second alone to love of God.” After all, if the war was part of the nation’s destiny under Providence’s guiding hand, then how could one oppose it without sinning?8 Even abolitionists, who were the least likely to see America as a nation not in need of redemption, got caught up in this bewildering splendor of godly patriotism. One, Kentuckian Cassius M.  Clay, stunned his anti-slavery allies by volunteering to fight in a war that they blamed on a Southern, pro-slavery conspiracy. Clay declared that despite the evils of slavery and his opinion that the Nueces River was indeed the proper boundary of Texas, he would serve his country. Clay privately expressed the belief that he could not fight for liberty at home if he did not first do so abroad. Evidently, Clay sincerely believed that the U.S. Army would in some fashion be liberating Mexicans. William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator disagreed. Calling Polk “a willing Pontiff” to his “devoted priesthood” in Congress, the radical abolitionist paper predicted that Polk’s “hellish liturgy” would end freedom not just in Mexico but in the United States as well.9 Not all soldiers had such high-minded motives as Clay for going to war. A  conflict with Mexico offered the temptation of booty in many forms, including the rich mines and agricultural lands of northern and central Mexico. Tennessee volunteer John Blout Robertson wrote matter-of-factly that “it is contrary to the genius of the Yankee to suppose that when once his greedy eyes have fallen upon so extensive a tract of fair and fertile country, he will be long finding the means to possess himself of its soil.”



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Anglo-Saxons, according to Robertson, had been waiting for years to take advantage of Mexico’s resources, and wherever “the restless Anglo-Saxon” goes, “the weaker races sink before him.”10 This ideology of conquest grew no more nuanced or muted as it climbed the chain of command. It could be found among land-hungry volunteers like Robertson but also in a virtually unaltered form among commanders like General William J. Worth, who asked, “Have not our Anglo Saxon race been land stealers from time immemorial and why shouldn’t they”?11 Worth meant this as a compliment. As American soldiers arrived in south Texas and prepared to enter Mexico, they became increasingly convinced that Providence had granted them the lands they saw before them.12 A  captain in the 1st Mississippi Regiment predicted that “the land from Matamoras to Camargo. . . is well adapted to cultivation and when the Anglo-Saxons get to work on it will lay the region of the lower Mississippi in the shade.”13 One did not need to be committed to the plantation agriculture of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana to agree. The best evidence that Mexicans did not deserve their own territory, alleged one Ohio volunteer, was that their nation remained degenerate even after so many years in proximity to the industrious United States.14 Even before entering Mexico to see the evidence firsthand, Anglo-Saxonist Americans had concluded that Mexican racial and religious inferiority had retarded progress there. The most obvious, readily attainable wealth in Mexico for most soldiers lay not in tillable farmland but in churches and monasteries. Indeed, there was no guarantee that massive territorial concessions would be included in a peace treaty. Mexico’s churches, on the other hand, stood out not just as physical reminders of the cause of Mexico’s backwardness but also as its most handy form of plunder. Here was something a man could carry back home in his pockets. He could mail packages home or ship large items by sea. Since few aspired to become a farmer south of the Rio Grande, this booty might be the only thing other than glory that a soldier took away from the war. The dazzling possibilities of Catholic treasures quickly earned the popular, shorthand term, “Golden Jesus.” These visions of clerical wealth, of course, did not spring into being with the war. Waddy Thompson, Thomas Jefferson Farnham, Albert M.  Gilliam, Samuel Gregory, Brantz Mayer, George W. Kendall, and William Prescott had prepared the way by forming a receptive audience with their hyperbolic tales of gold crucifixes, statues with gemstone eyes and studded garments, and gilded altar rails.15 Along

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with popular anti-Catholicism, these texts formed American soldiers’ expectations of what they would find in Mexico. Just weeks after the declaration of war newspapers began excerpting and paraphrasing these books under titles like “Church Wealth of Mexico.”16 The Whig Party’s National Intelligencer criticized the new histories of Mexico and the reprinting of the old ones. It singled out Thompson for providing fuel for the fires of conquest: “Faster than our own eagerness to get and to examine his volume–the journals of the Southwest are seizing upon and spreading, as incentives to the invasion of Mexico, his accounts of the golden altars and balusters [sic] of the Mexican shrines!”17 The journals and letters of soldiers reveal that many read or were at least familiar with one or more of these books. Thompson’s and Mayer’s were the most popular. Troops took them to Mexico as guidebooks.18 Soldiers and poets worked the visions of ecclesiastical gold and silver from these books into war songs, for those who neither knew how to read nor had the desire were still willing to sing while working or on the march. The writer of “Song of the Volunteers” hoped that “when we’ve punished them enough, We’ll make them sell us out the stuff.”19 Even more unabashed was the “Song of the Volunteers,” sung to the tune of “Yankee Doodle”: We’re the boys for Mexico Sing Yankee Doodle Dandy, Gold and silver images, Plentiful and handy. Churches grand, with altars rich, Saints with diamond collars, (That’s the talk to understand,) With lots of new bright dollars.20 Other crowd pleasers among the volunteers were ballads derogatory of Mexico’s Catholic priests.21 In light of the widespread anti-Catholic climate of opinion in the United States and mindful that a religious tenor to the war could produce the kind of prolonged conflict they did not want, President Polk and Secretary of State James Buchanan acted immediately to prevent the war from taking on an anti-Catholic character. A  coincidental turn of events simplified their efforts. As news of the war broke in May, American Catholic leaders were gathered at Baltimore for their Sixth Provincial Council. At Polk’s behest Buchanan invited several bishops to the State Department



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to discuss the war. Buchanan told Bishop John Hughes of New York and Bishop Mathias Loras of Dubuque that the president wished to appoint Catholic army chaplains in hopes of “disabusing the minds of the Catholic Priests and people of Mexico” that war would be waged on their religion. Both men pledged their assistance and then headed to nearby Georgetown College, which was run by the Society of Jesus. It was no secret at the Jesuit school that Polk’s nephew and ward, Marshall T. Polk, was a student there. What the public did not know was that Polk admired Georgetown as a suitable college for young men of any religion. In fact, he had sent his nephew there despite strong resistance from Marshall’s mother, his sister Laura Wilson Polk Tate.22 After a few hours at Georgetown, the bishops returned and told Buchanan that the Society of Jesus would make available a small number of priests to serve as army chaplains.23 On the evening of May 19 President Polk and Bishop Hughes met for the first time. For over an hour they discussed religion and the war. Both agreed that the presence of American priests in the army might alleviate Mexican concerns about the safety of their church property and their freedom to practice Roman Catholicism. At some point during the meeting Polk offered Hughes the position of special envoy to Mexico, which the bishop eventually declined. According to Polk’s diary, Hughes “expressed his willingness to visit Mexico himself if the Government desired it,” because he was a good friend of Emmanuel Posada y Garduño, the archbishop of Mexico City. Buchanan and newspaper reports, however, later claimed that the idea of the mission originated with Polk, not Hughes. Whatever the genesis of the proposal, the fact that Polk and Hughes attended a large party at the presidential mansion later that night helped spread news of their supposedly private conference throughout Washington.24 Polk’s consultations with American Catholic leaders did not stop with Hughes. On May 20 he met with the bishop of St. Louis, Peter Richard Kenrick. This was another effort, Polk said, to enlist the aid of the American Catholic hierarchy in “conveying true information in relation to the free toleration of all sects of religion under our constitution to the Mexican Priesthood & people.”25 Kenrick had already conferred with Marcy and Senator Thomas Hart Benton about the possibility of Catholic chaplains. Now feeling assured of American Catholic support, Polk ordered Marcy to ask Fr. John McElroy and Fr. Anthony Rey to accompany General Taylor’s army into Mexico. Both men were Jesuits and had been recommended for the job by the American bishops and Georgetown’s administrators. Because there was no law authorizing field chaplains, Polk could not

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officially appoint the two men. The priests were to accompany the army in an unofficial capacity.26 The task of explaining the purpose and quasi-official status of the Jesuit chaplains to General Taylor fell to the secretary of war. Marcy told Taylor that the president was confident the two priests could counter Mexican fears about attacks on their religion and the plunder of their churches. The presence of Jesuits in the invasion force would go further than government statements or well-behaved soldiers in convincing Mexicans “that their religious institutions will be respected, the property of the Church protected, their worship undisturbed, and in fine all their religious rights. . . preserved to them.” This claim that the administration’s motive was solely to ease Mexican fears of religious war is dubious, however, since McElroy spoke no Spanish and Rey’s knowledge of that language was questionable. Polk’s primary objectives were more likely boosting the morale of Catholic soldiers (who even before the war had complained of nativism in the army), preventing desertions, and preserving American Catholic support for his administration. Even McElroy, who had idealistic hopes of improving the state of the Church in Mexico, concluded, “the object of the President. . . in our mission was altogether political.”27 This dual policy aimed at Catholics in Mexico and in the United States soon became public knowledge. News of a possible Bishop Hughes mission to Mexico broke in the press before the chaplain story. The New York Herald denounced the idea that Hughes might serve the United States as a diplomat. The Herald’s editor, James Gordon Bennett, Sr., was a Democrat who was anti-Catholic but not all that nativist. His disdain for Hughes could be traced to the bishop’s efforts to secure state funding for Catholic schools after Hughes’s failure to stop the exclusive use of Protestant Bibles in public schools. Thus, the Herald responded with hyperbolic language every time Hughes stepped beyond what it thought should be his purely spiritual role. On May 29 Bennett’s paper accused the bishop of attempting to influence Polk so that Hughes could advance his own scheme: “Could the Catholic Church of Mexico be blended with that of the United States. . . the immediate reward would be a Cardinal’s hat. . . . The bishop does not overestimate the union between the two churches.” Indeed, the Herald claimed that Hughes was no different than unruly volunteers when it came to wanting to plunder the Mexican Church. Bennett surmised that Polk’s cabinet called off the Hughes mission only because it feared a repetition of the 1844 riots in Philadelphia.28



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Nativists from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River portrayed the Hughes affair as proof of a “Foreign Party’s” control over the Polk Administration. They suggested that the Baltimore synod had dictated terms to the president.29 Loudest among these critics was Native American congressman Lewis C. Levin, editor of the Philadelphia Daily Sun. The Sun was the party’s organ and the leading Native American newspaper in the nation. Historians who doubt the intensity of religious fervor underlying the Native American Party’s anti-Catholicism and instead find its inspiration in partisan nativism, ethnocentrism, or labor unrest need only read Levin’s paper to see how these interacted on an equal footing. The Daily Sun referred to the Jesuit chaplains as “Mr. Polk’s Romish Priests.” It called on Americans to transcend party and unite as Protestants against Polk. “If the President can recognize the Romish religion, he can establish it.”30 As for Bishop Hughes, Levin’s paper asked if Americans were to be subjected to Roman Catholic “butchery and intolerance, because a certain Bishop of that Church can influence a certain number of Catholic voters for any party who may choose to purchase them?” It challenged the president to say whether he had sought Hughes or the bishop had sought him, thus trying to create a scandal within a scandal. Whatever the case, Polk was a traitor even for suggesting that the bishop should serve under the same flag that “he gave orders to his Irish myrmidons at Kensington to trample under the feet and tear into fragments.” With the accusation that Catholics had desecrated the Stars and Stripes during the deadly Philadelphia riots, the Sun thus dredged up the two-year-old unrest in Southwark and Kensington in order to criticize Polk.31 The Daily Sun also cited the Hughes affair as proof that Americans needed to revise their naturalization laws to limit foreign Catholic influence. Indeed, the “atrocious abuses” of the Democratic Polk Administration proved that “the potato rot is a far greater political curse to this country, than it has proved a physical scourge to the old world.” As for Mexico, the Sun spoke of the menace of “the accession of eight millions of foreigners” who were “uncultivated in mind, brutal in manners. . . and slaves to the tyranny of monks.” In spite of this harsh rhetoric, however, religion trumped mere nativist politics, for the Daily Sun backed the annexation of Mexican territory in the name of evangelization.32 Given anti-Catholic rioting and rhetoric like this, even before American troops occupied a single Mexican city it is easy to see why Mexicans might have feared that an apparent war for territory might easily become a religious conflict. Propagandists within Mexico did not have to stretch the

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truth much in order to cause fear about the religious consequences of an American victory. As expected, recruiters, be they clergymen or politicians, accentuated the decidedly anti-Catholic religious underpinnings of Manifest Destiny rhetoric. Since Jesuits commonly bore the brunt of anti-Catholic rhetoric, this made Polk’s choice of chaplains all the more useful to his critics. Contrary to his intentions, then, Polk’s appointment of Catholic chaplains actually increased the growing dread on both sides of the border that the war would be one of religion. In marrying anti-Catholic and missionary impulses to avarice, recruiters faced protest from Catholics and Democrats in the North who realized they could not afford to alienate urban Catholics. A massive recruitment rally held at New  York City’s Central Park is a good illustration of this tension. On May 20, 1846, recruiters erected stages around the park for various speakers, drawing an estimated 50,000 people. Before a crowd of thousands, New York City lawyer Alexander Wells delivered a fiery speech about conquering Mexico, which he called a just outcome. This earned him applause. But when he wondered aloud whether Americans had “cause to level all their temples to the dust,” several in the crowd screamed, “No, no; let us have no church burning.” Ignoring them, Wells declared that Mexicans should be left to the mercies of God, “and if their priesthood can save them, be it so.” Irish men present in the throng hissed and yelled until they succeeded in drowning out the remainder of Wells’s speech.33 On another platform, the eloquent and popular attorney James T. Brady, a Democrat, tried to motivate his listeners by appealing to their patriotism. Even so, because it already had become such a common recruiting strategy, Brady had to acknowledge the attraction of Mexico’s clerical wealth in order to dismiss it. American men, argued Brady, needed only the enticement of patriotism to fight. No true American would go to Mexico to desecrate its “temples.” At this, the crowd broke into applause, crying, “No church burning.” Still, New Yorkers who found Wells’s rhetoric more stirring than Brady’s enlisted for the express purpose of plundering churches for “golden Jesuses.”34 Catholics in New York and Boston did not remain silent amid this talk of ransacking Mexican churches. The Freeman’s Journal called Wells “unfit for civilized life.” While it admitted his rhetoric might “swell the ranks of the volunteers,” which it in fact did, Bishop Hughes’s newspaper hoped the war could be fought without “religious hostility.” If nativist soldiers ever did loot Mexican churches, the Boston Pilot sarcastically surmised that such men “would put the gold and silver vessels and images to their own



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use as they did those of the Ursuline convent and Philadelphia Churches.” According to the Pilot, visions of plunder when combined with rampant anti-Catholicism would produce American soldiers “armed with a Bible in one hand and a pick-lock in the other.”35 The offering of “Golden Jesuses” as a lure by recruiters was not confined solely to New York and New England. From Illinois to South Carolina, volunteers quickly learned that one way to be elected captain or lieutenant was to promise “Golden Jesuses” to their comrades. With a salary of only $7.00 per month, even the most non-sectarian volunteer could be tempted to pilfer a “Golden Jesus” or two.36 The most notorious case of enticing volunteers with Roman Catholic wealth was the formation of a company in Tennessee by one of President Polk’s oldest political enemies, the Methodist minister, William G. Brownlow. In response to the appointment of Fr. McElroy and Fr. Rey, Brownlow recruited ninety-two men and named them the “Protestant Invincibles.” As the editor of a Whig newspaper, Brownlow had already written that the U.S. government should “let out the Mexican war on contract, to East Tennessee: for the privilege of plundering the rich Churches of Mexico, and coining their golden gods into money.” Accordingly, Brownlow proposed that his own Protestant Invincibles undertake the war for one-half of the booty as their only salary, “counting the fun of the thing at least a half compensation.” In this case, then, “Golden Jesuses” inspired not just individuals but an entire company to volunteer. In their request to serve, Brownlow’s men gave General William Brazelton, commander of the East Tennessee militia, two demands:  no Roman Catholic chaplains could be appointed to the army and generals must be non-partisan. The Protestant Invincibles then reported for service with thirty-four other Tennessee companies. The state did not accept them, however, ostensibly because of these conditions. The large turnout of companies and Brownlow’s Whig affiliation, along with the Polk Administration’s desire to allay Catholic concerns about the safety of their church, figured in the state’s decision as well.37 After a large Independence Day rally in July 1846, where the Invincibles drilled and marched in uniform, the eccentric company sent another request to Brazelton. This time they offered to pay for their own Protestant chaplain to ensure that they would not be forced by Jesuits to “join with Mexicans. . . in the worship of the Beast.”38 By this time, Brownlow must have known his Invincibles would not be allowed to fight in Mexico. All he could do was make as much political hay as possible over Polk’s Jesuit chaplains.

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Even if they could dismiss the Protestant Invincibles as fanatical demagogues, Catholics recognized their own delicate situation: at a time of widespread religious bigotry and even violence, their nation was now at war with a country whose problems Americans blamed largely on Roman Catholicism. Moreover, the solution to Mexico’s problems, many Americans seemed to be saying, was to supplant Catholic Mexicans with Protestant Anglo-Saxons. A new storyline also was emerging that claimed Catholic Americans who otherwise would be trustworthy soldiers were now giving up the fight because of the widespread calls for the looting and Protestant evangelism of Mexico. Catholic Americans thus felt compelled to defend their co-religionists in Mexico as a means of defending their faith more generally. But while doing this they needed to counter accusations that foreign-born and even native American Catholics were not patriotic. The public voice of the Catholic Church in the United States during the 1840s was the nation’s bishops and a scattered group of Catholic newspapers. Usually, the two were deeply related, as with Bishop Hughes’s Freeman’s Journal, the U.S. Catholic Miscellany, which had been founded in 1822 and was published by the Diocese of Charleston, South Carolina, and the Catholic Telegraph of the Diocese of Cincinnati. The Telegraph even had a German-language version, Der Wahrheitsfreund, the mere existence of which did little to allay fears that Catholicism was foreign to America. The clerical connection was more tenuous with some Catholic newspapers, as in the case of the Boston Pilot. The Pilot, an often incendiary Catholic paper aimed at an Irish-American readership, was founded by Bishop Benedict Joseph Fenwick in 1829 but had been owned and operated by lay Catholics since 1834. Together, the Catholic press took up the task of countering anti-Catholic war rhetoric. First, they accused Thomas Farnham and Waddy Thompson of providing a meticulous blueprint of Mexican churches that, when combined with racial and religious prejudice, would inspire soldiers to desecrate Mexican churches in a Jacobin-like frenzy. Second, they sought to reaffirm Catholic patriotism, which even before the war had been challenged with the argument that Catholicism was inimical to republicanism. The U.S. Catholic Miscellany optimistically predicted that the American tradition of religious toleration would dampen efforts to encourage church plundering and Protestant crusading. Large numbers of the army were loyal Irish-Catholics, the Miscellany pointed out, and President Polk had already appointed two Catholic chaplains to reassure Mexicans about the



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safety of their churches.39 It is difficult to gauge whether the editors of the Miscellany really trusted to any great degree in Americans’ belief in the freedom of religion. After all, as some Catholics were beginning to wonder openly, if Americans had already burned Catholic churches in the United States, what might unruly volunteers unleash on the enemy’s houses of worship? One way the Catholic press tried to renegotiate the religious meaning found in the war by soldiers and recruiters was to propagate a more positive view of Mexicans while criticizing the books about Mexico the soldiers were reading. According to a Freeman’s Journal correspondent in Monterrey, upper-class Mexicans and Mexico’s “foreign residents” disliked Waddy Thompson and thought him incompetent. Consequently, they shut the diplomat out of “good Mexican society,” thereby restricting his encounter with Mexican culture. Thompson thus based his claims about Mexican religion on limited experience and bigotry. The Catholic Telegraph concurred that Thompson’s Anglo-Saxonist prejudice against Catholicism had fated him to misrepresent Mexican culture even before he entered the country.40 Notably, these American Catholics were not refuting Thompson’s belief in Mexican inferiority so much as they were contending that he had merely missed encountering the “good” part of the population. In a lengthy review of Thompson’s Recollections and Gilliam’s Travels, the U.S. Catholic Magazine even admitted that the Church in Mexico was in need of reform. Nevertheless, the Magazine argued that Mexico had such a thoroughgoing “Catholic tone and spirit” that religious bigots like Gilliam, Thompson, and Prescott could not help but to bump into some aspect of Catholicism that they would like to disparage. Stressing Gilliam’s own admission that he did not speak Spanish and had never even seen the inside of a Catholic Church before visiting Mexico, the reviewers labeled him too ignorant to criticize the Catholic faith. Tellingly, a footnote accompanying the review stated that the article had been written before the outbreak of hostilities, and that it should be seen only as a “vindication of Catholicity.” The editors wanted their readers in no way to construe the article as a disloyal attack on the war.41 If American Catholics did not blame Mexico’s endemic instability on its religion and Spanish heritage, where did they place the blame? By and large, they blamed Mexico’s problems on demagogues who had preyed on the natives after the overthrow of Spanish rule. They simply did so while leaving out the Black Legend and Anglo-Saxonist rhetoric.

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Yet even without drawing on the Anglo-Saxonism of the Manifest Destiny discourse, American Catholic criticism of Mexico remained Eurocentric in the larger sense. It claimed the origin of Mexico’s problems lay in its deportation of Spanish clergy and the lack of Spanish guidance after the revolution. Invariably, then, the “good” parts of the population missed by Thompson were white creoles or peninsulares and the “bad” parts were the darker mestizos and Indians. Not everyone in the Catholic Press mimicked the racialism of their Anglo-Saxonist critics. A  few actually took the opportunity of the war’s outbreak to level accusations of racism against American Protestants. First, they accused native-born Protestants—that is to say, most white Americans—of indiscriminately looking down on all darker people, regardless of religion. They even argued that the Indians of Mexico were better off than those within the United States. This anti-Protestantism of course ignored the evangelicals in the 1830s who had fought to prevent Indian Removal, along with abolitionists who supported some level of racial equality. Indeed, without taking note of it these Catholics were not unlike radical evangelicals in this one criticism of American culture. Still, few Catholics fell in line with radical religious figures like William Lloyd Garrison, who supported complete racial equality and intermarriage among blacks and whites. Since Catholics often faced the accusation from Protestants that they worshipped idols, the second Catholic criticism of Protestants involved turning this attack around. This was done as part of the general refutation of recruiters who used “golden Jesuses” as their primary marketing tool. The real idolaters, Catholics said, were Protestants. As one Catholic newspaper put it, while American Protestants “call us idolaters,” throughout history nobody had “paid such cringing service to an idol” as Americans in search of Mexican gold.42 A considerable minority of American Catholics did venture timid criticism of the Mexican Church. The U.S. Catholic Miscellany announced a few months after the start of the war that “thanks be to God, a brighter day has commenced to dawn upon the Mexican Church.” That “brighter day” consisted of papal attempts to reorganize Mexican dioceses, send new religious orders into the country, and, purportedly, to reintroduce the Society of Jesus there. But it also included “the present chastisement of war,” a descriptive more often used by evangelical Protestants. Unlike American Protestants, however, the editors of the Miscellany declared that Mexico was being punished not because of its Catholicism but for mistreating



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Spanish prelates, “a truly edifying set of men.” The Boston Pilot blamed problems in the Mexican Church on the political “convulsions” that had taken place in Mexico since independence. Foremost among these “convulsions” was Mexico’s expulsion of the Jesuits. The Pilot echoed Protestant rhetoric by expressing hope that the war might help renew the Church in Mexico. Unlike Protestant critics, however, its solution was the same as the Pope’s:  the reintroduction of the Jesuits and greater papal attention to the country. Thus, even when they criticized the Catholic Church in Mexico, American Catholics denied that Catholicism itself was the major corruptor of the country. This is not surprising. What is remarkable is that in the 1840s their solution for Mexico was predicated on reestablishing the Society of Jesus—the one religious order most lampooned and feared by Americans.43 During the summer of 1846, as Americans vied for control of the war’s religious discourse and volunteers rushed to join the army, Alta California and all of New Mexico fell under American control. Only tenuously attached to the government in Mexico City by the early 1840s and strongly connected economically to the United States, these two autonomous states were a lot like Texas had been before its revolution. The Californios and Nuevomexicanos possessed their own cultural identity and had no love for the centralizing tendencies of distant Mexico City. This of course did not mean that they wanted to be ruled by the United States. Yet Governor Manuel Armijo sealed New Mexico’s fate when he fled without a fight, allowing General Kearny to claim New Mexico for the United States. In California, John C. Frémont and a few hundred “Bear Flag Rebels” declared an independent republic at Sonoma on July 4 after a revolt against their former Californio allies. This “Bear Flag Republic” was short lived, for only eleven days later Commodore Robert F. Stockton made landfall at Monterey. Once his men took Los Angeles on August 13, Stockton claimed California as an American territory and put Frémont in charge of U.S. land forces there. By mid-September 1846 the United States stood in effective control of the disputed area of Texas, New Mexico, and Alta California. Kearny left New Mexico for California, leaving Colonel Alexander Doniphan of the Missouri Volunteers in charge at Santa Fe. When Kearny finally arrived in California in December, his main role there at first was helping to put down a serious revolt against American rule. His next task was dealing with what he believed was a mutiny against him by Frémont.44 By September 1846, then, the American goal of locking down Mexico’s northern frontier territories was now close to completion and the Mexican

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Army was trying to regroup. To secure the vast desert between Santa Fe and Chihuahua, Doniphan headed south with 500 men. Four months and two victories later, Doniphan’s Missouri Volunteers had taken Chihuahua. All told, they had marched over 5,000 miles. The last major piece of the puzzle was the populous, well-defended city of Monterrey, west of Matamoras and south of Camargo. Taylor’s forces had occupied Camargo as a base of operations since July 14. Since then they had been making preparations to take Monterrey. After the fall of Matamoras, General Francisco Meija replaced Arista, who then was superseded in command by General Pedro Ampudia. Ampudia had now turned Monterrey into more of a fortress than it already was, placing it under martial law and massing over 7,000 troops there. Over the course of the Summer Polk had been negotiating secretly with Santa Anna through intermediaries, hoping that the exiled Mexican general, who had been thrown out of the country by Paredes in 1844, might return to Mexico and force it to make peace with the United States. Polk was counting on Santa Anna’s well-known opportunism, along with a $2 million request from the U.S. Senate, to help achieve a treaty. This plan backfired in the biggest way imaginable, for soon after the American navy permitted Santa Anna to slip through its blockade into Mexico in August, the general made a quick peace with his political enemies and raised an army to fight the Americans.45 Polk unintentionally had helped make Mexico’s best general the leader of the Mexican war effort but the first major battle of the war actually happened against Santa Anna’s orders. Santa Anna ordered Ampudia to abandon Monterrey but Ampudia instead prepared to defend it with natural and man-made defenses, including hills overlooking the city. Newly arrived volunteers under the command of General William J. Worth supplemented Taylor’s army. Father Anthony Rey, one of the Jesuit chaplains, also arrived. On seeing Monterrey, one worried American soldier called it “a second West Point in strength.”46 The ensuing battle for Monterrey lasted four days, after which Ampudia surrendered the city. The battle had been “bloody and hard,” but the fact that a larger Mexican army fighting from solid defensive positions had gone down in defeat heartened the Americans even as it discouraged the Mexicans.47 The volunteers had passed their first major battlefield test but whether they would also follow Taylor’s orders and not seek out “Golden Jesuses” was immediately cast into doubt when several of them tried to steal a statue of the Virgin Mary that overlooked one of the city’s bridges. They



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wanted a trophy for their victory. Granted, the statue might be a trophy but it was neither “golden” nor of Jesus. But it did represent what these volunteers believed the Mexicans held most dear, their religion. A brief scuffle occurred as they were headed off by a group of Irish volunteers. Cooler heads soon prevailed and the statue remained. Nevertheless, following a series of disruptions during Mass by volunteers, Fr. Rey secured a large force of men just to guard the church each Sunday.48 When Mexico dashed Polk’s hopes by not seeking to negotiate a peace after the Battle of Monterrey, the president concluded “that California & New Mexico, being now possessed by our forces, will not be given up, but will be retained. . . . Indeed you need not be surprised if other provinces also are secured in like manner.”49 In November American forces occupied Saltillo and Tampico. Polk then asked Winfield Scott to lead an invasion of central Mexico to take the capital. This would not be accomplished through the deserts of northern Mexico. Rather, Scott would make an amphibious landing at Vera Cruz and march in from there while Taylor remained in the north. In December, the administration asked Congress for ten new regiments of regulars to accomplish the task. If signed into law, this would bring the total number of Americans under arms to nearly 30,000, not including about 1,400 officers. In the meantime, Marcy told Taylor to stay put at Saltillo, and so the cities of Matamoras and Monterrey became occupied garrison towns with uncertain futures.50 Father Rey stayed at Monterrey while the other Jesuit chaplain, Fr. McElroy, tried to minister to soldiers at Matamoras. Some admired Fr. Rey for his bravery under fire at the Battle of Monterrey because he had tended to the sick and wounded on the battlefield, but it did not take long for some soldiers to voice their displeasure with him. Objections about seeing “an American minister officiating at the altar of the enemy” revealed this unrest to be more than vituperation about Fr. Rey. Rather, some Americans came to Mexico with an inability to see Catholicism as anything other than dangerous and completely foreign. They proved incapable of separating even masses said by American priests before congregations composed of many of their own comrades from their wartime enemy’s identity. Because they saw Rey and the Mexican enemy as of a piece due to religion, when Mexican bandits killed Rey many soldiers found it hard to believe that “those who worship in the same mode the same almighty” could have killed him.51 Because Fr. McElroy preached in English at Matamoras, he still managed to attract large numbers of American soldiers to Mass, whether they were Catholic or not. Curiosity and even homesickness overcame bigotry.

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Still, the American military governor of Saltillo, Colonel Samuel Ryan Curtis of the Third Ohio Volunteers, came to resent Fr. McElroy. Curtis complained bitterly about Polk’s decision to send “a Catholic priest into this barbarous Catholic country.” In part this was because he found Fr. McElroy’s church services repellant and longed “to return to the land of puritanical customs.” But he also questioned the motives behind Polk’s “tempering whining policy,” wondering whether the president wanted “to Catholicise these Catholics” or whether Polk just feared the Catholic Church so much that he had sunk to outright groveling.52 Whatever Polk’s motives where the two Jesuit priests were concerned, the real threat of major religious conflict had not yet come. That would have to wait until General Scott marched through the heart of Mexico. Neither the U.S. Army nor Polk had any plans to transfer Rey or McElroy to Scott’s army. The densely populated cities and towns in the region between the gulf and Mexico City contained the great churches and monasteries described in popular travel literature. This is why it is not surprising that an important part of the War Department’s policy was to ensure that American soldiers not only refrained from showing disrespect for Mexican clergy and churches but in fact respected them conspicuously.53 The statue incident at Monterrey had already put this policy to the test. American military governors and commanders had orders to meet with prelates and make a point of attending Mass and local religious festivals in full military dress. Secretary of War Marcy ordered American officers to inform Mexicans in the towns and cities they entered that the U.S. army would not damage churches, abuse priests, or in any other way attack the national faith. In some fashion, these proclamations imitated one written by Marcy and first issued by General Taylor at Monterrey: Your religion, your altars and churches, and the property of your churches and citizens, the emblems of your faith and its ministers, shall be protected and remain inviolate. Hundreds of our army, and hundreds of thousands of our people, are members of the Catholic church. In every State, and in nearly every city and village of our Union, Catholic churches exist, and priests perform their holy functions in peace and security, under the sacred guarantee of our constitution. In the United States, newspapers published Taylor’s proclamation to convince American Catholics and the war’s detractors that despite all the



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“Golden Jesus” rhetoric Americans were not wantonly abusing Mexicans or pillaging their churches.54 Catholic soldiers in the U.S. Army were more concerned with discrimination against themselves than with the treatment of Mexicans. So prevalent were these early conciliatory efforts that before the appointment of the Jesuit chaplains, some Catholic soldiers criticized Taylor for showing more concern for Catholic Mexicans than for Catholics in his own army. Their primary complaint had to do with the unfair disciplinary practices of nativist officers. Zealous commanders also sometimes forced Catholic soldiers to attend Protestant services where sermons were “mainly directed to insulting, calumniating and abusing the Catholic Church.” One officer even jailed a young Irish-Catholic lieutenant for not attending a Protestant service. In Corpus Christi, Texas, an angry Catholic soldier claimed that Taylor had commanded all his men to attend Presbyterian services: “We are forced to march every Sunday to listen to abusive declamations against our faith, under pain of imprisonment, and the loss of three or four months pay, for disobedience of orders.” Taylor denied the accusations, claiming that all such services were optional. Much of the Catholic press accepted Taylor’s statement or blamed lower ranking and more sectarian officers.55 Bishop Hughes, however, thought that instances of discrimination in the army were not isolated incidents. He was not the only Catholic leader to doubt openly whether Taylor’s troops could respect the Mexicans’ religion as ordered, when they could not even do so in their own country and in their own army. Indeed, it was not just Catholics who were starting to have these doubts. Even before the efficacy of Polk’s Catholic conciliation policy could be tested in central Mexico, some in his own party unintentionally undermined it. Meanwhile, Whigs and Native Americans increased their use of theologized language when attacking the president’s war aims. As Americans prepared for the full-scale invasion of Mexico, it became clear that the religious meaning of the war would be determined not just on the battlefield but in tandem with political controversies in the United States.

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Religion and Wartime Politics One nation is full of Christians, the other is full of Catholics. New York Journal of Commerce

In June 1846 Thomas O.  Larkin, the American consul at Monterrey, California, informed Secretary of State James Buchanan that an IrishCatholic priest had “proposed to President [José Joaquín de] Herrera to establish several thousand Irish in California.” Herrera had approved the plan, according to Larkin, but General Mariano Paredes had objected, “saying the Irish would join the Americans immediately. . . . He wanted no emigrants whose native language was English.” Whereas Paredes anticipated that similarities between Americans and Irish would overshadow any Irish-Mexican religious affinity, Americans feared just the opposite. In the United States, news of the aborted Irish settlement in the Far West added one more element to the interplay between anti-Catholicism and the war. In particular, it connected fears about Romanist designs out West to doubts about the patriotic fortitude of Irish Americans in a war against a Catholic nation. This question of Irish loyalty rose to a fevered pitch by late 1847 in one of the most controversial episodes of the war, the capture of the San Patricio Battalion.1 Coming on the heels of over ten years of heightened anti-Catholic activity, the Mexican-American War held explosive religious implications from the very beginning. By 1846 the vocabulary of anti-Catholicism had given new direction and definition to American exceptionalism under the term, “Manifest Destiny.” Evangelicals and expansionists now saw Mexico as a nation destined to fall before a great Anglo-Saxon Protestant advance. Soldiers talked excitedly about “golden Jesuses” and rushed to buy copies of Mexican travel literature. Yet even if conquering Mexico was America’s foreordained destiny, looting or atrocities committed by American soldiers



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might still prolong the war by stirring up an insurgency. The response to this in American cities could well be a new round of ethno-religious, Philadelphia-style rioting. The stakes were high, indeed, and not just for Mexicans. The war forced American political leaders to negotiate this web of meaning connecting race, religion, republicanism, war, and the meaning of America. Whigs and Democrats concluded that the best way to explain their wartime policies was through theological and nativist language borrowed from the anti-Catholic movement. Meanwhile, the war revealed the deep religious underpinnings of the upstart Native American Party, proving that there was more to the nativist movement’s appropriation of the Beecherite Synthesis than a Machiavellian exploitation of an advantageous political tool. With California and New Mexico conquered and northern Mexico apparently secure, General Winfield Scott was busy with preparations in early 1847 to land at Vera Cruz. Up to this point, the James K.  Polk Administration had for the most part successfully muted the war’s unavoidable religious overtones. Members of Polk’s own party, however, were increasingly making the execution of this Catholic conciliation policy more difficult. Even Thomas Ritchie, editor of the Polk Administration’s organ, the Washington Daily Union, had begun to use religious language to denigrate Mexicans in advance of Scott’s Mexico City campaign.2 If Polk faced trouble reigning in Ritchie in Washington, he faced an all-but-impossible battle against Democratic anti-Catholicism elsewhere in the country. Democrats had a finer line to walk than did Whigs, whom immigrant Catholics already identified as enemies of their faith. Nevertheless, Democratic leaders found in American anti-Catholicism a widely understood and malleable rhetoric loaded with meaning about race, political principles, and religion. One need not mention religion explicitly at all. Such rhetoric was immediately intelligible to the late Jacksonian Age’s “common man,” including the vast majority who had been horrified at the anti-Catholic violence perpetrated in Philadelphia in 1844. The Philadelphia Public Ledger, for example, argued that the Spanish Catholic nature of Mexico would create problems in the future if the country were not annexed quickly. This refuted the prevailing view that the white Anglo-Saxon United States could never absorb a non-white race of people as social and political equals. John L. O’Sullivan, who had introduced Americans to the term “Manifest Destiny” in 1845, now argued

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that because the “virtues of the Anglo-Saxon race make their political union with the degraded Mexican-Spanish impossible,” the only choice was to “amalgamate” the races through the work of “missionaries of republicanism.”3 Unlike their party’s newspapers, Congressional Democrats until late 1847 avoided discussion of religion and race. Instead, they emphasized Mexican atrocities in Texas and the abuse of American merchants. In the strongly Democratic, slave-holding South, a call like O’Sullivan’s for racial amalgamation as a means of republicanizing Mexico would have been inflammatory. So Southern Democrats emphasized that Mexico owed Americans a large indemnity. They blamed the war on Mexican arrogance and political incompetence. When the Catholic question entered into their speeches, it did so only as a counterpoint to rising anti-Catholicism. As one legislator put it in an attempt to reassure Catholics in both countries, the war was not “against the oppressed people of Mexico, nor their priesthood, nor their religion.” Americans needed to be on their best behavior around Mexico’s churches in order to show Mexicans the benefits of religious liberty. Not until 1848 and the “All Mexico” annexation debate did Congressional Democrats finally infuse their pro-war rhetoric with explicitly anti-Catholic and religious language.4 The exception to this was Charles J. Ingersoll, Democratic representative from Philadelphia and inveterate rival of the city’s Native Americans. During the Texas debate, Ingersoll had tried to convince his colleagues that annexation would not lead to war. The reason: Non-white Mexicans could never mix with white Anglo-Saxons. Besides, natural desert boundaries would negate the possibility of conflict between Mexico and the United States. With the war between the United States and Mexico now in full swing, Whigs threw Ingersoll’s words back at him. The Democrat’s only defense was a jingoistic appeal to Manifest Destiny. He compared Mexicans to the Indians forcibly removed westward by Democratic presidents Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren in their efforts to open the way for white farmers. The mission of Americans, proclaimed Ingersoll, was to “civilize, humanize, and reclaim vanquished savages.” This was true whether they lived in Mexico or in Tennessee and Georgia. To counter exaggerated charges by Whigs that the war was becoming a Protestant crusade against Catholicism, Ingersoll smugly pointed out that since even the Pope was now propagating “liberal institutions,” the United States could not be censured for “giving free institutions to ignorant, barbarous, and degraded people.” With his allusion to Pius



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IX’s attempts at liberal reforms in Rome, Ingersoll attempted to drag another contemporary controversy involving the Catholic Church into discussion of the war. Many Americans doubted that the new pope was a serious reformer. Others held public rallies calling for support of his efforts as a means of encouraging republican values among Catholics and in Europe.5 Whig opinion of the war vacillated to some extent but evolved relatively little prior to the onset of Scott’s Mexico City campaign. In their opposition to what was already being called “Mr. Polk’s War” by its opponents, they resorted to arguments and vocabulary rooted in racialist, anti-Catholic beliefs. Whigs generally opposed westward expansion for constitutional and practical reasons, believing that too diverse and far-flung a country posed a danger to American identity. They also had legitimate worries that adding new states in the West would diminish their political power. During the war, however, Whigs emphasized none of these concerns. Instead, they tended to stress religion and race in their arguments against annexing Mexican territory. Whigs doubted whether “eight millions of men at war with us by race, by language, by religion, manners, and laws” could ever become virtuous American republicans. Aware that increasing numbers of evangelical Protestants were supporting the war at least as a means of evangelizing Mexicans, Whig leaders cognizant of evangelical influence in their party acknowledged the war’s one potential benefit:  rescuing “seven millions of people from extinction by sowing among them the seeds of a true Christian faith.” Even so, saving Mexican souls was not the Whig leadership’s primary concern. The largest pitfall of any Mexican conquest, they believed, grew out of the old belief enunciated by John Jay in Federalist #2 that republics needed to be homogenous in culture, language, religion, and custom in order to prosper and not disintegrate. Thus, Whigs simply denied that a republican endeavor comprised of two different peoples—Americans and Mexicans—could succeed:  “even if annexation were good for Mexico, it would [be] bad for us.”6 Opposing the war was especially difficult for Southern Whigs, whose constituents were strongly pro-war and eager to create more slave territory. For their argument they turned to dissident Democrat John C. Calhoun, who opposed the war largely on the grounds that President Polk was using it to extend the federal government’s reach. Calhoun argued that this made the U.S.  government even more susceptible to tyranny than it already was while simultaneously absorbing the rightful powers reserved to the

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states under the Constitution. Southern Whigs adopted Calhoun’s argument, noting that by undermining federalism a centralized government also threatened the institution of slavery. Some claimed Polk’s war was not spreading but actually usurping “this free republic.” Even Southern Whig proponents of Manifest Destiny opposed expansion “by the sword,” calling it detrimental to the greater republican cause.7 Kentucky’s Whig governor, William Owsley, accused Polk of weakening state prerogatives in his appointment of officers and choice of volunteer regiments. This last accusation was true, given that during the war Polk appointed only Democratic generals. Polk, of course, denied his choices were partisan.8 Southern Whigs claimed that regenerating inferior Mexicans was impossible. Even the most openly anti-war Whigs employed the same politico-religious rhetoric used by pro-war Democrats. This racialism was deeply connected to their theories about black inferiority. Whether slavery and Catholicism had over time made blacks and Mexicans, respectively, inferior, or whether they had been inferior in the first place was not the question. Both were currently incapable of the demands of mature citizenship. Whigs seemed to be saying that even if Lyman Beecher was correct that the Bible was the foundation of all republican government, it was too late to save Mexico even through dissemination of the Bible there. Any attempt to conjoin the races of Mexico and the United States would thus inevitably harm the republican values that the war’s supporters claimed they wanted to spread. It would be tantamount to offering blacks full political and social equality with whites. Southern Whigs, in other words, tried to override the desire to spread slavery through preaching traditional American republican principles within the framework of a highly theologized Anglo-Saxonism. Whigs in the middle states and New England could more safely oppose the war, since their constituents opposed any annexation except California ports that might be good for maritime trade. Maine congressman Luther Severance maintained that Mexico stood to gain far more economically than the United States if annexed. Therefore, Americans should be patient and just allow the nascent republican movement in Mexico time to mature, for how could one spread liberty by force? If the United States forced republican institutions on Mexico, it would “bring republicanism into disrepute and bring monarchy to our very doors on the South.”9 Farther west in Ohio, where the war was popular, Whigs (except for the governor, William Bebb) held fast to their party’s anti-war stance. Congressman Daniel R. Tilden defended his party against charges that they



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were no better than the Federalists who had come to the brink of secession in their opposition to the War of 1812. Tilden claimed that he would have supported the War of 1812, because, unlike the war with Mexico, it had been fought on principle. His colleague, the abolitionist Luther Giddings, condemned the “physical and moral death, now rolling over Mexico” in the name of the extension of Anglo-Saxon civilization.10 Senator Thomas Corwin criticized American chaplains who, in their republican zeal, “throw aside the new Testament and seize a bill of rights.”11 Since some annexation of Mexican territory now appeared imminent, Whigs struggled to build a consensus among the party faithful. They did so once again by denigrating Mexicans as “a population as degraded as superstition and ignorance can make them.” This provided a unifying factor in a party riven by sectional divisions. (Within just six years of the end of the war, these divisions over westward expansion and slavery shattered the party.) One important consequence of this tactic was the use of race to blur sectional differences. While a Southern or Western Whig had more reason to support territorial expansion than Whigs from New England, none wished to see people “of every possible shade and variety of color and complexion” naturalized. As a whole, the Whig Party effectively tied blackness to Catholic and to Mexican, then held that web of meaning in opposition to a conflation of white, Protestant, and American. Only the latter was deemed capable of fulfilling every demand of citizenship.12 Catholics criticized these attempts “to render the Mexicans odious by abusing the Catholic religion.” They notably denounced the profligate use of the common anti-Catholic phrase, “priest ridden.” The Boston Pilot commented that “a people who have so obstinately withstood the force of ‘powder and balls’ cannot easily be ‘ridden over’ by a few. . . priests.” Bishop Hughes defended Mexicans by blaming most of their difficulties on Mexico’s military and separation from Spain. He also rejected the belief “among our Protestant fellow-citizens. . . that the Catholics of Mexico. . . are different in every particular from American Catholics.” Of course, drawing an equivalency between American and Mexican Catholics was exactly what nativists had been doing for years to bolster their argument that uncontrolled Catholic immigration was a corruptive influence. In defending Mexico’s Catholics by showcasing their similarities with American Catholics, Hughes unintentionally strengthened the idea that Catholics were a monolithic menace in a way no nativist could.13

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The Native American Party had little trouble connecting the war to its signature issue of immigration. Thanks to their 1844 electoral successes, the Native Americans could do so in the halls of Congress, not just in newspapers and state houses. In May 1846, William W. Campbell, New York’s leading Native American in the U.S. House, called for raising the salary of volunteers in order to attract more native Americans. This, he said, would lessen the presence of foreign Catholics in the army. That, in turn, would help avoid treachery by soldiers, since the army would be comprised “of our own citizens.”14 In a speech before Congress in early 1847, Lewis Levin warned “that a storm was gathering over our land,” composed of European immigrants and their “bigoted superstition.” To prove his claim that Irish immigrants were undeserving of citizenship, Levin cited what was then only a rumor of Irish desertions from the army. When another congressman interrupted Levin to point out that the “majority of the deserters were Americans,” the flamboyant Levin quipped that at least when Americans deserted, they did not join the ranks of the enemy.15 Because of the limited time allotted to the small Native American contingent in Congress the party depended on Levin’s Philadelphia newspaper to flesh out its position on the Mexican-American War. The Daily Sun described Mexicans as unhappy people “who only want to drink at a pure fountain in order to become pious and exemplary Christians.” But they were squeezed between a rapacious clergy and a despotic military. “Mexico is a Popish military hierarchy—ruling a population steeped in ignorance, besotted with superstition, and bereft of all energy and resolution of character.” Mexicans, said the Daily Sun, had either to be exterminated or civilized, given their proximity to the United States. The Daily Sun preferred civilization. Yet because of Catholicism Mexicans would never be able to accomplish this feat by themselves. Therefore, regardless of the negative consequences of territorial aggrandizement, the Sun touted the spread of civil and religious liberty to Mexico as a patriotic and benevolent cause.16 The Native Americans were not simply anti-Irish, political nativists, or Whigs in all but name. They were moved more by dreams of Protestant-American supremacy than by practical political calculations, nativism qua nativism, or labor agitation. Their distinct responses to the Oregon dispute and to the Mexican-American War prove this. The Native Americans opposed war with Great Britain over the Oregon territory because the English were “a nation with whom we boast a community of feeling, language, sympathies, and religion—connected by a common descent.” Anglo-Saxons ought not fight one another. Mexicans,



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on the other hand, were Roman Catholics. One might reasonably expect white nativists not to want to welcome eight million non-white, foreign Catholics into the Union. But the Native American Party advocated doing so if it meant dissolving Mexico’s “connexion between church and state” and enlarging “the area of freedom.” The Daily Sun even labeled as traitors anyone who called for peace, because anything short of complete conquest would fail to Protestantize Mexico.17 Native Americans may have found a reason to support the war against Mexico but they lumped President Polk in with the traitors when he requested three million dollars from Congress in December 1846. The purpose of the funds was to help secure a peace without having to send in General Scott’s army. If Polk had already whored himself for the Catholic vote by appointing Jesuit chaplains, then surely he could not be trusted with such a huge sum of money. Since the Catholic clergy were Mexico’s real rulers, “Mr. Polk and Congress lay taxes on the American people” not so much to end the war but “to fill the pockets of the priests of Mexico.” This collusion with Mexican bishops would make congressmen “patrons of the church” while transforming the United States into “a mere tributary” of “monks” and “priests.” To avoid this unseemly bribery and extortion, the Daily Sun recommended that Americans dictate a peace once they stood in the Halls of the Montezumas. At least in this, Democrats proved willing to concur.18 Outside a strictly partisan framework, the Mexican-American War unmasked the intricate connection between nativist politics and abolitionism, not so much in terms of a coherent, interchangeable body of principles but in terms of a reliance on the Beecherite Synthesis to support both causes. The war was forcing nativists to decide between bringing millions of new foreigners into the United States or letting a large section of the continent remain a Catholic barrier to the growth of Anglo-Saxon civilization. Now it also forced leading abolitionists to negotiate a separate but related question:  which was the greater evil, slavery or Romanism? Most abolitionists were evangelical Protestants. So, too, were nearly all anti-Catholic activists. Evangelical leaders during the reform-minded era of the 1820s to 1840s commonly belonged to or led multiple voluntary societies or ascribed to a variety of moralistic causes. Since the expansion of slavery seemed a likely result of the war, abolitionists were naturally inclined to oppose it. Yet their anti-Catholicism quickly muddied the waters, since at question was not simply the expansion of slavery in North America but another spreading cancer on the continent, Roman

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Catholicism. Could an American republican and Protestant allow one to flourish in order to stop the other? A look at Lewis and Arthur Tappan evinces how some leading evangelicals negotiated what was for them a real ethical dilemma. Both men were ardent Calvinists and abolitionists. After co-founding the American Anti-Slavery Society with racial equalitarian William Lloyd Garrison in 1833, the latter served as its president until 1840. Lewis Tappan, like Garrison, advocated marriage between blacks and whites. Both were editors of the New York Journal of Commerce, an ostensibly non-religious, political newspaper founded by Samuel F.  B. Morse in 1827. By 1846 the Journal had become New York City’s leading nativist paper. Even so, it condemned the Native American Party’s jingoistic position on the war. It balanced this, however, with condemnations of the Jesuit chaplains, apprehension about Bishop Hughes’s power over Polk, tales of American Catholic treason, and derogatory descriptions of Mexicans rooted in race and religion. One might think that a paper founded by the arch-nativist Morse could do no less, and yet this rhetoric is remarkable because it came not from Morse but from the pen of the Tappan brothers. Despite denouncing the evils of the war, the Tappan brothers admitted, “The only consolation for us in this matter is, that with the spread of our race is secured the spread of liberty, civilization and Christianity.”19 The civil-religious assumptions behind this anti-war sentiment ultimately overpowered what otherwise seemed to be the complimentary abolitionist and nativist goals of blocking large-scale Mexican annexation. For example, the Tappans through the Journal blamed “the Romish Church, with her exclusiveness” for being “the grand barrier in the way of Mexican improvement.” If the war could free Mexico from “bondage” to the Catholic Church, Mexicans eventually could be elevated in every way. This could be accomplished only if “this unhappy war” led to the advent in Mexico of “liberty of Conscience, and a pure Protestant Christianity.” So passionate were the Tappans that Protestantism supplant Catholicism in Mexico that they worked themselves into a rhetorical dead-end, forced to praise the final results of a war they otherwise roundly condemned because a Catholic country was at the receiving end of American military action.20 Here was the source of the only real dispute among political nativists over the war:  how to reconcile the thrill of forcibly opening a Catholic nation to Protestant evangelization with the fear of assimilating its inhabitants in toto and with no restriction on their level of civic participation.



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Whereas the Native Americans formulated the seemingly un-nativist policy of supporting total annexation by holding out hope of proselytizing (and therefore republicanizing) eight million Mexicans, nativist abolitionists like the Tappans tried to balance their belief in racial equality while walking a tightrope between their intricately connected religious and political objectives. “Anglo-Saxon blood” was not what had made Americans economically prosperous and politically superior to Mexicans in the eyes of the Tappans. Rather, “the Bible has made us to differ.” Indeed, the most important distinction between the two countries was not so much the blackness of one and the whiteness of the other but that “one nation is full of Christians, the other is full of Catholics.” As long as Mexico remained “3/4 Indians, bigoted, superstitious, semi-barbaric,” and Catholic, annexation would be out of the question.21 The specter of annexation loomed larger once President Polk gave up on achieving peace without further battlefield gains. On February 11, 1847, the president signed the Ten Regiment Bill, designed to increase the regular army by 7,000 soldiers. This was almost exactly one month prior to General Scott’s planned landing at Vera Cruz. Ten days later, there occurred the largest battle of the war, at Buena Vista, just south of Saltillo. On February 22 over 4,500 troops under General Zachary Taylor skirmished with a Mexican army nearly three times its size, commanded by General Antonio López de Santa Anna. A massive battle the next day left no clear victor but it seemed numbers would surely make a third day of battle go the Mexicans’ way. The Americans were surprised, then, when they awoke on February 24 to find that Santa Anna’s army had quietly retreated during the night. This allowed Taylor and the U.S. Army to claim victory in what became the most famous battle of the war. Santa Anna’s army was despondent after Buena Vista. What began in January as a force of around 20,000 men had dwindled to just above 5,000 by the time Santa Anna arrived back at his home base, San Luis Potosí. Some of this loss was due to desertion. Disease had also taken a toll. Mostly, however, the numbers had diminished due to deaths on the battlefield. Even as Buena Vista was being fought, yet another rebellion broke out in Mexico City. Called the Revolt of the Polkos, it was led by middle class liberals called moderados who in part wanted to abolish a three-month old law backed by Santa Anna and Vice President Gómez Farías calling for the requisition of church property to fund the war. Santa Anna decided to head south to the capital with his remaining army at exactly the time he

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knew he ought to be marching east toward Vera Cruz to stop the American landing.22 Street fighting in Mexico City lasted from February 27 through March 8 but Santa Anna did not arrive with the remnant of his army until March 21. The general promptly dumped Farías as vice president, compromised with the rebels, put the moderado Pedro María Anaya in the presidency, and denounced the effort to take church monies that he himself had once backed. Ever the opportunist, Santa Anna in this one case appears to have taken the only prudent road. After all, the Americans now controlled lands to the north and were already on the Gulf coast. As part of this agreement, the clergy agreed to loan the Mexican government nearly two million pesos. By the time the whole mess in Mexico City was settled, Scott and the Americans stood in control of Vera Cruz, after having bombarded it with great loss of Mexican life between March 9 and 29. As Santa Anna himself said, “However shameful it may be to admit this, we have brought this disgraceful tragedy upon ourselves through our interminable in-fighting.”23 The American success at Vera Cruz, along with Taylor’s victory at Buena Vista, shifted the theater of war to the area along the National Road running between Vera Cruz and Mexico City. The path to the capital was clear. It ran though Jalapa, Perote, and Puebla. Santa Anna raised a new army and set off for El Encero, the hacienda he owned near Jalapa. From there he began making fortifications at Cerro Gordo, where he planned to challenge the Americans from a high hill above the narrow pass. But over the course of a two-day battle at Cerro Gordo from April 17–18, Scott’s army of 8,500 managed to dislodge a force almost double its size in very costly fighting. Americans lost just short of 500 men, with around 1,000 Mexicans killed and three times that captured. Rumors that American deserters had fought for the Mexican side, and that the deserters were Irish, Catholic, or both, remained unconfirmed for the time being. So great was the Mexicans’ defeat that Santa Anna, his army in ruins, fled toward Orizaba rather than going back to El Encero. After occupying Jalapa, the U.S. Army moved on to Perote, which it took without a fight. The Americans entered the city of Puebla on May 15 after only a skirmish or two.24 Santa Anna blamed the lack of resistance on a dearth of patriotism yet he soon found himself accused of just that because of the Cerro Gordo disaster. Caught up once again in Mexico City politics, Santa Anna headed to the capital, where in May Mexico’s generals—many of whom were his political rivals—gathered to discuss whether to surrender. So crushing was the U.S. victory at Cerro Gordo that had the American army not been



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approaching Mexico City, perhaps the war would have ended right there. The looming threat to their capital convinced the generals to cooperate one last time.25 Over the next three months, no major battle occurred as each army made preparations. Mexican generals gathered soldiers and fortified defenses along the National Road outside Mexico City, hoping to repel the invaders. In Puebla, the Americans settled in and waited for the reinforcements Scott knew would be necessary for the final campaign into the Valley of Mexico. Many of his volunteers had served out their enlistments and were on their way home. New recruits were expected to arrive by August, although some would be drawn from Taylor’s increasingly shrunken army in the north. As both armies prepared for the coming Mexico City campaign, the Polk Administration spent the summer of 1847 embroiled in religious controversies that had nothing to do with rumors of Catholic desertion or Americans looting Mexican churches in the search for “Golden Jesuses.” The first of these was a self-inflicted wound that posed the first real threat to Polk’s carefully cultivated relationship with Catholic Americans as well as to his wide-ranging attempts to reassure Mexicans about the safety of their churches. Just prior to the American occupation of Puebla, Thomas Ritchie editorialized in the pages of the Washington Daily Union: It is not as a religious body, but as an engine of state that the Catholics of Mexico look upon us with a hostile eye. It is for their own special political purposes—to retain their vast possessions, which impoverish the nation—to sustain their own hierarchy, which lords over the people—to preserve their power, which weighs down the rest of the community into the slough of ignorance and slavery—that they are thus solicitous and active. It is a zeal for the mammon of un-righteousness—not for the welfare of souls—which animates the Catholics of Mexico. This was uncharacteristically anti-Catholic language for the Democratic newspaper, especially since it was so closely related to Polk. But the Union essay went further: In this aspect of the case it, [sic] may become a matter of grave consideration, if the church continues to oppose a peace and furnish the fuel of war, whether the immense revenues of the church in

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Mexico shall be left untouched—whether they shall be suffered to remain at the disposal of the enemy, and to be applied to sustain the war against us—whether justice and policy do not equally dictate that they should at least be sequestered during the continuance of the war. . . . Ritchie’s article created an immediate firestorm. Bishop Hughes denounced it as “nothing more nor less than a proposal to turn the war against Mexico into a war against the priests and religion of that unfortunate country.” Extracts from Ritchie’s editorial quickly appeared in newspapers throughout the country. Although the idea of forced Mexican contributions was not new and had been considered off and on since early in the war, most advocates had prudently declared church property something to be “sacredly protected.” Indeed, up to this point the irony was that only Farías and Santa Anna had threatened the property of Mexico’s church.26 Ritchie expressed astonishment at the public outcry but retracted his article just one week later. He claimed it had been “hastily penned.” More to the point, he assured readers that his essay had been “published not only without the knowledge of the President or any members of the cabinet, but is. . . opposed to the sentiment of one and all of them.” Declaring that church property would remain “inviolate under all circumstances,” Ritchie shifted the blame to the “whig press, and its correspondents,” accusing them of having “grossly perverted and misrepresented” his editorial. Catholic newspapers, however, needed no assistance from Whigs in stirring up Catholic resentment; they had only to quote directly from the Union. Polk’s exertions to counter anti-Catholicism, now damaged by his administration’s own mouthpiece, were in danger of falling flat.27 Bishop Hughes was particularly unforgiving. He derided Ritchie’s “lame apology” as “far from re-assuring the outraged feelings of the friends of religion.” He threatened Polk not to take for granted the Catholic support he and the Democracy had enjoyed since 1844. At the very least, Democrats could no longer advertise their party as “exclusively the friends of the Catholics.” Hughes’s warning notwithstanding, to what party could Catholics have turned in 1847? Obviously the Native American Party was not suitable, but neither was the Whig Party. Although opposed to the war, the Whig Party was moderately nativist, commonly pro-English, and therefore unpalatable to Irish and German Catholic immigrants. Still,



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Hughes, especially through his Freeman’s Journal, was reminding Polk that his personal support for the administration and the war was neither permanent nor unconditional.28 Whigs recognized the Ritchie controversy as a rare chance to tear away at Catholic allegiance to the Democratic Party. Bishop Hughes’s public rebuke of President Polk made this easier. Polk’s detractors finally had a religious issue on which they could attack the president that was not anti-Catholic. Calling the Union editorial Polk’s “Manifesto against the RELIGION of Mexico” and a “gross insult” to Catholic Americans, Whigs called for an immediate end to the war before it degenerated into “rifling the temples of God to aid the work of conquest and slavery.” As for Ritchie’s claim that the Polk Administration had had nothing to do with the article, the Whig National Intelligencer pointed to the long delay between the original proposition and the retraction: “The Union throws out an idea to the public: if it takes, or escapes condemnation, it stands as semi-official; if it proves odious, the Editor makes himself the scapegoat, and exonerates the President.”29 Judging from Ritchie’s correspondence with Polk, it is unlikely that the editorial was an administration trial balloon designed to gauge public support for the theft of Catholic property in Mexico. Although the president sometimes wrote editorials for the Union to resolve troubles caused by Ritchie, he did not do so in this case. Polk’s diary is strangely silent about the controversy. But while Whigs were incorrect in drawing a firm connection between the administration and the Union’s call to sequester Mexico’s clerical wealth, they nevertheless exhibited a keen awareness of the current climate vis-a-vis Catholicism as well as the partisan opportunities of the whole affair.30 For a while, Polk tried to ride out the controversy, hoping it would fade from public view. But the president’s enemies and the war’s opponents refused to let Ritchie’s political blunder be forgotten so easily.31 William G.  Brownlow pounced on the chance to portray the Whig Party as a savior trying to stop Polk’s plan to steal Catholic wealth. He scoffed at Ritchie’s “attempt . . . to shift the responsibility of the proposition from the President’s shoulders to his own.” Brownlow claimed to find the idea of confiscating Catholic Church property “repugnant,” despite having advocated the same thing with his “Protestant Invincibles” one year earlier.32 So successful was the Whig criticism of Polk that by July the Union launched a counterattack. Polk may have pledged only to serve one term as president but he still had to think about his party’s future. A letter writer

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calling himself “A Roman Catholic” blamed anti-Catholic Whigs for burning the Charlestown convent in 1834, destroying churches in Philadelphia in 1844, and propagating the false “Maria Monk” tale. “Another Roman Catholic” soon responded in the Intelligencer, blaming those most famous anti-Catholic outbursts on the Native Americans who were, as everyone knew, former Democrats. The crowning evidence in “Another Roman Catholic’s” defense of the Whig party was, of course, the Union’s “ ‘speculation’ about robbing the Mexican churches.” Surely no pro-Catholic political party would suggest such a thing. This press battle, fought in the wake of the Union’s call to seize the property of the Mexican Church, played out under the shadow of the larger religious questions of the war.33 In the midst of this quarrel there occurred another incident, one that also had domestic religious consequences but which posed little danger to American troops in Mexico. The Rev. William L. McCalla issued a scandalous claim about the Catholic chaplains, which Lewis Levin’s Native Americans, among others, had not ceased to criticize since their appointment one year earlier. McCalla was a combative Presbyterian minister from Philadelphia with ties to the schools controversy as well as to the Native American Party. In a public letter to Native American leader Peter A. Browne he alleged that in October 1846 Polk had told him that Fathers McElroy and Rey were being sent to Mexico as “spies.” Levin’s Daily Sun was the first to print McCalla’s statement, followed soon by Louisville’s Presbyterian Herald. But only after publication by the National Intelligencer did the accusation attract serious attention. Newspapers around the country soon followed with their own renditions of McCalla’s story.34 Polk was angry but unsure what his reaction ought to be. In his diary on July 29, 1847, Polk wrote that “The letter of Mr. McCalla contains a positive and absolute falsehood, to wit, that in conversation I had informed him that I had sent them to the army nominally as chaplains, but really as spies.” Secretary of War Marcy, Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft, and Postmaster General Cave Johnson all advised Polk to refute McCalla’s statement publicly. Secretary of State James Buchanan suggested “a very positive but short denial of the statement.” But Polk hesitated, thinking it unbecoming to “descend from my station to notice him at all.” After all, nativists made outlandish claims all the time. The president also detected partisan politics behind the accusations, calling Browne “a leading Native American” and McCalla “a Whig & a religious fanatic.”35 Fanatical though they were, Browne and McCalla both knew how to capitalize on the current climate of anti-Catholicism surrounding the Polk



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Administration’s attempts to conciliate Catholics. McCalla might have fabricated his story, but in the overall fight against the Catholic menace that mattered little. After all, “Maria Monk” had been made up as well. To obdurate anti-Catholics, a small lie to oppose the greater evil of a federal government in bed with the papacy was no ethical dilemma at all. What was important was, first, the hegemony of Protestantism in the United States and, second, the success of their respective political parties. They concluded that these results went hand in hand, for in the person of Polk the Democrats had proven they had sold themselves to the “Man of Sin.” Never before had anti-Catholic conspiracists possessed such damning evidence against a major American statesman, let alone a president. Polk decided to deny McCalla’s charges only when the allegations began to rile American Catholics. After going through numerous drafts, Polk produced a statement based largely on his own diary’s account of his conversation with McCalla from October 14, 1846. He called the Philadelphian “a bigoted fanatic without reason.” McCalla claimed to have a letter of recommendation from Vice President George Dallas, as well as a petition signed by prominent Philadelphians against the employment of Jesuit chaplains. McCalla read the letter and the petition to Polk during the interview but oddly refused to show Polk a copy of either one. Polk described the petition as “a violent & most intolerant attack on the Roman Catholics” that censured the administration for having hired Catholic priests. “I felt great contempt for Mr. McCalla and for his religion and gave him my mind freely,” wrote Polk in his diary. Even at the time, the astute Polk suspected McCalla’s request for a chaplaincy was a pretext for some kind of future political stunt.36 In the first week of August 1847, the Washington Daily Union printed Polk’s unsigned rebuttal to McCalla’s allegations. In it the president gave the rationale for sending Catholic chaplains to Mexico. The two priests had been sent to minister to Catholic soldiers in General Taylor’s army and to assure Mexicans that the United States did not come to attack their religion. McCalla had come to the president asking to be appointed army chaplain in October 1846, bringing “with him the conclusive proof of his bitter hostility to the Catholic religion, which he had exhibited through years of controversy.” Not receiving a chaplaincy, McCalla had lashed out at Polk for reasons of politics and prejudice. Anyone familiar with “McCalla’s knight errantry against the Catholic Church,” according to Polk, should have known immediately that the minister’s statements were “calculated” and “false.”37

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Catholics hailed Polk’s editorial as a sign the president was serious about opposing attempts to use the war to attack Catholicism. The Freeman’s Journal, under Bishop Hughes’s editorial hand, thanked Polk for putting “to rest forever” such a “painful question.” Privately, the bishop penned a long letter to Polk in which he thanked him for “condescending to notice, and contradict, the vile statement of the Revd. Mr. McCalla.” Hughes admitted that he was aware of McCalla’s notorious reputation for grandstanding. Nevertheless, the bishop also believed “his position as a recognized clergyman gave weight to his accusation. It produced quite a sensation among our people here.”38 The McCalla controversy was dying down but the Union incident was still going strong when fresh American troops finally arrived in Puebla. By August 15 the U.S. Army had moved to within nine miles of Mexico City. Santa Anna stationed his soldiers on the most likely attack routes and Scott sought ways to flank them. In particular, he investigated approaching Mexico City across the famously impassable Ed Pedregal lava fields. When Captain Robert E. Lee and his engineers discovered a route across the lava beds on August 18, Scott wasted no time before making his move. On August 19, in an outlying area of Mexico City called Padierna, Mexican and American troops engaged each other. Poorly positioned and finding themselves encircled, a Mexican army under General Gabriel Valencia retreated from the field on August 20. Americans called this victory the Battle of Contreras. Mexicans called it the Battle of Padierna. Afterward, an angry Santa Anna gathered the remnant’s of Valencia’s men and made a stand later that same day at Churubusco, just five miles from the capital. Santa Anna’s position at Churubusco consisted of a church and convent, guarded not only by the finest Mexican artillery but also riflemen and sharpshooters. As strong as the Mexican position was, however, Scott’s smaller army was able to take it during hours of very bloody fighting. With the Mexican army now just two-thirds of what it had been three days earlier, and with the Americans only three miles from the fabled “Halls of the Montezumas,” Santa Anna’s soldiers began deserting in large numbers.39 It was at this crucial moment that one of the biggest religious controversies of the war erupted, for at Churubusco the U.S. Army captured a group of mostly Irish-American deserters calling themselves the San Patricios, or Saint Patrick Battalion. The rumors about American Catholic



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deserters fighting for the enemy had apparently turned out to be true! Their story quickly became famous and infamous, depending on one’s perspective.40 In the United States, debate ensued over the San Patricios’ nationality, motives, and goals. This debate, even more than earlier ones involving religion and the war, required recourse to the language of the anti-Catholic movement because nativist abuse by American officers seems to have been the key factor in the desertion. For a given crime officers would sometimes merely demote native-born soldiers while imprisoning, whipping, or dishonorably discharging foreign-born men. Early on in the war the sight of priests blessing Mexican troops at Matamoras, when juxtaposed to nativism in the army, had led some foreign-born Catholic soldiers to reconsider their newfound allegiance to the United States. Atrocities, church looting, and the abuse of priests—all of which are discussed in the next chapter— aggravated an already extant anxiety that the Protestant United States was attacking Catholicism qua Catholicism, not just Mexico. Many Irish in particular, including John Riley, the San Patricios’ commander who had been born in Clifden, Ireland, and come to the United States via Canada, likened the United States’ attack on Mexico to that of England’s occupation of Ireland. The San Patricios saw both cases as instances of Anglo-Saxon Protestants subjugating non-English Catholics.41 The causes of this desertion, however, were not a one-sided affair born of officers’ nativism and American religious culture. Mexican broadsides distributed throughout the war offered land and money to American deserters. Mexico offered extra boons to those who would bring soldiers or weapons with them, or serve in the Mexican military. This propaganda referred explicitly to religion when addressing German- and Irish-Americans. One broadside in particular caught the attention of the American press, because it appeared soon after the capture of the San Patricios at Churubusco. Addressed to “Catholic Irishmen” by Santa Anna but probably written by Riley, it appealed to them to “Come over to us; you will be received under the laws of that truly Christian hospitality and good faith which Irish guests are entitled to expect and obtain from a Catholic nation.” Santa Anna then asked, “Is religion no longer the strongest of all human bonds?” Aware of the 1834 and 1844 attacks on American Catholic churches, he pointedly demanded:  “Can you fight by the side of those who put fire to your temples in Boston and Philadelphia?” “Are Catholic Irishmen to be the destroyers of Catholic temples, murderers of Catholic priests, and the founders of heretical rites in this pious nation?”42

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How effective was this propaganda? Of 111,063 troops who served during the war, approximately 9,000 men deserted. As Catholics were quick (and, it seems, correct) to assert, most of the deserters were native-born Americans. Nervous Catholic leaders backed up this fact with effusive praise of Irish volunteers. Catholic newspapers featured tabulated, ethnic breakdowns of deserters even before the capture of the San Patricios.43 Indeed, the vast majority of deserters left the U.S. Army for reasons unrelated to religion. Whether they were Catholic or not, volunteers often resented what they saw as unduly harsh army discipline. Some simply left camp in search of liquor and women and never returned. Other times Mexicans impressed intoxicated Americans into their military.44 In spite of the severe discipline leveled at foreign-born soldiers by native officers, non-Catholic immigrant soldiers blamed “religious fanaticism” stirred up by Mexicans, not their officers’ nativism, for the desertion of the San Patricios. The German-American Protestant, Frederick Zeh, quoted a Mexican broadside in his journal: “Join us and fight with us for our rights and for our sacred imperiled religion, against this infidel enemy, etc.” If Zeh’s experience in the regular army was typical, he would have faced much less nativism as a Protestant than as a Catholic. This explains why Catholic camaraderie, according to Zeh, accounted more than anything else for the mass desertion. He could find no other means to interpret the events of Churubusco than the lens of religion. 45 Irish-Catholics in the United States at first denied the battalion’s existence. Once irrefutable evidence of its existence became known, they pointed out that many of the San Patricios were not Irish. For a time, the Freeman’s Journal even maintained that the San Patricios’ commander, John Riley, was “not an Irishman, but an Englishman.” George Wilkins Kendall wrote from Mexico that Irish soldiers had been the most vigorous denunciators of Riley’s seventy-two-man battalion. Irish-American soldiers feared that the treachery of Riley’s men would enrage their nativist comrades further. Raphael Semmes summed up their sentiment at the hanging of the San Patricios: “The brave Irish. . . were the more rejoiced at this event than the native-born Americans even, as they had felt keenly the stigma which this conduct of their countrymen had cast upon them.” In all, twenty-seven were hanged, despite Mexican pleas for leniency. Riley was among those who were only whipped and branded, because he had deserted before the start of hostilities.46 Although for propaganda purposes Mexico emphasized the Catholic identity of the San Patricios much more than did the deserters



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themselves, at the time the vast majority of Americans believed that the San Patricios were almost entirely Irish-Catholic. It is easy to see why.47 The battalion flag was made of green silk. On one side was a Mexican coat of arms and the phrases, “Libertad por la Republica Mexican” and “Erin go bragh.” On the other side was a figure of St. Patrick and the words “San Patricio.” One could not but assume that the men of the San Patricio battalion had joined the Mexican army out of religious affinity.48 Americans blamed Irish and Mexican priests in Mexico for inflaming religious tensions in the U.S. Army and accused American priests back home of advising their parishioners not to enlist. Yet when considered altogether, the evidence suggests that while religion was involved in the defection, the San Patricios had originally deserted more because of intense abuse by nativist officers than love of Mexico or the Catholic Church.49 With the San Patricio affair competing with tales of U.S. military heroics in the American press, Scott meanwhile felt so confident about the American victories at Contreras and Churubusco that he unwisely signed an armistice on August 24 with Santa Anna. To be fair, Scott hoped that Nicholas Trist, the American plenipotentiary at the Mexican capital, might use the U.S. Army’s recent victories as leverage to reach a negotiated peace. Instead, Scott once again found himself outsmarted by Santa Anna, who used the lull to regroup his soldiers and build up the forts at Molino del Rey and Chapultepec. Both of these needed to be taken if the Americans were to enter the capital without the enemy remaining behind them or on their flank. Peace negotiations fell through and on September 6 the armistice ended. Two days later Scott’s army attacked the fort at Molino del Rey. American intelligence, expecting to find a huge arms cache inside, instead found nothing. It turns out that Molino del Rey was only a diversion, albeit a deadly one at 700 American casualties. Santa Anna used the delay to fortify the castle at Chapultepec. Chapultepec, on a tall hill overlooking Mexico City, was now the primary obstacle to Scott’s army. The Americans captured it in a ferocious battle on September 13. On September 14, the victorious Americans hoisted their flag above Mexico’s National Palace. The U.S. Army stood in effective control of nearly all of Mexico. The fall of Mexico City marked the end of major fighting in the war. Santa Anna fled, hoping to fight on. When another Mexican government was formed, however, the new president, Manuel Peña y Peña, relieved Santa Anna of command. Then Peña y Peña restarted treaty

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deliberations. Before long, Santa Anna found himself once again condemned by his own countrymen and living in exile, this time in Colombia. The real test of the Polk Administration’s controversial Catholic conciliation policy had arrived. U.S. troops, most of them volunteers, now occupied Mexican cities. The potential for a religion-fueled backlash caused by the ill-advised behavior of a few troops increased. The War Department told commanders to take “particular care” so as “not to alarm the religious feelings of the Mexicans.” The first controversy actually arose when Colonel Thomas Childs, a Catholic, ordered his soldiers to kneel as a Catholic procession passed in the streets of Jalapa. The event immediately worked its way into Native American campaigning nationwide. The Kentucky Native American Party predicted that before long “men in high authority,” meaning Polk and other Democrats, would “bear the holy candle in procession through our streets.” Even more dangerous was that citizens themselves might soon be “compelled to bend the knee and doff the hat, as the consecrated wafer—that remnant of superstition—is borne by.” Nativists elsewhere predicted: “If our military resources may be used to assist in popish mummeries now, why may they not be employed in shooting down all who refuse to conform to the foreign ecclesiastical will?”50 Even after the American occupation of Mexico City and in spite of displays like that of Childs’ regiment, Mexicans continued religion-based attempts to entice Americans to desert. Eventually Scott had to issue a statement warning of “false priests.” The general urged his men not to believe Mexican promises of land and money. He also not-so-subtly reminded his “soldiers, Protestant and Catholic” of the “fate” of the San Patricios.51 The story of the San Patricios had given Mexicans hope for further American desertions even in the face of so many military defeats. But it had also increased the normally even-handed Scott’s suspicions of Catholic loyalty. Back in the United States, nothing American Catholics did could alter the nativist belief that Catholic identity by definition precluded being patriotic. Even when Catholics celebrated American victories by holding thanksgiving liturgies, nativists doubted the sincerity of their “profane burlesque.” Catholics “chanting Te Deums for the slaughter of their own brethren in the faith” became simply another sign of Catholic immorality. “Foreign priests” could never honestly rejoice in American victories.52 Because of these religion-tinged controversies during the summer and fall of 1847, but above all because of Ritchie’s editorial, President Polk decided to use his annual message to Congress to put to rest all



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questions about his administration’s relationship with the Catholic Church. Buchanan, Ritchie, and others helped Polk shape the final version of his message. Buchanan recommended that Polk mention church property only in the wider context of private property. But Ritchie, still apprehensive about the consequences of his editorial, urged the president to be precise about the property issue so “as to exclude the conclusion that you had changed your views in regard to the Church.” The final message, given to Congress on December 7, specifically addressed Mexican fears that the war was “a war against their religion and their churches, which were to be desecrated and overthrown, and that their rights of person and private property would be violated. To remove these false impressions, our commanders in the field were directed scrupulously to respect their religion, their churches, and their church property, which were in no matter violated.” In the end and after much revision, Polk had chosen a mixture of Buchanan’s and Ritchie’s advice.53 The Mexican-American War had been fraught with religious connotations from the start. The closer the U.S. Army had gotten to Mexico City, the more the threat had grown of trouble somehow connected to religion. American politicians recognized that only through some combination of anti-Catholic sentiment, racism, and republican principles could they maintain a nationally coherent stand on the war. The Beecherite discourse had already done this work for them by weaving all three into one fabric. Drawing heavily from it they furthered their own interests by using the most universally understood and effective rhetoric they had. Thus, a Whig Party beset by sectional dissention turned to the themes and vocabulary of the anti-Catholic movement to form a rationale for opposing “Mr. Polk’s War.” For its part, the Polk Administration formulated policies toward the Roman Catholic Church that looked toward ensuring victory in the war while at the same time preserving Catholic support for the Democratic Party. This does not mean, however, that Polk’s goals were driven purely by political concerns. His concern for religious freedom was genuine. Polk demonstrated this fact in his private remarks about the Rev. McCalla, as well as in his willingness to execute polices that had as much potential to be unpopular among a great majority of Americans as they had to be popular among the Catholic minority.54 In the eyes of nativists, Polk’s policies provided the best proof yet of an outright conspiracy, fulfilling the warnings voiced by Samuel F. B. Morse and Lyman Beecher a decade earlier. In what at first glance

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appeared a contradictory stand, the Native American Party championed the war even as it used the conflict to criticize Polk. Abolitionists treaded more carefully but they, too, were forced to admit their satisfaction with the potential opening of Mexico to American Protestant missionaries. Native American behavior during the war demonstrated the extent to which the party rested on the religious appeal of anti-Catholicism as nativists negotiated the strands connecting evangelical Protestantism with anti-immigrant politics. No other explanation sufficiently explains the Native American position on the war than to say that its party members believed their own theologized rhetoric and believed it passionately. For them, this involved a claim about truth, and like most believers striving for orthodoxy they took truth claims seriously. Events like the Jalapa incident involving Colonel Childs proved an added boon to the conspiracy-minded. How American troops other than Childs responded to orders to respect the Mexicans’ faith conspicuously, and the reaction by Mexicans to this spotty but ultimately successful policy, is told in the next chapter.

6

The American Soldier in Mexico You have battled long and hard against Catholicism in Kentucky, but I assure you this war is making Protestants fast, very fast. Even those that came out Catholics, are completely disgusted, and have lost all confidence in the priest-hood. Here we see it as it really is, unrestrained by Protestantism, sapping the very foundations of society, and laying waste what ought to have been the most flourishing country in the world.1 G. G. Goss, chaplain, Kentucky Volunteers

The Americans who fought in Mexico came from a nation fluent in the language of anti-Catholicism and convinced of its Anglo-Saxon identity and destiny as a continental republic. As the foot soldiers of Manifest Destiny, American soldiers had the opportunity to test first-hand American presuppositions about Mexicans, Catholics, and Protestants. These men possessed few means, least of all personal experience, with which to interpret what they saw in Mexico. One interpretive tool was a sense of their own masculinity and all that this demanded. Another was a popular romanticism that focused on the thrill of adventure in strange lands and the desire to record that adventure in writing.2 What connected and overarched these as the most significant means of making sense out of Mexican culture was the Beecherite Synthesis. For soldiers no less than other Americans in the 1840s, understanding Mexico and the war against it required anti-Catholic vocabulary and themes. The American experience with Mexico’s Catholic culture occurred at a key moment in Americans’ search for religious meaning in their frenetic westward expansion, even as it was a pivot point in the evolution of the anti-Catholic movement. At a time when Roman Catholicism was under

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attack in the United States as an anti-republican threat, these Americans’ first experience with Catholics occurred in Mexico. This cultural encounter tested the broad spectrum of accusations against Catholics, accusations that went far beyond worries over Catholic esprit de corps raised by the San Patricio defection: nativist claims about immigrants, allegations about Catholicism’s anti-republican nature, and the belief that Roman Catholics were not Christians but superstitious idolaters. American perceptions of the “Catholic Race” of Mexicans confirmed hearsay and provided fresh evidence of Catholic debauchery, economic stagnation, and political tyranny. Sometimes even Catholic Americans in Mexico reacted with horror at Mexican religious practices and the health of the Catholic Church there, and so it is important to draw distinctions between theirs and the common Protestant soldier’s opinion. The Jesuit chaplain Fr. John McElroy, finding the cathedral at Matamoras in disrepair, wrote somewhat inaccurately in his journal: “—so much for the effects of the revolution. Since the Spanish yoke was cast off not one church as yet has been erected throughout all Mexico.” McElroy found “the state of religion in Mexico. . . to be most deplorable.” Although he saw nothing beyond Saltillo and Matamoras (a hernia prevented him from traveling extensively), he concluded “there is no country in the world more destitute in the labors of the sacred ministry than Mexico; and I  would add, in no country would a more abundant harvest be reaped, especially among the Indian race.” Unhappy with the Mexican revolutionaries’ expulsion of the Jesuits along with most of the peninsulare priesthood, he blamed the nation’s problems on the corruption and ignorance of Mexican priests. On the surface McElroy’s opinion appears to differ little from the prevalent American criticism of Mexico, but he in fact lamented the lack of the very same people whom Protestants alleged had emasculated and corrupted Mexico in the first place. “All the good simple people want,” McElroy claimed, “is a zealous, disinterested priesthood, in sufficient numbers.” The solution to Mexico’s travails, McElroy seemed to be saying, was not its Protestantization via American conquest but rather its re-evangelization by Catholics.3 McElroy’s shock on encountering what he viewed as the dismal state of Catholic affairs in Mexico was a pale shadow of how most American soldiers reacted. Along with preconceived notions of Mexico and Catholicism gleaned from a variety of sources, including travel literature, the foreignness of Mexican culture most often negatively affected soldiers’ opinions.



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American troops, Protestant and Catholic alike, agreed that Mexico had been left behind in the dawning age of industrial expansion. However, McElroy and other Catholics, not unlike their coreligionists back home, were more apt to blame Mexico’s faults on race or the Mexican army whereas Protestants almost always traced all of Mexico’s troubles to Catholicism. While the Protestants conflated religion with race in their critique of Mexico, Catholics did not. Perceived and real corruption in the Mexican Catholic Church reinforced these views.4 American soldiers typically viewed Mexicans as racially homogeneous and inferior, but at times they divided Mexicans into subgroups, such as Spanish, Indian, Mixed, and Negro. Such groupings were common to mid-nineteenth century American racialist thought, which placed ethnicities and culturally distinct groups on one large racial ladder, usually with Anglo-Saxon Protestants at the top and black African animists at the bottom. According to competing racial theories of the time, biological, cultural, environmental, and even historical differences, as well as skin or hair color, could very well lead to the conclusion that Caucasians and people of color were actually different species. Skin color was not the only determinant. In the 1840s among Anglo-Saxon and Scots-Irish Protestants, the view predominated that Irish were inherently violent, disloyal, and ignorant, and that this racial inferiority was most aptly demonstrated by their poverty and choice of religion.5 This opinion about Irish-Catholics is significant, because Irish immigrants were the one group of Catholics with whom most Americans were familiar, even if only through hearsay and derogatory cartoons. They had only to modify these opinions on encountering Mexicans. Despite the dismal view of the Irish taken by many Americans, however, soldiers viewed the Catholic people of color they encountered in Mexico as far worse. John Scott’s vitriolic description of a Mexican was typical: “Hardy, cruel, unrelenting, savage, treacherous, dirty, vulgar, and obscene, the essence of these qualities make up his composition.” Soldiers blamed all groups along the racialist spectrum of Mexico for everything from the country’s political troubles to its perceived ignorance and backwardness.6 The Black Legend also came into play, and Mexico’s Spanish heritage occasioned many remarks from Americans who from childhood had been raised on stories inherited from their anti-Spanish English ancestors. This is one reason why some Americans in Mexico consistently referred to Mexicans as Spanish or Spaniards. But in every case those who blamed Spain for the degradation they found in Mexico intermixed their

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criticism of the Spanish with condemnation of the Catholic Church. “The Mexicans became mere animals” at the hands of the Spanish, one soldier asserted, and “the ministers of this task were the priests.”7 Indeed, these soldiers did not juxtapose Catholic and black to white and Protestant but instead blamed Spaniards for ruining a formerly superior Indian race. Echoing Henry Stuart Foote, some went so far as to claim that Aztec religion, despite its ritual human sacrifice of unwilling victims, was closer to the “pure” worship of God than the Catholic Mass. All agreed the “moral contagion” of Catholicism was the primary curse placed on Mexico by its European rulers.8 The soldiers’ newspaper, American Star, summed up this view when it called for the U.S. Army to be the instrument of “reestablishing” republican principles in Mexico. It noted that Indians were naturally inclined toward “social virtues which the Hispano-Mexican has despised.” By removing the Spaniards’ descendants, Americans could lift the naturally pious Indians up to republican heights. While this might seem surprising that some white Americans deemed other Europeans inferior to Indians, the soldiers who wrote for the American Star were adhering to the same Rousseauian notions about “noble savages” that Thomas Jefferson had argued decades earlier. Jefferson surmised that Indians, having been born in the untrammeled Eden of North America free of European (and, by extension, Catholic) corruption, were purer than Europeans in many ways.9 Indeed, the key defect in the Spanish character, according to these soldiers, was Roman Catholicism. Some Americans, ignoring nationality entirely and just describing Mexicans by using what they saw as their most distinguishing characteristic, just called them “Romanists.”10 While some faulted the inseparable Spanish heritage of race and religion for Mexico’s political instability, others blamed the very Indians their comrades admired. The once strong Spaniards, they said, had enervated their race by mixing with Indians. Officers and enlisted men, volunteers and regulars, used terms like “degenerate sons of the Aztecs,” “savage,” and “inferior” when referring to the Indians of Mexico. They compared the Indians they encountered to those in the United States, implying that they too ought to be pushed aside or even exterminated to make way for the Anglo-Saxon.11 One Tennessean declared, “I think I should be pretty well pleased with this country if there was white folks here but there is nothing in the world could induce me to stay here among these molatto [sic] Mexicans.” In other words, if not for Mexicans, Mexico would be a wonderful place.12



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A few Americans praised Mexico’s Aztec past but in general they lamented the country’s dearth of Europeans. Some even claimed that Mexico had declined precisely because the Jesuits, along with much of the Spanish population, had left. The expression of such sentiment in the antebellum United States, where the term “Jesuitism” was synonymous with sinister underhandedness, is astonishing. These Americans believed that Indians, left to rule the country and the Church on their own, had failed miserably in both cases. They cited poor moral character and paganism under the guise of Catholicism as evidence of Mexico’s decline. In their view, the hegemony of the Mexican Church and its corruption were due not to Spaniards or even to Jesuits, as others claimed, but rather to ineradicable Indian influences.13 Giving more weight to race than religion was certainly new to American anti-Catholic thought, but so too was a close-up examination of a non-European, Catholic population. Soldiers took the racial rhetoric a step further and compared Mexicans in skin color and intelligence to free and enslaved African-Americans in the United States.14 Yet even in these critiques anti-Catholicism retained its prominent place in the evidential chain used to interpret Mexican culture. For example, soldiers viewed peonage as worse than slavery and portrayed the Catholic priesthood as the slave master of the population. This enthrallment to priests, according to one soldier, was worse than American slavery because it made Mexicans “more degraded than the African race among us.” Here again, regardless of the verbal content of this racial rhetoric the ultimate and proximate cause of Mexican inferiority remained religion, not biology.15 Not all American soldiers held such a low opinion of Mexicans. In fact, a few found themselves pleasantly surprised on entering Mexico.16 But the vast majority of American fighting men hoped to bring to Mexico the republicanism, with its requisite Protestantism, they found lacking there. Depending on the person, this meant exterminating Indians, annexing Mexican territory, occupying Mexico in a paternalistic waiting game until a true republic could evolve, or simply destroying the Church in order to allow Mexicans to begin the task of building a republic on their own. In all these scenarios, the central feature remained the Church, whose power, wealth, and influence would have to be demolished. Many soldiers felt a sense of religious mission regarding their sojourn in Mexico. With one officially sanctioned religion, “the state of Priest ridden Mexico” unquestionably had no religious liberty approaching that of the United States. Nevertheless, even Americans who evinced a genuine

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desire for freedom of conscience proceeded from the Beecherite assumption that Roman Catholicism was inimical to republicanism. Henry S.  Lane blamed the Catholic “monster which is miscalled religion” as the primary reason Mexico did not exploit its natural resources. Saying “it requires no gift of prophecy to foretell their doom,” Lane predicted that Mexicans were “destined soon to fall before the all grasping & all conquering genius of genuine Americanism.” Only the introduction of Protestantism into Mexico, in Lane’s view, could establish republican government. Republican government, in turn, would help lay the only sure foundation for material prosperity. This foundation was composed of virtue and liberty, and it in turn produced a society that encouraged and valued honest, hard work.17 Even without the criminal appetite to loot Mexican churches or emulate the riotous nativists of Philadelphia—and the overwhelming majority intended neither of these—American Protestant soldiers generally concluded that any destruction of Catholic power would be a universal republican victory. Americans thus ought not waste their unprecedented opportunity to bring a “pure gospel” to Mexico, be it by annexation, force, or good example. They believed this would naturally lead to a love of republican principles by Mexicans. These soldiers therefore found it difficult to separate their strictly military task from ideas about a political and religious crusade. Providence, men like Lane believed, was leading the United States ever westward while guiding the American army as it brought republicanism to Mexico. Official statements from the War Department that the religion of the Mexicans should remain unmolested could not stand in the face of divinely ordained Manifest Destiny.18 While it is true that most of the American soldiers experienced Catholicism for the first time while in Mexico, nearly all of them already possessed convictions about the Catholic Church that went beyond its hostility to republicanism. (Those from Louisiana and the urban northeast, for example, certainly had prior contact with Catholics and priests; most other Americans did not.) The chance to encounter Catholicism in some form existed in all theaters of the war. The prominent size and great quantity of churches in Mexican towns and cities drew the immediate attention of the Americans. Bored by long marches and camp life, especially once Mexico City fell to General Scott in September 1847, soldiers visited churches to satisfy their curiosity and enjoy some recreation. The U.S. Army’s use of churches and monasteries as hospitals and barracks also exposed Americans to the Mexicans’ religion. One other reason American



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men visited the churches of Mexico, at least according to the soldiers themselves, was to admire the women seen praying there every day. Attending churches allowed Americans to test the preconceptions of Mexico and Catholicism that they had gained from hearsay and books. American Catholic soldiers attended Mass in Mexican churches, too, but remarked little about such experiences. For non-Catholic soldiers, however, these encounters tended to strengthen the array of preexisting religious, political, and racial assumptions. Attending Mass, conversing with friars, getting caught up in festivals, examining churches, and meeting the Jesuit chaplains were among the most likely opportunities for soldiers to experience Catholicism firsthand. But even hearing about the San Patricio defection, army orders regarding Catholics, and the cautious behavior of certain officers toward the Church elicited a lot of comment and reflection on religion.19 In their opinion of Roman Catholicism soldiers vacillated between curious admiration and repulsion, a common response to Catholicism by American romantic thinkers of the time. Romantics tended to admire Catholic architecture and art while at the same time reviling the religion that had inspired them. This revulsion arose from the conviction that priestcraft, not piety, had fabricated such beautiful edifices merely to subjugate the ignorant. The Puritan ideal of the spare meeting house remained strong in mid-nineteenth century America, and American romantics tended automatically to see small, simple wooden churches as the fruit of popular democracy. The converse to this was that towering stone cathedrals displayed the profligacy and corruption that comes with the union of throne and altar. This romanticized view of democracy left Jacksonian Americans entranced by Mexican churches at the same time they bemoaned their expense or derided their colorful Indian artwork.20 Friends and relatives in the United States worried for the souls of these impressionable young men. Ralph W.  Kirkham’s wife feared he might convert to Roman Catholicism, because his letters home revealed such a strong fascination with Catholic rituals and the churches he visited. Reassuring her, the devout Episcopalian wrote from Puebla:  “You seem to express considerable anxiety lest I  should become a Romanist. Have no fears on that subject for I  assure you I  am less one now than I  was before I came to this country. I have seen too much wickedness among those who profess this faith to change my church.” Kirkham refused to believe that the piety he witnessed among Mexicans was as sincere as his own. He attended Mass, enjoyed processions, and sometimes even took

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communion, yet he thought Mexicans who did these same things were idolaters.21 The sheer splendor of Mexican churches startled the Americans. Large churches and cathedrals, particularly in the cities of Vera Cruz, Monterrey, Puebla, and Mexico City, made strong impressions on the invaders. Even those who considered Catholicism a “gross superstition” found themselves impressed. Unprepared for the Old World architecture he encountered, impressionable Edmund Kirby, bucking the romantic trend, hoped the “Moorish” churches of Mexico would inspire “steeple” builders back home.22 Puebla’s churches, which numbered over seventy, elicited the most comments and greatly shaped opinions about Mexico’s relationship with Roman Catholicism. The U.S. Army occupied the city from May 1847 to June 1848. Puebla, which lay in the shadows of tall volcanic peaks and between the two Indian towns of Tlaxcala and Cholula, was the only city in Mexico completely planned and built from the ground up by Spaniards. As such, it had a more European feel than other cities encountered by the Americans. On its central square, or zocolo, rose Puebla Cathedral, which had been built over several decades, beginning in the 1570s. Puebla Cathedral aroused more awe and curiosity in Americans than any other structure they encountered in Mexico. So “magnificent” did General William J. Worth find the cathedral that he thought “it. . . utterly inconceivable that a population of this kind should inhabit such a beautiful and well-built city.”23 Jacob Oswandel, a Pennsylvania volunteer who admitted to unfamiliarity with Catholicism, also came away impressed with the cathedral of “the so-called Christians” of Puebla. This did not, however, leave him with a positive view of the Poblanos or their religion. Perhaps offended by the strong effect of the cathedral’s beauty on him, Oswandel raged in a book published after the war: “I thought to myself how ignorant and degraded these Mexicans are, and think it no wonder, where the Catholic religion rules, that the country does not flourish.” He had not thought much about religion before but his experience in Mexico sparked theological reflection on the nature of government. Oswandel concluded that the Church’s “iron yoke” would have to be broken before republican principles could take root in Mexico.24 If architectural triumphs like Puebla Cathedral could convince Americans of Mexican inferiority, this was more true of the many smaller churches that soldiers called “tawdry” or “barbaric.” “One cannot enter a church in Mexico without disgust,” one Presbyterian wrote, “excited



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by the numerous images and pictures with which the walls are disfigured.”25 Even the level of artistry and craftsmanship came under criticism. A Missouri legislator turned volunteer mocked the “saintships” of an El Paso church, commenting, “I felt any little girl at home would have been ashamed of such a badly dressed set of dolls.”26 If the structure and décor of Mexican churches elicited commentary, actually attending religious celebrations provided an even greater opportunity for reflection. American soldiers often described what occurred at Mass in Mexico as “mummery” and “flummery.”27 By branding Mexican Catholic practices as paganism, idolatry, or superstition, American soldiers found meaning in the war even as they discovered a way to demonize their enemy without explicitly mentioning race. A  Missouri volunteer described a liturgy he attended as “a pompous, unmeaning show, & a gross mockery of the pure religion of the meek and humble Jesus whom they pretend to serve.” Another soldier wrote that “the mummery of the service would have been laughable had it not been so melancholy to reflect that ’twas an attempt at the worship of God.” Henry S. Lane agreed that the Mass lacked “the stern simplicity & sublime spirituality of the true religion of the Poor Nazarene,” and suggested that the money spent on the military conquest of Mexico would have been put to better use bringing “the Gospel to the poor and deluded Mexican” in order to end his “mental thralldom” to “the Mother of Harlots.” That, too, in Lane’s opinion, would be a conquest, but “not a conquest of barren territory. . . a conquest of souls.”28 These religious critiques were not merely aesthetic or pious denunciations of Catholic rites by men concerned about Mexican souls. For instance, Josiah Gregg cared little about the spiritual regeneration of Mexico and even less for liturgical debate. But he came to see in the Mass a microcosm of every problem Mexico faced. In Gregg’s opinion, it was the “time lost in such frequent ceremonies” that retarded the growth of republicanism in Mexico. Gregg therefore concluded that “the lowering of the priests” would be one positive outcome of the war.29 Thomas Tennery, an Illinois volunteer, took a similar view, remarking after attending his first Mass that it was just such “Priestcraft,” in combination with congenital racial inferiority, that kept Mexico mired in despotism.30 The strangeness of Mexican liturgies did not evoke negative responses from all Americans, even those who were firmly anti-Catholic. Many could not help but be impressed by Mexican piety. A  few, like volunteer John Kenly, thought that Roman Catholic rites had been a positive influence on

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the Indians of Mexico, whom he believed needed paintings and music to teach them Christianity.31 Kenly was perceptive in recognizing the mnemonic value of images and elaborate ritual in the Christian evangelization of non-literate societies (although he more likely had read William H.  Prescott’s statements to that effect). Most other Americans did not understand this, instead jumping to the simplistic conclusion that every image or statue was an idol, and every rite a primitive superstition. Even soldiers who avoided Mass inevitably encountered Mexican religion, for the frequency of feasts and festivals ensured that even the non-curious would have contact with Catholicism. Funerals, “a strange commingling of the Romish superstitions and the ancient Indian funeral rites” according to Captain Ephraim Kirby Smith, attracted the most attention because Mexicans held them in part out of doors. Mexican funeral rites confused Protestant Americans, especially the feasting and rejoicing that invariably followed burials. Seeing them further aggravated feelings against the Mexicans’ coreligionists in the United States, for like most other American Protestants these soldiers imagined a monolithic Catholicism. They assumed that Catholics in the United States, whether native or foreign-born, worshipped exactly as did their Mexican counterparts. And what these Americans saw of Mexican religious practices they did not like. As Ralph Kirkham told his wife, “the more I see of the Romish religion in this country, the more I am convinced that it is real idolatry.”32 Sunday observance in Mexico also brought to the surface anti-Catholic sentiment among American soldiers. Sabbatarianism had been an influential Protestant reform movement in the United States during the heyday of the Second Great Awakening during the 1820s and 1830s. Sabbatarians urged an observance of the Christian Sabbath (i.e., the Lord’s Day) that they believed to be consonant with Scripture—quiet, reserved worship and abstention from work and frolicking. Sundays in Mexico, which featured cock-fights, music played in the streets by the same bands that had earlier performed in churches, and open gambling, scandalized young men who had grown up in this Sabbatarian climate. This was the case even if they did not actively support the movement’s aims. Combined with the upbeat music at Mexican Masses, Sundays in Mexico reinforced soldiers’ fears about Catholicism’s adverse effects on civic virtue and private morality.33 The priesthood itself piqued the curiosity of some Protestant soldiers even more than Mexico’s Catholic culture. Stories of devious or perverted priests, long popular as entertainment in the United States even among those ambivalent about Catholicism, meshed seamlessly with actual



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experience in Mexico. Seeing Mexican pastors at cockfights or playing cards shocked American puritanical sensibilities. The fact that priests drank wine or smoked cigars was enough to draw condemnation. In a few cases, concubinage among priests, and Mexicans’ seeming ambivalence toward this practice, understandably confused the Americans. American Protestants could not be expected to understand the Catholic belief that, since all people are sinners, the efficacy of the sacraments cannot depend on the priest’s holiness. Otherwise, none would be efficacious. This is not to say that Mexicans did not want holy clergymen who could model virtue. They certainly did, and they had such priests and friars or nuns in greater numbers than even Fr. McElroy seemed willing to admit. But unlike a Protestant minister, the primary function of a priest was that of a craftsman. He was to perform the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and administer the sacraments, not preach on or model how to live a holy life. Thus, behavior like this was not as scandalous to Mexican Catholics as it was to Protestant Americans. Priestly celibacy in particular was another difficult concept for American Protestants to comprehend. Soldiers likened Mexican priests to women or, conversely, fabricated stories of nighttime visits to convents by priests.34 In the anti-Catholic mind, the priest was a paradox that need not bear serious reflection: on the one hand, if he was faithful to his vow of chastity and the discipline of celibacy he was condemned as effeminate. On the other hand, if he engaged in sexual conquests, gambled, drank, or smoked, he was an unconscionable hypocrite for participating in such masculine activities. In other words, he could not win for losing. In both cases his cassock or habit marked him as a tempting target. Of all the priestly behavior condemned by Americans, only fornication was considered sinful to Mexicans. A  great number of American Protestant soldiers, on the other hand, held that everything from the Mexicans’ worship style to their use of the Lord’s Day for rejoicing was sinful. Scandal among the clergy helps in part to explain the anti-clerical movement in Mexico at the time as well as the measures by Pope Pius IX to reorganize the Catholic Church in Mexico. “When the priests. . . indulge in the grossest immoralities. . . what can be expected of the people?” asked one American at Monterrey. Still, the fact is that many Americans who described Mexican clerics in this manner gathered their information from second-hand stories and literary sources. Plagiarizing another soldier’s account was also common.35 Testing their abilities to write and entertain, soldiers interspersed accounts of priestly misbehavior with sarcastic

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stories and rhetoric common to, and even taken word-for-word from, anti-Catholic literature published before the war.36 This frenzy of fanciful writing, with each soldier trying to top the other in order to be published, did not go unnoticed by American commanders. From the start of the war generals had struggled to reign in violence stemming from religious bigotry. But what about the possibility that the war might induce more violence in the United States akin to the Charlestown attack and more recent Philadelphia riots? General Taylor, for one, feared that stories about “the flumery. . . as regards the forms & ceremonies appertaining to the Catholic religion at Puebla and other places which I thought were in bad taste” would inflame Americans against the Catholic Church. Not that Taylor disagreed with the sentiment voiced by his soldiers. He did not: “While I would respect. . . every religious denomination, Catholic as well as Protestant, yet I have a great contempt for hypocrisy & deceit of any kind.”37 Meanwhile, while Taylor feared the post-war consequences in the United States of battlefield-fed religious bigotry, this anti-Catholicism took the form of violent anti-clericalism in Mexico. Anti-clerical abuse by Americans ranged from ridicule to murder but most incidents fell somewhere in between. In some places volunteers engaged in passive-aggressive behavior, like disobeying orders to tip their hats when passing clergymen or forcing them off the sidewalk and into the street. But in Puebla volunteers attacked priests, ripped their robes from their bodies, and then wore the garments mockingly in front of Mexican church-goers. At one monastery in Puebla Albert Bracket, an officer serving under General Lane, ordered his troops to attack the monks. Bracket’s goal was free room and board. Once quartered in the monastery, and weary of the sound of its bells, Bracket’s men beat the bell ringer. Afterward, they climbed atop the steeple and tied their company flag to the cross. As one New York volunteer pointed out about his forced entry into a church elsewhere in Mexico: “There is no such thing as refusing us anything—‘might gives right.’ ”38 Anti-clerical violence like this stemmed from preexisting beliefs shaped by anti-Catholicism more than it did from first-hand experience in Mexico. The relationship, however, was symbiotic, for even before the return of the American army from Mexico the war gave rise to important contributions to anti-Catholic literature that went beyond the syndicated letters of soldiers and war correspondents in U.S. newspapers. Indeed, in 1847, even as General Taylor feared Americans’ Mexican experiences would further invigorate anti-Catholicism, the war produced a popular rival to “Maria



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Monk.” Entitled Adventures in Mexico and written by Corydon Donnavan, the book centered on mysterious happenings at a convent. Donnavan claimed that a nun invited two American officers to her cell late one night. On arriving there they found a dead monk, the victim of a failed love affair. The nun asked the men to carry the body secretly over the convent wall and, pulling a gun, threatened to shoot them if they disobeyed. Some evangelical Protestant newspapers recognized the entertainment value of the story and quickly serialized it. Soon after the appearance of the book, however, the National Intelligencer, Freeman’s Journal, and the U.S. Catholic Magazine revealed that the story had been plagiarized. Donnavan had based his tale on an older story set in Spain, “The Convent Cell,” by T. Colley Grattan, which was fiction.39 Given the poor treatment of priests by a minority of American soldiers, it is not surprising that even greater numbers—usually but not always volunteers—disobeyed orders to treat Mexican churches and shrines with respect. As the largest buildings in most cities, monasteries and churches were the obvious choice for barracks, depots, and hospitals. The Mexican Army used them for outposts as well. But after robbing some Puebla churches in the summer of 1847 Americans even used them as stables. Per orders Americans were supposed to request permission to commandeer such buildings, but in practice they often used force and threats. In all cases, the buildings, though private and thus deserving of compensation according to army policy, were occupied without payment. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army paid for grain and animals. Being quartered in churches and monasteries provided ample opportunity for misbehavior. Incidents of vandalism and looting seem to have been evenly distributed throughout the war years and various theaters of the conflict. The normally more idle hands of the occupation army generally proved to be no more or less at fault in this regard than the initial invasion force. Still, there can be no doubt that as they marched inland from Vera Cruz to Mexico City between April and September 1847, Scott’s army had more opportunities for trouble than had Taylor’s army in Monterrey and Matamoras. Josiah Gregg recognized the obvious problem arising from the contradiction between American occupation of churches and the official desire to appear unthreatening to the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico: “The necessity of this is unfortunate, as nothing tends to incense the people so much as any desecration of their churches.”40 Those who already believed Catholicism to be superstitious and unrepublican showed the least concern for Mexican religious sensibilities.41

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For example, as he lay wounded in a church after the Battle of Buena Vista, Herman Upham relaxed next to the altar, covering himself “with an old carpet” and using “a wooden image of the Virgin Mary as a pillow.” When not reclining he used “as a writing-desk, a Lamb of God embroidered on gold upon silk and fastened upon a frame of wood.”42 Apparently it did not even occur to Upham that even his American Catholic comrades would deem his actions sacrilegious. A far more destructive incident took place in September 1847 at Mixcoac near Chapultepec, when a company of American regulars took up quarters in a small church. They destroyed its interior, with one soldier even making a bed for the night out of “a big glass coffin” after having “tossed out [St.] Christopher—who did not protest.” Such behavior appalled Frederick Zeh, who was as ill-disposed toward Catholicism as many native Protestant Americans. “Our men showed no piety on this occasion,” said Zeh, “but instead engaged in unpardonable vandalism, mercilessly devastating the pretty décor of this church.”43 In response to such vandalism and looting by volunteers in Mexico City, General John A. Quitman, the military governor there, issued an order on October 6, 1847, promising punishment for “interference and ill treatment on the part of our soldiers.” To reassure the Mexicans he printed the order in both Spanish and English, secured the mayor’s endorsement, and distributed it as a broadside.44 Quitman’s order had little effect, however, for on October 12 further depredations occurred. In his journal, Madison Mills described the “disgraceful” scene in Mexico City:  soldiers “broke open shops, stores and private residences, and robbed and maltreated the citizens. . . they are at the moment plundering without restraint.” The next day, he reported seeing “Drunken soldiers with priests [sic] robes on staggering about before their officers.”45 The American rampage in Mexico City left homes robbed and furniture destroyed. As in Puebla, troops singled out rectories and churches to burglarize even as they expanded this to include homes and shops.46 Overall, the vast riches of the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico, which lay mostly in real estate and religious articles hidden by bishops afraid of both nations’ armies, stayed untouched by American hands. Indeed, in many ways Mexican priests feared anti-clerical revolutionaries in their own country more than they did the American invaders.47 Even so, incidents of American thievery were common enough to garner the attention of Santa Anna, who denounced the sacking of churches and entreated General Scott to maintain better control of his troops.48



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One of the biggest complaints by Mexican bishops concerned the American occupation of Mexico City’s convents. Archbishop Juan Manuel and several prioresses objected to ill treatment and insufficient notice when told to evacuate. The soldiers, according to the Mexicans, also engaged in “scandalous and sacrilegious robbery of the churches and sacristies.” Once the Americans left, the nuns found “the images stripped, and the coffers, the drawers and the pantries where we keep the sacred ornaments and several other articles. . . entirely empty.” In some convents soldiers even bored holes into the walls, raised floor stones, stole carpets, and tore apart confessionals looking for the “Golden Jesuses” that recruiters had promised would be hidden there. Archbishop Manuel challenged American military officials, especially Scott: Is not the General-in-Chief today the same one, who, on his word of honor, promised protection to every class, and to every person. . .  Was he not the same who made use of the most unequivocal and affectionate expressions, promising me that he would protect the immunities of the Church; assuring me that wherever his government should be established, respect to the ecclesiastical property, and to the temple and its ministers would be secured. . .  General Scott, spontaneously promised to evacuate the Archepiscopal Palace of Mexico, telling me that he did not know until that day that it was occupied. . . [but] the palace remains occupied. The archbishop appealed to Scott for “an order that will secure the Convents of religious females, and the houses of education, from being converted into barracks,” but received none.49 More often than raiding entire convents, American men pilfered churches for small crosses and figurines that were easy to carry. After all, some had signed up for service to do just that. In response Mexicans began to refuse entry to churches by unaccompanied Americans, especially in New Mexico where the dispersed population made the apprehension of robbers difficult. In central Mexico, American commanders responded by placing guards over churches to ensure the safety of their contents. Unfortunately, in at least a few cases the same volunteers ordered to protect a shrine burglarized it. In Parras, the very army patrol in charge of keeping order rode their horses into the crowded Church of San José during Mass.50

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As they had promised before embarking for Mexico, some soldiers sent religious articles home to loved ones as mementos. Others boldly placed advertisements in American newspapers selling “Mexican curiosities.” One Kentucky paper advertised “1 right hand of the Saviour, two hundred years old, taken from an old church.” Missouri newspapers announced the sale of a tabernacle covering and a priest’s stole that had been transformed into suspenders, shocking Catholics in St. Louis. But while Catholics condemned these sales, nativists actually defended them by arguing that “those expensive and gaudy decorations” were legitimate trophies of war.51 Much of the Catholic press reacted to this evidence of looting by lashing out at Thomas Ritchie’s infamous editorial in the mouthpiece of the Polk Administration: “We are much afraid that in too many instances the suggestion of the Washington Union has been reduced to practice, and that the churches of Mexico have suffered.”52 Secular newspapers also traced the American looting of Mexican churches to the Daily Union’s retracted suggestion that the United States sequester the Church’s wealth. The Vermont Free Press reminded its readers “that many of our Volunteers. . . were induced to volunteer under the impression that the facilities to plunder the Mexicans and their churches would be many.” With the administration organ having proposed organized plunder, the writer feared that soldiers now felt freer to rob and desecrate churches.53 Even the normally jingoistic New York Herald admitted that its faith in the virtue of American soldiers was wavering due to the occupation of Mexico City, “where countless thousands are locked up in the churches and cathedrals—where solid gold and silver vases, candlesticks, and images are scattered in profusion—the very balustrades of these buildings being made of the precious metals.”54 Other than during the fallout of the Daily Union incident in mid-1847, only at the very end of the war did Catholics begin systematically to voice concerns about the sacking of Mexican churches. The Catholic Telegraph complained that the “religious feelings, even under the eye of general officers, were shamefully outraged.” The Telegraph repeated stories of nuns and priests being “driven from their dwellings” by Americans or “marched through the streets.” Even worse, said the Telegraph, convents and rectories had been plundered, “churches disfigured, and. . . the cushions of the cathedrals torn open” by some American soldiers “in the lust for gold.” The newspaper also noted that church bells had been shipped from Mexico to the United States. Other stories surfaced of American soldiers disrupting Mass by smoking cigars, lying down on pews in the



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few churches that contained them, refusing to take off their hats, and taking seats belonging to local authorities. In one case some volunteers even threw cannon balls through a chapel’s windows, breaking the altar. Having grudgingly supported the war with great reservations about the safety of Catholics in Mexico, the American Catholic press did not sit idle as soldiers came home with horror stories of abuse and plunder.55 American experiences in Mexico strengthened preconceived notions about the danger of Catholicism even as these preconceptions initially provided the most common, complete means to interpret Mexican culture. American soldiers had few means to interpret what they experienced in Mexico. A small number were already virulent anti-Catholics but most were ambivalently so. Nearly all were familiar with the travel and historical literature about Mexico. Still more had read or heard popular anti-Catholic stories. In terms of political theory, most accepted the notion that Roman Catholicism was inimical to republicanism, because it somehow bred ignorance and despotism, two things that incontrovertibly retarded the virtue needed to preserve liberty. While for some this inspired acts of vandalism and violence, for the majority it led them to find the war’s meaning in the United States’ destiny as an Anglo-Saxon, Protestant republic ruling all North America. Because these encounters between American Protestants and Catholic Mexicans invariably engendered much comment about Roman Catholicism in general, they are crucial to understanding the overall effect of soldiers’ Mexican experiences on the development of anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States. The war reinforced strongly held preconceptions that in turn led American soldiers to reach conclusions about immigration and Catholicism back home. As it turns out the opinions these men expressed about the Mexican Church were not substantially different than those they held of Catholicism as practiced in the United States. But they had never felt the need to express them before, at least not in writing. The diaries and letters of Mexican-American War soldiers and correspondents thus rank among the most revealing antebellum religious literature because they offer such great insight into the civil-religious consciousness and climate of anti-Catholicism in late Jacksonian America. In the months following the occupation of Mexico City the war and the anti-Catholic movement in the United States reached a new level of symbiosis. By connecting Mexico’s racial characteristics and religion to its political anarchy, American soldiers drew deeply from the themes of

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the anti-Catholic movement. Whether they did so consciously, or whether these theories and beliefs had trickled down through popular literature, is not as important as the credence their experiences lent to the notion that Catholicism was inimical to republicanism. Just as O’Sullivan had hoped, their wartime experience turned them into “missionaries of republicanism.” Soldiers’ experiences seemed to them a warning of the dangers of allowing Roman Catholicism to gain the ascendancy in the United States. At the same time, Mexican experiences combined with disdain for Polk’s policies to produce an even deeper conspiratorial anti-Catholicism—soldiers could view what Catholicism had wrought in Mexico while feeling its insidious effects on themselves as the mechanism of Polk’s coercive, pro-Catholic policies. G.  G. Goss, chaplain of the Kentucky volunteers, expressed this linkage between the fight against Mexico and the struggle against Catholicism at home: You have battled long and hard against Catholicism in Kentucky, but I assure you this war is making Protestants fast, very fast. Even those that came out Catholics, are completely disgusted, and have lost all confidence in the priest-hood. Here we see it as it really is, unrestrained by Protestantism, sapping the very foundations of society, and laying waste what ought to have been the most flourishing country in the world.56 Such opinions existed separately from the more aggressive and criminal desire to plunder Mexican churches, but they grew out of the same root sentiment. Relegating Mexicans and Catholicism to a level inferior to Anglo-Saxons and to Protestantism opened the door for a variety of abuses against Mexicans and their holy places. This type of behavior served as a more acceptable counterpart to the burning of churches in the United States. Reactions like those of Lane, Tennery, Gregg, and others naturally led the Americans who read their accounts to ask: If Mexican Catholics were idolaters, what about their American counterparts? It also led them to wonder whether the accusations of the anti-Catholic movement were not exaggerated at all about the corrupting influence of the Man of Sin and the danger it posed to civil and religious liberty. If nothing else, it confirmed the racialist theories about Mexican inferiority and Anglo-Saxon superiority. In this way the Mexican-American War reinforced not just



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anti-Catholicism qua anti-Catholicism but also broader assumptions about American republicanism. The publication of soldiers’ stories provided substantial and all new fodder for the anti-Catholic movement, but what about its effects on the majority of Americans who were not stridently anti-Catholic? Most white, non-evangelical Protestant Americans were reflexively anti-Catholic to some degree and accepted the Anglo-Saxonist underpinnings of Manifest Destiny and American republicanism. Most were not, however, as nativistic as the Native Americans, in favor of violence against Catholics, or active supporters of anti-Catholic causes. To be titillated by “Maria Monk” or convinced of Anglo-Saxon Protestant superiority did not inevitably lead one to want to burn down convents and churches. The primary effect of the soldiers’ accounts, then, was not to inspire religious violence or make every American a looter of churches. Rather, tales from Mexico peddled anti-Catholicism to the broader American public in a highly effective, evidence-based way that no evangelical voluntary society or violent nativist gang could hope to match. For the anti-Catholic movement, which was composed almost entirely of white evangelical Protestants, this was a timely gift. For white evangelical Protestants generally, however, the war unexpectedly threatened to reshape their diverse attempts to purify American society as it forced them to grapple with the moral and political questions raised by the war.

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Protestant Leaders and the War Whatever may be the opinions of some in relation to the justness or unjustness of our quarrel, there ought to be but one opinion among all good men. . . .  Our Bible and Tract Societies and Missionaries ought to be in the wake of our armies. Samuel F. B. Morse to Sidney Morse, October 29, 1846

On May 20, 1846, in Claiborne, Alabama, William F. McRee had a solution to the war. A Protestant preacher and longtime correspondent of James K.  Polk, McRee proposed to the president that the war be decided “by single combat.” “Let two chaplains be selected by each Gov.,” suggested McRee. The men would face off on horseback at one hundred yards, using whatever weapons they wished. The Alabaman had in mind someone in particular to represent the United States: “Choose me on the part of our Nation, & trusting in the God of our Fathers I  would bring that Papal priest to his mother earth.” In the event that Polk disapproved of this surefire plan, McRee asked for an appointment as chaplain to the U.S. Army. Alas for McRee, Polk heeded neither suggestion.1 McRee was not the only American preacher to see the Mexican-American War primarily as a religious conflict, although he may well have been the most creative. Like other Americans, evangelical Protestants sought to understand the causes, justice, and probable results of the war. The war and possible territorial expansion tested their commitment to anti-Catholicism, especially among the leading purveyors of that ideology’s rhetoric. Most Protestant denominations refrained from issuing extensive statements on the war. In spite of this, the moral, social, and political questions raised by the conflict with Mexico reshaped the anti-Catholic movement in style and substance, if only for a time, as evangelicals struggled to reconcile



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conflicting pacifistic, abolitionist, and anti-Catholic views. This struggle revealed the deep-seated influence of anti-Catholicism among evangelicals as they attempted to come to grips with the religious meaning of the Mexican-American War. Disagreement over the morality of slavery (and, in particular, over whether bishops could own slaves) split Methodists into northern and southern camps between 1844 and 1845. During the war, however, the anti-Catholic impulse in the northern branch proved stronger than anti-slavery. Whereas the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, offered no comment when its ministers met in conference for the first time just as the war was getting under way, Methodist conferences in the North openly supported the war. Indeed, they even declared Mexican territory to be under Northern Methodist jurisdiction before the land had even been annexed. In part they did so in expectation of missionary competition with their recently-separated Southern brethren, who were geographically closer to the theater of action. Perhaps they wanted also to ensure only anti-slavery missionaries would spread Methodism in Mexico.2 Yet the Northern Methodist Episcopal Church did not deny the injustice of the war or the possibility that it might spread the evil of slavery. Rather, it hoped the military defeat of Mexico would produce an outcome similar to the results of Great Britain’s Opium Wars. In those wars, the British had opened “heathen” China to evangelical Christian efforts. So, too, said Northern Methodist leaders, “this Mexican war” could do the same for Mexico by weakening the “Romish priesthood” there.3 American Presbyterians had split in 1837 between Old School and New School adherents. New School theology played down strict predestinarianism and doctrinal orthodoxy in favor of revivalism, perfectionism, and evangelicalism. The most popular purveyors of New School Presbyterianism were Charles G.  Finney and Lyman Beecher. Old School Theology, on the other hand, continued to hang on to Reformed (Calvinistic) orthodoxy while emphasizing strict adherence to the Westminster Confession. As for revivals, Old School Presbyterians dismissed most of them as a mix of heresy and pure emotionalism, especially those held as protracted meetings outside the control of official ecclesiastical structures. Official Presbyterian response to the Mexican-American War, besides being divided along these Old and New School lines, was further complicated by sectional disagreements over slavery. This rift over slavery later reached fruition in 1861 when Presbyterians split between North and South.

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Old School Presbyterians cautiously condemned the war at their General Assembly in 1847. Even so, the Rev. J. W. Miller of the Brazos Presbytery in Texas argued before the Board of Domestic Missions, “Now is the time to strike.” The “millions of Mexico” were waiting for someone “to counteract. . . Popery” and “infidelity,” according to Miller. The clergyman begged for help from the Board and it approved his suggestions. Presbyterian missionaries left for Texas even as their Board of Foreign Missions prayed for peace and resolved that “it is not her [the Presbyterian Church’s] province to subvert monarchies and institute republics.” At their general assemblies and in regional presbyteries across the North, New School Presbyterians typically decried the war as evil. Like their Old School counterparts, however, New School adherents did not take a monolithic stand.4 A forceful statement by the Presbyterian Synod of Mississippi illustrates the distinction between the northern and southern Presbyterian response. Toward the end of the war in 1848 it independently approved the following resolution: In view of the present relations of our Government with Mexico, and of the door that by the Providence of God is now opened for missionary efforts, by means of Colporteurs, Tract and Bible distribution, and for the preaching of the Gospel in the valley of the Rio Grande and in many of the ports and cities of Mexico:  Resolved, That this Synod do. . .  take into especial consideration the propriety of embracing in their field of operations such parts of Mexico as may be occupied by the American armies. The Mississippians thus took the stand that however new lands were opened to the Gospel, Christian duty required that missionaries be sent immediately. Noteworthy also was that the resolution ascribed the occupation of Mexico to the Providence of God and not the success of worldly arms. These appeals to duty and Providence, consistent with a Calvinistic theology that represented a general belief in God’s overwhelming sovereignty and the lack of humanity’s free will, allowed the Mississippi synod to sidestep the war’s moral questions. If God’s will was perfect and inscrutable, then it was morally acceptable as well as pragmatic not to waste the opportunity to evangelize Mexico. Unlike their northern counterparts, these Mississippians were not bothered by the fact that conquest would very likely establish slavery and plantation agriculture on formerly Mexican lands.5



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As unequivocal believers in free will, Baptists showed more willingness than Presbyterians to effect the evangelization of Mexico on their own terms. The Baptist response also proves that, much as in the debate over slavery, differing theologies—predestinarian or free will—could still reach similar conclusions on critical moral and political issues. Baptists had separated along sectional lines in 1845 over the issue of mission work by slaveholding Baptists. Northern Baptists did not meet as a body between 1846 and 1848 and therefore took no official position on the war.6 In the pulpit and in the pew, Southern Baptists showed a great deal of unity in their support of the war. The chance to spread the Gospel and slavery at the same time was too tantalizing an opportunity to pass up. Both were deemed necessary to the civic health of a Protestant republic bound together by white equality. Thus, at its very first meeting in June 1846 the Southern Baptist Convention’s Committee on Foreign Missions praised the war as the first step in saving Mexico “from the withering reign of the Man of Sin.”7 Pro-war rhetoric among evangelical Protestants could take a variety of forms besides official denominational decrees. Competition was fierce among preachers, essayists, and newspaper editors for stories by Americans who had seen the evils of Romanism in Mexico first hand. Some used these tales to illustrate the dangers of lax Sabbath observance. Others in much more reflective ways delved into the moral issues surrounding the conflict. Anti-Catholic pacifists struggled to come to terms with a war they believed to be evil but realized might open the way for evangelizing a previously closed Catholic country. The war thus worked to find its place in a long tradition of anti-Catholic writing, even as it replaced the usual subjects of those stories—European Jesuits, Canadian nunneries—with the timely example of Mexico as a laboratory of Catholic depravity. Even with these commonalities, however, denominational affiliation still played a significant role. More important, though, was region, and Southern and Western evangelicals tended in their opinions to resemble the broader population of their regions. That is to say, they were more explicitly pro-war than their northeastern counterparts.8 Already by mid-1846, Presbyterians living in the hotbed of Native Americanism, Philadelphia, professed hope that the conflict would introduce Protestantism to Mexico. A  Texas minister called them to action: “Should toleration of the gospel throughout the Mexican territory spring out of the present war, it becomes our church. . . to go up speedily and possess the land.” A Presbyterian working for the American Sunday

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School Union similarly challenged Pennsylvanians to settle the Rio Grand Valley as a means of influencing “Catholicism in Mexico.” The subtext here is that Texas was no longer just for aspiring planters and slavery. It was the launching point for what the writer called the “advance guard of the great Protestant army of occupation.” By speaking in military terminology, the missionary clearly had more in mind than influencing Mexican Catholics. Indeed, in urging Americans to help “overthrow the corrupt system of Popery, which now so extensively prevails throughout that benighted land,” he was depending on the U.S. Army to open Mexico to missionaries.9 Outside major cities, where minor branches of Presbyterianism flourished, adherents turned to their respective newspapers for news and opinion on the war. The Reformed Presbyterian Church, through its Covenanter, acknowledged that Mexico was a “popish and priest-ridden country” but feared the war would spread slavery and give Americans a taste for imperial conquest. Still, it held out hope that God would somehow “bring good out of our evil.”10 Cumberland Presbyterians in Tennessee and Kentucky had no problem defining just what that “good” was: the installation of “a Protestant ministry” in Mexico to crush “the yoke of Roman superstition.”11 In their newspapers Northern Baptists walked a fine line between opposing the conquest of Mexico and using Mexico as a symbol of all the Catholic Church’s failings. Although they regularly printed anti-Catholic articles, because they condemned slavery Baptist newspapers north of the Mason-Dixon Line maintained steady opposition to the war throughout 1846. So while they mocked “Popery in Mexico,” detailed Mexican clerical wealth with excerpts from Waddy Thompson’s Recollections, and argued that Mexicans had no “rational idea of true religion,” Baptists in New York and Boston uniformly argued that the slave power’s war against Mexico would cause more harm than good to American republican principles and institutions. This argument was substantially the same as that made by congressional Whigs, not simply because many evangelicals were Whigs but because Whigs by this time were increasingly a northern political party.12 Evangelicals typically backed the pro- or anti-war arguments prevalent in their respective regions, but they did so with theological reasoning rather than economic or political rationale. The most thoroughgoing example of this was the Southern Baptists. Southern Baptist leaders in 1846 rarely veered from their region’s pro-war militancy. The most vehement among them in his anti-Catholic and anti-war views was Louisville’s



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Rev. William Buck, editor of the Baptist Banner and Western Pioneer. Buck predicted that the march of liberty would dispel “the darkness of popery” in Mexico and leave a “door opened for the Bible and the missionary of the cross, to the vast multitudes of Priest-ridden Mexicans and benighted Indians, who sit in that region of the shadow of death.” He even placed the ultimate blame for the war on Mexican religious persecution of American Protestants in Texas during the 1820s and 1830s. Although Buck “regretted” the war for Texas independence, he pointed out that at least Texas was now “an enlightened land.” A crusade against the “deeply degraded and sinful Mexicans,” according to Buck, would achieve the same result.13 A few leading Congregationalists went against the above trend. Because Congregationalism was confined almost entirely to New England, where Whig anti-war sentiment was strongest, this anomaly is all the more striking. The New Englander, a nominally Congregationalist publication from New Haven, astounded its readers when it agreed with the growing consensus among Protestants, especially evangelicals, that the war was somehow part of God’s plan to benefit “the Protestant cause.” The reaction to this by Congregationalists was swift. The Boston Recorder attacked the implication “that the War with Mexico might prepare the way for the introduction of Protestant missionaries into that country.” The Recorder admitted that God could do so, but “to presume beforehand on God’s doing this, would be to insult him with the most shocking presumption of impiety.” This influential and usually anti-Catholic paper had not decided to put aside its usual religious bigotry. Rather, it feared that the war would cause Mexican Catholics “to look upon Protestantism with more hatred than ever.” Practically speaking, such an outcome would only delay Mexico’s salvation.14 As U.S. victories on the battlefield mounted in 1847, culminating in the fall of Mexico City on September 14, Protestant shapers of opinion began subtly to alter their views. This was true even of the best known and most radical white abolitionist in the country, William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison had been an early disciple of Charles G. Finney but his radicalism on women’s rights, his pacifism, and his immediatism consistently led to a falling out with other abolitionists and anti-slavery advocates. In 1833, a couple of years after he had launched The Liberator and one year after he had founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society, Garrison co-founded the American Anti-Slavery Society with Arthur Tappan. The partnership did not last out the decade, because Garrison’s feminism, among other things, drove Tappan along with his brother, Lewis, to launch the American and

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Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Meanwhile, those who eschewed Garrison’s uncompromising stands on abolition and racial equality left the apolitical American anti-Slavery Society for the Liberty Party. In 1844, the year of Polk’s election and the first in which the Liberty Party vied for votes, Garrison publicly burned the U.S. Constitution as an unholy document. Clearly, Garrison was no compromiser of principles. And yet the Mexican-American War seems to have tweaked his legendary fortitude in this area. Garrison’s anti-war rhetoric had been unrelenting in 1846.15 Into the early months of 1847 Garrison continued to fill the pages of the Liberator with condemnations of “archbishop Polk” and “Bishop Taylor” for “spreading their gospel among the Catholic heathen of Mexico.” As usual, his paper attacked anti-slavery advocates, this time because they supported the war or were offering only token opposition to it. This included Cassius M.  Clay of Kentucky and the Rev. Dr.  Brisbane of Philadelphia, Baptist editor of the Liberty Party’s American Citizen.16 Like many other evangelicals, Garrison believed in an exaggerated Catholic influence over the Polk Administration. This explains why the Liberator attacked American Catholics, especially priests, for supporting the war. Catholics, wrote Garrison, “have but to will peace, and it will come almost instantly.” Yet in April 1847 the Liberator reprinted an incendiary editorial from the New York Observer without comment or byline, a common sign of editorial approbation. The author of the essay was most likely Samuel F. B. Morse, who as the editor’s brother often contributed to the Observer. The editorial read: There is but one light in which we are able to look upon the war with any other feelings than those of deepest regret. It is this: it is in the power, and we trust, in the purposes of God, to make this war contribute to the political and moral renovation of Mexico. The printing press and the Bible, the school-master and the colporteur, will follow the army, and when the latter retires, the former will remain; the people now ridden with petty tyrants and wicked priests, will learn the principles of civil and religious freedom: popery, the sworn and natural enemy of liberty, will be compelled to quail before the advancing light of truth. Apparently, by mid-1847 even Garrison was susceptible to the argument that through God’s sovereign power the Mexican-American War might benefit humanity.17



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Garrison was not alone in reevaluating the war’s consequences. As it became increasingly obvious in the summer of 1847 that the United States stood to gain substantial territory at Mexico’s expense, reality set in among Protestant pacifists and abolitionists. Whether they liked it or not, an American army soon would be standing in the presidential palace in Mexico City. A consensus began to form as to how not only abolitionists but especially pacifists might in good conscience maintain their principles while employing the “good from evil” argument in favor of a religious crusade against Mexico. What held this consensus together was anti-Catholicism. The most effective way to posit an effort to Protestantize Mexico was to criticize its “Romish Priesthood” for its immense wealth and influence. The most plumbed sources for disparaging information about Mexican Catholics and their bishops, other than U.S.  soldiers, were Waddy Thompson’s Recollections and Brantz Mayer’s Mexico. How could defeating such a debauched and decadent group of men be unjust? Others now pronounced that the war had become morally acceptable because it clearly promised to stamp out “idolatrous superstition” and end Mexico’s “long subjection of three hundred years to the Papacy.” A few resorted to a more realistic assessment of the situation, namely that the opportunity “for scattering the Bible and wholesale religious books” in Mexico should not be wasted in a debate over whether the war itself was just or unjust. One journalist, discarding the more nuanced view that Christians always should seek the good in an evil situation, simply concluded, “If good is to come of it, then war is justifiable.”18 Even as the American occupation of Mexican cities forced American evangelicals and other Protestants to reassess the war in light not of their ideals but of reality, the Jesuit chaplains united them in open opposition to the Polk Administration. This was true even among those who had not cut their teeth on anti-Catholic fervor. The roots of this sentiment against Polk belonged as much to a late Jacksonian Era understanding of American republican principles as they did to religion as such, but as usual the two were so deeply intertwined as to be inseparable. The most often heard complaint was that the Jesuits’ appointment was “a flagrant outrage upon the Constitution” because Catholics aimed at “the predominance of their church and society over all governments.” Militarily speaking, anti-Catholic controversialists could not bring themselves to believe that the priests would or even could refrain from consorting with the enemy, whom they identified not simply as Mexican but as Catholic. The chaplains also would

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thus encourage American Catholic soldiers to desert.19 The chaplain controversy revealed that Jesuits did indeed hold sway over the president.20 Another issue that stirred Protestant discontent was the conspicuous respect paid to Mexican clergy, churches, and religious festivities by American officers, including General Winfield Scott. Presbyterians and Baptists roundly condemned the participation of Scott and General Edmund Gaines in religious processions. The incident involving Colonel Childs and the Eucharistic procession in Jalapa, however, created the most controversy. If Catholic chaplains and the abortive Bishop Hughes mission to Mexico had not convinced some wavering Protestants that American bishops controlled the government, then stories of the U.S. Army “kneeling to the papal host” did. The Christian Watchman issued an ominous warning about “the evil to come,” lambasting Polk for violating the Sabbath by allowing the army to land at Vera Cruz on a Sunday. But the “worst evil” was that the army forced soldiers not only to violate the Sabbath, but also to participate in idolatrous Catholic ceremonies. As a consequence of the “outrage” at Jalapa, a number of evangelicals reportedly sent a petition to Congress demanding an investigation and official rebuke of Childs.21 The voluntary associations that proliferated during the Jacksonian Era, so aptly described by Alexis de Toquevílle in Democracy in America as one great source of Americans’ sense of common identity, provided an important outlet for evangelical Protestants to voice their concerns while burying denominational differences. Many of these societies, though still dominated by members of their founding denominations, had evolved into remarkably ecumenical organizations by the 1840s. This interdenominational cooperation, at a time when so many Protestant denominations were in the process of schism, was largely due to the broadly defined objectives of each organization. Americans, then, joined these organizations not so much to advance particular sectarian objectives but to pursue goals such as evangelizing the unchurched on the frontier, saving the West from Catholicism, distributing Bibles and tracts, and preserving Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture. These were goals nearly all Protestants could support but ones which especially fired the evangelical imagination. Fights over infant baptism and ecclesiology could easily be forgotten amid great uniting features like patriotism and anti-Catholicism, forged as these two impulses were into an Anglo-Saxonist republican ideology. The American Home Missionary Society (AHMS), twenty years old at the onset of the war, was one of the largest, most active missionary societies during the 1840s. Its mostly northeastern membership of



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over 4,500 men and women included evangelicals like Lyman Beecher but also more heterodox figures such as Congregationalist Horace Bushnell.22 The AHMS encompassed as many politicians as preachers, including both men from the 1844 Whig presidential ticket, Henry Clay and Theodore Frelinghuysen. Semi-autonomous subsidiaries of the AHMS operated in major cities like New  York and Philadelphia. The vast majority of the society’s supporters were Congregationalists and Presbyterians but the Lutheran and German Reformed Churches depended on the AHMS as the main vehicle for their missionary work. The AHMS’s primary goal was that of Lyman Beecher: to save the West from Catholicism, thereby preserving the territory for Anglo-Saxons, republican institutions, and Protestantism. Beecher’s Plea for the West propelled the AHMS to the forefront of Protestant missionary organizations in the United States. In The Home Missionary and on the lecture circuit, AHMS spokesmen expertly used to their advantage fears of a Jesuit conspiracy to conquer the West.23 When military conflict replaced the spiritual battle for souls in the West in 1846, the AHMS faced a moral dilemma. Even though the U.S. Army seemed poised to reduce Catholic power in the very territory that the society had pronounced the primary battleground between Protestantism and Catholicism, AHMS leaders balked at ending their twenty years of fear-mongering regarding the West. Complicating matters further was that many of its members were anti-slavery advocates and a victory over Mexico might well lead to the expansion of slavery. AHMS ministers also feared intemperance and Sabbath desecration among young, impressionable soldiers. A  few AHMS clergymen were strict pacifists. Yet the Society’s more astute members realized that without a sense of permanent crisis about the West, the American public—and, more importantly, benefactors—would lose interest in Beecher’s “plea for the West.” Thankfully, from the AHMS’s point of view a Mexican cession of any size would be quickly filled with American Anglo-Saxons, placing the settlers in immediate danger from encroaching Romanism. The AHMS therefore argued that whether the war was just or unjust they had an obligation to evangelize their countrymen wherever they were. Besides, as one AHMS leader put it, if the war gave Mexicans “rational freedom and Scriptural religion,” and if reports of American troops participating in Masses and processions increased anti-Catholic feeling in the United States, then despite all the debate “good effects” will have resulted from “an unrighteous war.”24

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Another Protestant missionary society that occupied a vital niche in the anti-Catholic movement’s work during the 1840s was the American Tract Society (ATS). The ATS originated in 1825, when several tract societies from Boston, New  York, Philadelphia, and other cities merged. The ATS initially stressed Sabbath observance and Sunday school attendance but by 1842 its workers concentrated mainly on the “millions of bigoted Romanists” who had settled west of the Appalachian Mountains. The ATS cooperated with similar organizations, including the AHMS, and it believed that the best way to spread a pure gospel in Catholic countries or among rural Americans and immigrant Catholics was through the distribution of tracts and Bibles by colporteurs.25 A colporteur was the bearer of religious books mainly to the unchurched, but also to Catholics. The French term was first used to refer to American missionaries in 1841. The ATS paid particular attention to Texas, not so much because of the spiritual needs of the Americans living there but because of “the great influence its inhabitants must exert upon Catholic Mexico.” With the onset of the Mexican-American War, the ATS happily discovered that it already had a substantial network of colporteurs primed to enter Mexico. It wasted no time before seeking donations and finding additional colporteurs.26 In its fundraising efforts the ATS cited the mysterious workings of Providence in order to alleviate qualms about the war’s justice. ATS fundraisers encouraged Christians to “take a larger view of events which God has permitted” because there was “another kind of war to be waged in Mexico.” Thanks to Providence Americans now had the chance to “regenerate, disenthrall, [and] bless Mexico” with Bibles, tracts, and Sunday schools. Because the ATS saw a dynamic relationship between its spiritual mission and the republican institutions of the United States, it also advertised the opportunity Americans had to give Mexicans “our civil institutions.” No group of Americans better fit John L. O’Sullivan’s ideal of “missionaries of republicanism” than the American Tract Society. Reasoning such as this allowed the ATS to skirt the troublesome accusation that the war was evil and incapable of producing good results, for how could one seriously argue that all of the war’s results would be evil if it weakened the Catholic Church in North America while spreading republicanism at the same time?27 ATS colporteurs first targeted New Orleans, the major port of departure for American troops headed to Mexico. The Rev. F. Y. Vail, the ATS agent in New Orleans, received willing support from Mayor A.  D. Crossman, Governor Isaac Johnson, and a number of state legislators and army



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officers. Vail’s goal was not limited to ensuring that Sabbatarian tracts and Bibles found their ways into the hands of young men before they left for Mexico. In recruiting soldiers to serve as ATS colporteurs in Mexico Vail told them they would be pioneers: “When religious freedom is secured in Mexico, we can propose to carry our Spanish works into the heart of that country.”28 Further evidence that the Mexican-American War was transforming the ATS’s goal in North America to one of foreign missions is found in the remarkable person of Ann Chase, the wife of Franklin Chase, U.S. consul at Tampico. By the time American troops occupied Vera Cruz in March 1847, the ATS already had Mrs. Chase in its employ. In June 1846, Chase had found herself abandoned by her husband, who had fled “in order to save my valuable store of goods, and Household effects.” Filling in as consul until Franklin’s return in January 1847, she divided her time among evangelizing, keeping Secretary of State James Buchanan informed of Mexican activities, and avoiding banditry. Protestants praised her for reputedly pulling down the Mexican flag and raising the Stars and Stripes over Tampico when the U.S. Navy approached in November 1846. Ann Chase claimed she could distribute as many tracts as the ATS could send her. She pointedly requested Spanish tracts and alleged that the local bishop approved of her activities. This is hard to believe, considering that many ATS tracts were almost cartoonishly anti-Catholic and anti-clerical. What also makes Chase’s assertion of episcopal support doubtful is her own claim that she hoped to circumvent the “Sabbath-breaking priesthood” of Mexico and directly “diffuse evangelical religion among the benighted people.”29 True or not, Chase’s stories from Tampico inspired American evangelicals to shift their focus from the United States to Mexico. In June 1847 the ATS issued a new “Appeal for Mexico,” using Chase as its centerpiece.30 As expected, donations poured in along with offers by volunteers willing to go to Mexico as colporteurs. Less expected were offers of assistance from competing Bible societies and from various churches, offering to supply Bibles or to pay the colporteurs’ salaries. The ATS welcomed all this help, since missionary work in Mexico was proving expensive. The American Bible Society (ABS), the American and Foreign Bible Society (AFBS), and similar or affiliate organizations in major cities happily entered the fray. Each had been founded to engage in domestic work comparable to that of the AHMS and the ATS. Headed by Theodore Frelinghuysen, the ABS had funded auxiliary

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societies in Texas since the 1830s but had never ventured into Mexico. But Scott’s military victories in 1847 convinced ABS leaders that part of Americans’ Manifest Destiny was to give Mexico the inseparable blessing of pure religion and republican principles.31 The war’s unprecedented opportunity to expand the missionary field proved irresistible for the ABS, AFBS, and like-minded groups. Like most Americans, these societies believed that only Protestant Christianity could provide nations with an enduring foundation for civil and religious liberty. The AFBS deftly exploited the multitude of stories that negatively portrayed Mexican Holy Week activities in order to solicit money to fund the distribution of Spanish Bibles in Mexico and Texas. Meanwhile, in cities around the United States Mexico-bound colporteurs along with soldiers and chaplains received New Testaments and Bibles. The Rev. William F.  McRee, finally getting his chance to meet Mexicans face-to-face, was among them. Supported financially by Baptists and Presbyterians but under the aegis of the ATS, McRee worked in Tampico and Vera Cruz throughout most of 1848, passing out tracts along with hundreds of Spanish Bibles donated by the ABS and AFBS.32 This robust evangelical activity kept volunteer army chaplains in Mexico busy. Lewis Leonidas Allen, chaplain to a Louisiana regiment, is one of many who served in a dual capacity as an ABS missionary.33 An ardent Anglo-Saxonist, Allen became famous through the serialized publication of his letters in American newspapers. In one such letter he alluded to what he saw as the war’s paramount objective:  “And rest assured as soon as the star-spangled banner shall waive [sic] over the ramparts of Matamoras, there are men ready promptly to unfurl the banner of the cross by its side.” Indeed, Allen handed out hundreds of tracts, Bibles, and New Testaments while still encamped in Louisiana. He took many more with him into Mexico, including Spanish-language ones obviously intended for Mexicans. Allen saw American soldiers as the rightful (and, indeed, righteous) successors to the first Puritans, carrying their religious books and love of liberty with them into the wilderness. In the case of Catholic Mexico, it was a “wilderness” only in the sense that it denied its people the fruits of Protestant Christianity, one of which was republican government. By bringing tracts to Mexico Allen hoped to hasten the day “when the valley of the Rio Grande will be peopled with those who obey the second commandment in the letter and spirit.”34 Catholic idolatry would fall before the advance of Anglo-Saxons who, like their Puritan ancestors, practiced a vigorous and pure Christianity.



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In the wake of major American military victories during the first half of 1847, army chaplains and evangelical societies ratcheted up their cooperation and Mexican focus even further. On March 9 General Scott’s 10,000-man force landed at Vera Cruz and commenced what became a twenty-day bombardment of the city. In response, the ABS-affiliated Texas Bible Society immediately asked New Englanders to obtain for Mexicans “the gospel printed in their own language.” In April, when news of the stunning, lopsided American victory at Cerro Gordo reached Washington City, the Washington City Bible Society swiftly submitted a resolution to the ABS praising the “opening for the circulation of the Scriptures” that the U.S. Army had created in Mexico. The Rev. John C. Smith, the society’s Presbyterian leader, personally drafted the resolution. Smith said he wanted the society to begin shipping Bibles to Mexico “with the least possible delay.” He wanted American soldiers to protect anyone willing to distribute them. The ABS turned down Smith’s proposal, because it feared the danger posed to American missionaries by the Mexican people and their priests. Saving Mexican souls was apparently not worth the cost of martyrdom. Nevertheless, even without resolutions officially tying the society to the army the ABS was already hard at work in Mexico. By July 1847 it had sent a number of Spanish “gospels” to California, nearly 1,000 to Mexico, and over 2,000 to Texas.35 Even as General Scott’s string of victories inspired evangelicals to redirect their efforts toward Mexico, the war in turn reshaped the ways in which anti-Catholic voluntary societies engaged in domestic politics. The evolution of the American Protestant Society (APS), itself an excellent example of how anti-Catholicism alone could provide sufficient means for evangelical unity, presents an instructive case study of this process. Unlike the missionary societies, the APS exploited the war more as a timely source of anti-Catholic and anti-Polk rhetoric than as an opportunity to save Mexican souls. The APS’s self-proclaimed mission was to prove to the world that the United States was “the cradle of civil and religious liberty for the human race.” Inevitably this meant saving the West from Catholics. According to the APS, the “light” of Protestantism and the “darkness” of Romanism could not coexist in the same country. The imaginative link between race and religion here is hard to miss. The APS opposition of light with darkness was not unlike the widely held belief among white Americans that they could never coexist on equal terms with blacks. The differences were just too great. Even as Free Soilers hoped to keep free

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blacks out of the West, the APS sought to confine Catholics to eastern cities and, if possible, convert them or keep them out of the country entirely. Only Southern whites hoped to introduce blacks into the West, as slaves. While blacks could not change the color of their skin, Catholics, the APS reasoned, might at least change their religion. Yet given the unlikelihood of Catholic conversions, it was best just to sound the warning about Romanists and work to keep them, like blacks, out of the West. Mormons may have been run out of the East as undesirable outsiders but they were allowed in the West. Indeed, the U.S. Army even welcomed them as a corporate religious entity (i.e., the Mormon Battalion) to fight the Catholic Mexicans. Unlike Catholics, the APS reasoned in what was a common opinion among evangelicals, Mormons did not pose an internationally based, existential threat to the republic. The APS claimed to be apolitical but the war revealed it to be unmistakably Whig in sentiment. The APS launched its commentary on the war’s religious implications when President Polk appointed the two Jesuit chaplains in July 1846. The priests, protested the APS, might unduly influence American Catholic soldiers among an enemy who were “all of the same bigoted persuasion.” By late 1846, the APS warned that Polk and Bishop Hughes were using the war with Mexico to increase the number of Roman Catholics in the United States. This would increase Hughes’s power as a religious leader and add to the political strength of the Democracy at the same time. To reinforce these conspiratorial claims, the APS, like so many similar groups, turned from European tales and nativistic sensationalism to a new brand of stories based on Mexico and its priests.36 The APS persisted in its criticism of Polk through the duration of the war, not just because of the Catholic chaplains but due to the army’s policy of respecting Mexico’s religion and churches. It even censured General Scott, a known Whig who unsuccessfully had lobbied for his party’s nomination in 1839, for participating in a Catholic liturgy at Vera Cruz. Such “accommodation to the idolatrous sentiments of a vanquished Papal nation,” argued the APS, actually paid “homage. . . to the potentate of the Vatican.” The APS implored Protestants throughout the United States to speak out against the war, regardless of political consequences, because the war was Catholicizing the United States from the army and federal government on down.37 Besides adding to the rhetorical arsenal of voluntary societies and reorienting their geographical focus, the Mexican-American War also reshaped the content of Protestant sermons. This is not surprising, given that prominent ministers also exercised leadership roles in many voluntary



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societies. Some gave the war only cursory treatment when speaking to their congregations, out of an honest distaste for political meddling. Yet others, especially those who spent a good deal of time on the lecture circuit—a popular form of mass entertainment in the 1840s—devoted entire homilies to the war. Addressing the conflict’s relationship to anti-Catholic causes occurred as the natural outgrowth of the ongoing struggle against papal inroads in North America. Rather than using images of an immigrant conspiracy drawn from the pages of Morse and Beecher, pastors now could repeat newspaper reports about American soldiers marching in a “Popish procession.”38 Only a very small number of preachers published unapologetically pro-war sermons. Even so, an important factor to consider is that the vast majority of published sermons came not from the pro-war South and West but from New England, where anti-war sentiment was strongest. The best explanation for this is simply that Northeastern anti-war preachers were more dutiful than others in the publication of their sermons. The New Englanders also had a longer tradition of publishing important sermons. By contrast, most of the evidence for pro-war sermons exists only in bits and pieces in newspapers, remarks by soldiers in their journals, and disparaging references by others to such homilies. The Rev. John N.  Maffit occupied the extreme pro-war position. A Methodist Episcopal minister, Maffit hailed from New York but had lived in Tennessee and Kentucky. In 1841 he had served as chaplain to the U.S. House of Representatives. By that time he had already become famous (or, rather, infamous) for his controversial preaching on the Southern lecture circuit. In the summer and fall of 1847, the Rev. Maffit embarked on a speaking tour of a number of cities, including New York, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia. He preached primarily about the war and argued “that the conquest. . . is part of the design of Providence for reforming the religion and morals of that country.” Indeed, Maffit’s anti-Catholicism ran so deep that he unapologetically supported not only the war, but also the conquest of all Mexico strictly for the purposes of evangelization.39 Preachers like Maffit even made their way to Mexico as volunteer chaplains. One of these, Richard A. Stewart, was a sugar planter and Methodist minister from Louisiana. Stewart was so strongly in favor of the war for religious and expansionist reasons that he captained his own volunteer company. His fervor in Mexico matched Maffit’s in the United States. Stewart preached a sermon on the eve of the conquest of Matamoras that quickly became famous. In it, he portrayed America as Israel and

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“the land of Mexico. . . as the land of the Canaanites” waiting to be conquered.40 Evangelical pacifists pointed to Stewart’s Matamoras sermon as the inevitable outgrowth of the proposition that the war could be turned toward the good end of opening Catholic Mexico to the Gospel. Stewart’s rationale, however, was little different than that which underlay most Anglo-Saxonist, Manifest Destiny rhetoric.41 On the other end of the spectrum from Maffit and Stewart, anti-war preachers struggled to find ways to tout their anti-Catholic credentials while criticizing religious war as downright heretical. This was especially true of influential abolitionists like Theodore Parker and Rufus W. Clark. Both viewed the war as a thinly veiled attempt to extend slavery. Clark, a popular preacher on the anti-Catholic circuit during the 1840s, countered doubts about his dedication to anti-popery by making clear that he did in fact want to send American men to Mexico—he just wanted them “armed with bibles, and tracts, and the rich treasures of Christianity,” not “instruments of death.” The Unitarian Parker, beloved by many then (William Lloyd Garrison and Abraham Lincoln) and later (Martin Luther King, Jr.) for his opinions on racial equality, did not see Catholic Mexicans in the same positive light as he did black Americans. Parker argued that Mexicans were wretched and inferior compared to the advanced Anglo-Saxons of the United States. Parker even predicted that the Anglo-Saxon race and its religion would eventually control all North America. But, said Parker, Americans could only rightly fulfill their Manifest Destiny through peaceful means.42 Most Protestant preachers who were also anti-Catholic occupied a middle ground between the uncompromising anti-war stance of Parker and the fiery pro-war rhetoric of Maffit. They censured the war as unnecessary and evil but acknowledged that “God was going to bless the next generation of Mexicans through the wickedness of the American nation.” Ministers from every geographical section of the country voiced such sentiments. Even those who did not believe in Manifest Destiny or trumpet the Anglo-Saxon race assured the faithful that the war would “result in good to Mexico” because it “may be the way by which God means to disenthrone the man of sin” from North America. Others, in explaining how “evil shall be overruled for good,” pointed out that the war would “push forward also the principles of civil and religious liberty.”43 A few Protestant ministers opposed the war not out of moral or anti-slavery concerns but for nativist and anti-Catholic reasons. Samuel D. Burchard, who several decades later composed the winning electoral



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slogan, “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” denounced as “papal dogma” the idea that God would use the conquest of Mexico to “break the spell of a false religion, and introduce to the darkened minds of her children, the light of pure Christianity.” Surely an accusation of popery was the greatest insult one could hurl at fellow anti-Catholic controversialists. Burchard blamed such convoluted moral theology on an increase of immorality in the United States brought on, ironically enough, by the increasing “power of the Pope.”44 Between 1846 and 1848 Samuel F. B. Morse, one of the anti-Catholic movement’s guiding hands, said little publicly regarding the war. Most likely his lack of public comment was due to a time-consuming and intense legal dispute over the rights to his telegraph. His private letters, however, show his opinion with stark clarity. He suspected that the “inveterate hostility of the Mexican Hierarchy” to peace was due to their realization that the “downfall of their power” would occur as a result. Morse, while noting that war is “dreadful,” nevertheless praised the one with Mexico because it would stop that country’s “clerical tyrants” and their “designs,” which he suspected were “connected with the Leopold operation in our own country.” The Polk Administration may not want such an outcome, according to Morse, but Providence would see to it.45 The war forced many evangelical Protestants like Morse to reconcile their pro-peace (or anti-slavery) and anti-Catholic views. In one letter to his brother Sidney, Morse provided the best summary of the predominant sentiment among evangelicals during the Mexican-American War: The Mexican race is a worn out race, and God in his Providence is taking this mode to regenerate them. Whatever may be the opinions of some in relation to the justness or unjustness of our quarrel, there ought to be but one opinion among all good men, & that should be that the moment should be improved to throw in light into that darkened nation, and to raise a standard there which whatever may become of the Stars & Stripes, or Eagle & prickly pear, shall never be taken down till all nations have flocked to it. Our Bible and Tract Societies and Missionaries ought to be in the wake of our armies.46 Even evangelicals who remained steadfastly opposed to the war or annexation struggled to explain why conquering a Catholic country like Mexico, and thus opening it up to Protestant missionaries, was not a good thing.

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Many found a middle ground that transcended sectional differences and allowed them to approve the results of the war for evangelical and antiCatholic reasons while condemning it as unjust and evil. Among pacifists especially, this ruminative endeavor was not mere public relations but a sincere attempt to reconcile pacifism and anti-Catholicism. Both of these beliefs formed an equally integral part of their worldview and yet the war with Mexico had pitted one against the other. Anti-Catholicism was not the only factor in determining enthusiasm for the war among evangelical Protestants. Sectionalism played a critical role. There is little doubt that southern and western evangelicals mirrored the pro-war opinions of their section of the country. Likewise, northern evangelicals were more likely to oppose the war. In each case, they used theological arguments where others employed political or economic arguments. But whether they passionately supported or opposed the war, what united them was that their reasons were somehow deeply intertwined with anti-Catholicism. This says as much about anti-Catholic sentiment in the 1840s as it does about the evangelicals themselves. The ideology of American anti-Catholicism, as multi-faceted as it already was, proved during the Mexican-American War that American identity and the belief in Manifest Destiny were unintelligible without it. This is why anti-Catholicism proved to be the most useful tool in the hands of professional orators and writers, producing a web of racial and religious bigotry more tightly intertwined than ever before with exceptionalist political and economic arguments in favor of American empire. A tool for argumentation this may have been, but evangelicals’ use of it proved that, to the faithful, it was much more than a convenient rhetorical device. War against a Catholic country illumined the level of commitment among prominent controversialists like Theodore Parker to the anti-Catholic rhetoric they had used for years. The remarkable fact is that so significant a number of them were quick to take advantage of the same American arms they also condemned. In doing so, they proved their unwillingness to turn their back on the well-trod conspiracy theory regarding a papal-orchestrated, Catholic takeover of the West. Moreover, in tying anti-Catholicism to America’s civil-religious mission they revealed that they were like other Americans. In the process, they refashioned Morse’s and Beecher’s theories to take into account the new situation in the West, the current prevalence of Mexico in the American mind, and the probability that the United States might annex huge numbers of Romanists as part



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of a Manifest Destiny they had to believe was part of God’s providential design. Between 1846 and 1848, evangelical writers discovered a new, more effective way to prove Roman Catholicism caused moral depravity and was inimical to republicanism. The time-tested examples of sordid nunneries and corrupt prelates were tossed aside in favor of stories about Catholic Mexicans drawn from the accounts of war correspondents and soldiers. This new “evidence,” which fit nicely into the argument that the future of American civilization and Protestantism lay in the West, included stories about the Jesuit chaplains, the depravity of Mexican priests, and Sabbath desecration by Mexicans.47 This activity was no mere exchange of Catholic misbehavior in the United States for the same in Mexico. Rather, the crucible of war and its many unintended consequences convinced committed anti-Catholics who formerly eschewed politics to enter the fray. Above all, this meant railing in print against Polk’s pro-Catholic policy. According to William Hogan, a laicized priest turned circus performer turned author, the war had revealed Polk’s inability to recognize that Roman Catholicism was “at variance with every Protestant principle recognized by our government, or indirectly embodied in our Constitution.”48 This transformation had started well over a decade before the war when the anti-Catholic movement had begun to adopt the ends of the nativist movement and nativists had begun to draw on a substantially anti-Catholic vocabulary. The Mexican-American War had now proved that the stakes were just too high to continue relying on moral suasion alone. This was not unlike the dilemma earlier faced by abolitionists over whether to fight slavery from within the Whig and Democratic Parties, whether to found new parties wholly devoted to free soil or human freedom, or whether to withdraw from political life altogether. This extreme focus on Mexico would not last long beyond the end of the war. But the wartime experience nevertheless helped lay the groundwork for the full politicization of the anti-Catholic movement in the meteoric rise of the Know Nothings during the 1850s. As 1848 dawned, however, Americans anxiously awaited news of peace and an answer to two important questions. First, would the United States be annexing part of Mexico or all of it? Second, if all of Mexico, would this mean the naturalization of several million Catholics? Evangelical leaders feared that with the new territory gained from Mexico, “the Papists,” who were already “flooding us with priests. . . and

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establishing their nunneries,” would “pour. . . like a deluge all over the land.” The United States already had enough to worry about with European Catholic immigrants. To annex Catholic Mexicans, along with a huge expanse of land that would only invite more European immigrants, surely would doom the republic.49 The ultimate consequences of the war were not yet clear. Polk’s peace emissary, Nicholas P. Trist, had been in Mexico since May 1847. Nobody in the Polk Administration had heard from him since October 1847 when the president had ordered him back to the United States. An impatient president, and an even more impatient public, waited for word from Trist and wondered what to do now that the United States stood in possession of all of Mexico. Their answer would not be long in coming.

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Bringing about the Republican Millennium Ours is the government of the white man. John C. Calhoun

In February 1848, not long after Nicholas P. Trist completed successful peace negotiations with Mexico, Paris exploded in revolution. Other liberal revolts soon broke out in Austria, Prussia, Bohemia, Bavaria, and on the Italian peninsula. Americans assumed these popular uprisings had successfully replaced autocratic rule with republican government on much of the European continent. Observing these events from Mexico, one American soldier interpreted his own country’s military victory in light of this perceived advent of republicanism: It was about the beginning of May when the news of the French Revolution reached Mexico, creating a vast deal of excitement and speculation among all classes of the army; indeed, to judge from the triumphant expression of countenance worn by the more enthusiastic of the worshippers of democratic government, they seemed to believe that the millennium of republicanism had arrived at last. . . . Unfortunately for the forces of liberalism in 1848, however, the “millennium of republicanism” lasted well short of 1,000  years, for later that year the old governments used military force to regain power. Only in North America were the forces of republicanism not repulsed by the old European order of throne and altar. The American victory over Mexico seemed to indicate that, at least where the expanding United States was concerned, the prophesied ascendancy of republicanism would come to pass.1

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The year 1848 proved a turning point for the American anti-Catholic movement, not least because evangelical Protestants looked with hope toward the destruction of the papacy amid warfare in Europe. Significant armed conflict ended between the United States and Mexico after General Winfield Scott’s army captured Mexico City on September 14, 1847. President James K. Polk’s peace emissary, Trist, set to work negotiating the cessation of hostilities and the annexation of New Mexico and California. During the first half of 1848 congressmen turned with renewed vigor to the malleable rhetoric of anti-Catholicism to debate how much Mexican territory should be annexed and whether the treaty signed at Guadalupe, near Mexico’s most sacred Roman Catholic shrine, should be ratified. Historians, poets, playwrights, and novelists joined the fray, all finding in the war a new reservoir of creative material. Between 1848 and the early 1850s, they popularized a view of Mexico and the war that embodied the racial and civil-religious sentiment that had characterized American opinion throughout the war. Meanwhile, evangelicals continued to refocus their missionary efforts as they sought to take advantage of the American victory. By the time American troops occupied Mexico City, Trist had been in Mexico for over four months. His first serious negotiations began in late August 1847 following the “armistice” between Scott and General Antonio López de Santa Anna after Churubusco. During the talks, the diplomat thought that the prospects of peace were “most auspicious.” If his efforts at negotiating a quick peace failed, Trist believed the only remaining option would be to occupy Mexico City and absorb the Mexican government. American troops, as an occupying and perhaps even colonizing force, could then facilitate the permanent annexation of portions of the country that the United States would have received through negotiation anyway. Trist claimed that “this wish is extensively entertained even among the clergy,” who desired American rule because they had discovered during the war that Americans respected “church property instead of subjecting it to contributions & forced loans, and threatening it with wholesale confiscation.”2 Trist’s efforts at peace failed, however, and Scott ended the armistice on September 6.3 American troops then fought their way to victory at Mexico City between September 8 and 14. Within weeks, an irritated President Polk recalled Trist and revoked his treaty-making powers. Before receiving these orders, however, Trist sent a lengthy communiqué to Secretary of State James Buchanan explaining the “present crisis” of political



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squabbling in Mexico. Many parties disagreed over how to treat with the Americans. Trist seemed to think that “the higher clergy” were the most influential. If he could use to American advantage their fear of forced contributions and loans, Trist predicted the United States could gain territory “rich beyond calculation.” Trist claimed that even though American annexation would bring religious freedom to Mexico, the Mexican bishops were willing to undergo “this evil” to ensure “the security of their property.”4 What surprised Trist was that “the lower clergy” held the same view as their superiors. His opinion of Mexico’s priests was far from complimentary. He described them as fanatical and “stupid monks” for whom “religion is sheer idolatry & burning candles.” Yet in this one case, Trist believed that even though the priests were men of “gluttony and lasciviousness,” they, as much as their bishops, feared “the downfall of the Church itself.” Trist related the clergy’s opinion, high and low, to his conviction that the Roman Catholic Church’s influence in Mexico depended entirely on its material wealth. Trist’s anti-clericalism owed more to Jeffersonian influences than to personal experiences in Mexico, for even before entering that country he had described Catholic priests as natural tyrants. As with the soldiers who had come before him, Trist’s experiences in Mexico merely strengthened his extant beliefs.5 Trist received Polk’s orders to leave Mexico in November but ignored them and continued to negotiate with Mexican authorities, believing that his departure would deprive the United States of its best opportunity to end the war. Interestingly, in light of his previous advocacy of occupation he now lamented that the war was becoming one solely of conquest and not one aimed at securing a peace. Trist wanted the United States to look on Mexico with “motives of philanthropy,” not “motives of ambition.” What this meant in reality was still occupation, but an occupation in keeping with Manifest Destiny where under “Providence” the regenerative powers of American republican institutions would improve Mexico. The same principle of participatory government that had placed the United States above all other nations of the earth had, Trist said, placed Mexico at “the very lowest point.” It had nowhere to go but up, and Providence had deemed that its path to progress would run through the United States.6 Meanwhile, in Washington City rumors circulated that Bishop John Hughes was going to replace Trist as the United States’ chief peace negotiator with Mexico. There was no truth to that claim but Hughes did preach

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a sermon in the House of Representatives on December 12, 1847. In his sermon, Hughes said nothing of the Mexican-American War and spoke of strictly religious matters. Just his presence in the halls of Congress, however, fueled speculation that he was really in Washington for ulterior motives. The idea of the Hughes mission to Mexico faded from the headlines more quickly than it might have in the recent past. One reason this story lost traction is that nativists soon proffered a newer accusation against Hughes: the bishop was angling for the title of American ambassador to papal Rome. What really obscured the Hughes issue, however, was the All Mexico debate in Congress between December 1847 and March 1848. News that on February 2 Trist and his Mexican counterparts had signed a treaty would soon bury it completely. Congress used the long delay in peace negotiations to debate whether all of Mexico ought to be annexed. Many claimed Mexico’s intransigence left no other solution. Frequently, proponents of this position argued that not only was total annexation the best means of promptly ending the war, but it also was divinely sanctioned and therefore the unavoidable fulfillment of Manifest Destiny. In one great program of uplift the annexation of All Mexico would allow Anglo-Saxons to spread republicanism while saving Mexican souls.7 Embedded in this talk of Manifest Destiny and Mexican inferiority was the call to spread religious freedom to Mexico. Most Americans understood that this meant spreading Protestant Christianity and ending the official and unofficial dominance of Roman Catholicism. For instance, Sidney Breese did not doubt that Mexicans were inferior, but he also believed that their inferiority was neither congenital nor irreversible. All that Mexicans needed, according to the Democrat, was American republican rule to secure “all their rights, civil and religious.” By appealing to the great transformative capacity of republican principles, Breese hoped to undercut those who opposed Mexican annexation because of Mexico’s religious and racial makeup.8 Other Democrats appealed to Providence or progress in their support of annexation. Mexicans were “to give way to a stronger race,” allowing Americans to extend liberty and inculcate virtue in populations that at present were incapable of self-government. Trying to position himself for the 1848 presidential contest, Lewis Cass argued the war had revealed Mexicans to be “ignorant, feeble, and, if not retrograding, stationary.” Cass stopped short of endorsing All Mexico so as not to drive potential



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supporters away but made clear that a cession of territory was one of the “legitimate consequences” of victory. At his philanthropic best, Cass proclaimed that Americans could “meliorate their condition, civil, religious, social, and political.” The hint of anti-Catholicism in Cass’s statements was cast as a well-meaning humanitarian effort.9 The intertwined Anglo-Saxonism and anti-Catholicism among the supporters of All Mexico also was found among its opponents. In some ways, such sentiment was even more prominent among those who opposed the wholesale absorption of Mexico into the Union. Unlike the advocates of massive annexation, who had to explain the elaborate methods by which Mexicans would be regenerated by American rule, foes of All Mexico did not. They had only to draw the ugliest, most discouraging picture possible to demonstrate the dangers of seizing a country where only the bishops and generals were white. The rest, a “vast Indian population,” which was a superstitious, “degraded, dependent, melancholy race,” were irredeemable. Whig Senator John Bell of Tennessee asserted that the Mexicans’ greatest inadequacy was not their congenital racial defects. Rather, as thousands of American soldiers now realized, it was “the religion of Mexico” that was “the evidence, and may be the cause, of this intellectual inferiority.” Bell went on to espouse the well-worn Beecherite polemic that Protestantism inevitably “sowed the seeds and the growth of civil liberty.” He thus concluded that the wealth of the Roman Catholic Church would have to be confiscated after all, if Mexico was to be regenerated and its debt paid in full. Taunting Democrats with the implication that they were in the pocket of the Catholic Church, Bell quipped, “How will you excuse yourselves to the new Pope of Rome and Bishop Hughes?”10 Among Southern Whigs much more partisan reasons for opposing annexation could easily be found but even there anti-Catholicism proved the rhetorical vehicle of choice. Senator Joseph R. Underwood compared the annexationists who wanted “to overturn the civil and religious institutions” of Mexico to European crusaders. Providence, he noted, had seen fit to evict the crusaders from the Holy Land. “It is not in the nature of man to be taught true religion, or the true principles of civil liberty and republican government, at the point of the bayonet,” asserted Underwood. As much as any American, said Underwood, he wanted to see Christianity and thus republican government spread throughout the world. But he wanted such progress only “through bright and peaceful example.” Despite his lofty rhetoric, Underwood’s opposition to All Mexico was almost entirely political. The Kentuckian’s real fear was that the “voter of

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Oaxaca” would know little and care even less about presidential candidates and the politics of the northeast, the bastion of his own Whig party. Like other Whigs, Underwood saw in massive annexation the specter not only of a Union with too heterogeneous a population but also a whole new Democratic constituency. To a Kentucky Whig even the saving of souls with a pure gospel would not be worth annexing millions of Catholics steeped in the habits of subjugation and tyranny.11 In New England, where Beecher had led the way fusing anti-Catholicism with anti-Irish nativism during the 1830s, senators did not have very far to go rhetorically to find consequentialist arguments against Mexican annexation. True, William Upham of Vermont did speak in grandiose terms about how a “career of conquest” would undermine the health of the American republic. But like his fellow New Englanders, Upham did not argue primarily that the United States would degenerate into an empire, as had the Roman Republic following its breakneck territorial expansion. He instead implicated Mexicans. Describing them in much the same manner as nativists caricatured German and Irish immigrants, Upham predicted that annexation would “bring. . . an ignorant, degraded population, wholy unprepared for the enjoyment of our free and liberal institutions.” Senator Albert C. Greene agreed, arguing that the Constitution was “framed for an Anglo-Saxon race.” Sure, these New England senators feared the further decline of Whig power as a consequence of westward expansion and the enfranchisement of a presumably non-Whig constituency. Nevertheless, the concomitant anxiety these senators felt about massive annexation on the future health of the United States as a republic was quite real. Whigs like Greene found compelling the argument that Catholics posed a fatal threat to civil and religious liberty.12 Not to be outdone in his opposition to All Mexico by Yankee Whigs, John C. Calhoun boldly announced on the floor of the Senate, “Ours is the government of the white man.” Along with his contention that America would be engaging in a “fatal error” if it placed “the colored race on an equality with the white,” Calhoun argued that the annexation of All Mexico was “subversive of our free popular institutions.” He suspected that such an enormous increase of territory would enhance the president’s patronage powers, making way for a European-style despotism. What he did not express aloud was the general South Carolinian antipathy toward westward expansion. Instead, he criticized as “a sad delusion” the ideal of spreading “civil and religious liberty” to Mexico. Mexico’s inhabitants, he said, were congenitally incapable of maintaining republican institutions.



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Where there was “intelligence and wealth” in Mexico, it was “concentrated in the priesthood, who are naturally disinclined to that form of government.” Calhoun was speaking specifically of Mexican bishops. Yet by appealing to the widely held belief that Catholics were naturally disinclined toward republicanism he used an old allegation that needed little embellishment or explanation.13 Although the Senate had the final say regarding the Mexican cession, representatives nonetheless spoke their mind about it. Their views, too, provide insight into the deeply anti-Catholic roots of American republican identity as well as the range of uses to which anti-Catholicism could be put. As in the Senate, party and sectional affiliations influenced policy positions. Likewise, for the task at hand congressmen wisely resorted to the most useful rhetoric, anti-Catholicism. Vermont’s George P.  Marsh defended Senator Upham against charges that Whigs were neo-Federalist traitors due to their opposition to All Mexico. Of course Whigs were patriots, said Marsh. To prove it he denounced Mexico as “cursed with the worst possible forms of misrule—the tyranny of the soldier and the tyranny of the priest.” This situation made Mexicans “unfitted for self-government and unprepared to appreciate, sustain, or enjoy, free institutions.” According to Marsh, the real danger to the United States was the supposition among pro-annexationists that Mexicans could be made to be good republicans. This, thought Marsh, was impossible.14 Rhetoric like Marsh’s was common among representatives who opposed All Mexico. Arguments appealing to anti-Catholic sentiment were more effective and less divisive than purely sectional or racial ones. Supporters of both major national parties responded well to implicit and explicit anti-Catholicism. For instance, one Mississippian opposed complete annexation simply because Mexicans would be too hard to pacify. True, he claimed, the Spaniards had easily conquered Mexico, but it was not “the Spanish sword” that had done the job. Rather, “the subtlety of Spanish Jesuits” had enabled Spain to rule disorderly Mexico. And, he noted in reference to the return of Fr. McElroy and the death of Fr. Rey, as of late 1847 the United States no longer had Jesuits in its employ. Other congressmen denigrated Mexicans as “under the control of the clergy in an extraordinary degree,” citing reports by American troops that “the country is little better than a Sodom.” Illinoisan Orlando B. Ficklin just thought that it was too late to help Mexico, for the “priest in his robes” had already established “a despotism over the souls and bodies” of the Mexicans. Indeed, it was that control, bolstered by superstition, that

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Ficklin (erroneously) blamed for allowing the clergy to dupe Mexicans into a war against Protestants in the first place. Therefore, according to Ficklin, to oppose annexation was actually very patriotic, for who wanted such a people to join the Union?15 Nativists had been asking Ficklin’s question about Catholics in the United States for years. Americans were astonished, therefore, when the Native American Party did not relent in 1848 from its initial stance favoring the annexation of Mexico in its entirety. Congressman Lewis Levin admitted that total annexation would increase the power of the Catholic Church in the United States. Yet despite this fact, he and his party advocated All Mexico because they believed Providence demanded it. God had willed that Protestant Anglo-Saxons take on the task of enlightening Mexico with American ministers, “an open Bible,” “Christian principles,” and through “the moral power of our [republican] institutions.” As the final salvo in the nativist attack on Polk during the war, Levin opposed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo because it offered citizenship, and thus suffrage, to Mexicans in the ceded territories. The terms of the treaty, he said, proved that Polk planned to spread Roman Catholicism throughout the United States in order to expand his party’s base. As Levin’s opinion shows, Native Americans were willing to alter their conspiracy theories to suit their anti-Catholic ideology: If Polk opposed total annexation, then it must be a good thing, in that it would lead to Mexican evangelization, which in turn would allow republican principles to germinate. But if Polk supported only partial annexation, then that must be a bad thing, because the president only wanted to create more Democrats. In any case, for Native Americans even the limited chance offered by the treaty to proselytize Catholic Mexicans did not outweigh the risks of letting them vote.16 Following months of speculation on Mexico’s future, Polk received a copy of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 19. Although he felt that “Mr. Trist has acted very badly” in ignoring his recall and continuing negotiations, the president conceded that if “the Treaty is one that can be accepted, it should not be rejected on account of his bad conduct.” Polk’s cabinet also condemned Trist’s refusal “to return to the U.S. when he was recalled,” but they, too, agreed to examine the treaty. They decided to send it to the Senate with the suggestion that only Article X, regarding Mexico’s rights involving land grants in Texas, should be rejected. Thus, on February 22, the Polk Administration forwarded to the Senate a treaty negotiated and signed by a diplomat without plenipotentiary powers.17



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The debate in the Senate lasted much longer than the president expected or preferred. The unhappy fact for Polk was that senators in favor of All Mexico joined forces against the treaty with those who wanted no cession whatsoever. Acting as if he himself never analyzed actions for their political ramifications, the president complained that election-year concerns were overriding the surface issues involved in the debate. It became obvious by March 7 that the Senate had made significant changes to the treaty that Mexico might not accept. The largest modification, other than wholesale changes made to Article X, was the alteration of Article IX. The first paragraph of Article IX was uncontroversial:  it guaranteed full civil and property rights to Mexicans living on land that would become part of the United States and allowed for the continuation of Mexican laws until the establishment of American authority. However, this paragraph was followed by two others: The same most ample guaranty shall be enjoyed by all ecclesiastics and religious corporations or communities, as well in the discharge of the offices of their ministry as in the enjoyment of their property of every kind, whether individual or corporate. This guaranty shall embrace all temples, houses, and edifices dedicated to the Roman Catholic worship, as well as all property destined to its support, or to that of schools, hospitals, and other foundations for charitable or beneficent purposes. No property of this nature shall be considered as having become the property of the American government, or as subject to be by it disposed of, or diverted to other uses. Finally, the relations and communication between the Catholics living in the territories aforesaid, and their respective ecclesiastical authorities, shall be open, free, and exempt from all hindrance whatever, even although such authorities should reside within the limits of the Mexican republic, as define by this treaty; and this freedom shall continue, so long as a new demarkation of ecclesiastical districts shall not have been made, conformably with the laws of the Roman Catholic church. This controversial portion of Article IX contained little that U.S. government officials and army officers had not promised Mexicans during the war. But many senators found it distasteful for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the seeming special legal status it awarded to

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Catholics. They knew that such singular treatment would be unpopular among their constituents, especially considering the prevailing anti-Catholic climate of opinion that among other things accused Polk of collusion with the Catholic Church.18 Senators debated Article IX for nearly three full days. The alterations made to Article IX centered on the Roman Catholic Church, beginning with Senator James D. Westcott’s move on March 6 to strike the second paragraph dealing with Mexican bishops and their rights in the ceded territories. After much debate, the Senate adjourned without voting on Westcott’s motion. The next day that chamber again took up Westcott’s motion and continued to debate Article IX. At this time the Florida Democrat was forced to withdraw his amendment.19 Georgia Democrat Herschel V. Johnson was the next senator to attempt to remedy what some viewed as foreign clerical interference in what soon would be American territory. Rather than trying to delete whole paragraphs as Westcott had done, he instead sought to insert at the end of the article a limitation on the Mexican church’s power: Provided nothing herein contained shall be so construed as to secure to Roman Catholics their religious corporations or communities or the ecclesiastical authorities of the Roman Catholic church any other rights and privileges than such as are enjoyed by other religious sects, their corporations or communities, or ecclesiastical authorities, in the United States. Johnson’s amendment, however, fell sixteen votes short of approval. Westcott then resubmitted his amendment and this time it came to a vote. With a vote of twenty-nine to eighteen, the Senate approved Westcott’s motion and removed the following paragraph from Article IX: Finally, the relations and communication between the Catholics living in the territories aforesaid, and their respective ecclesiastical authorities, shall be open, free, and exempt from all hindrance whatever, even although such authorities should reside within the limits of the Mexican republic, as define by this treaty; and this freedom shall continue, so long as a new demarkation of ecclesiastical districts shall not have been made, conformably with the laws of the Roman Catholic church.20



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At this point, therefore, only one paragraph dealing with Roman Catholicism was left in the article. John Davis, a Massachusetts Whig, quickly moved to delete it, along with sentences allowing the temporary continuance of Mexican laws in the cession. Although some senators were ambivalent about the language involving Catholics, all were adamant that Mexican laws should never in any fashion govern U.S territory. Thus, when the Senate put Davis’s motion to a vote, it garnered even more support than had Westcott’s.21 The Senate struggled with the religion-related portions of Article IX for two important reasons. Senators knew that they had to be consistent with the administration’s wartime policy of conciliating American and Mexican Catholics. Yet at the same time members of both political parties were keenly aware of the extent of anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States and that this had been exacerbated by the war. The latter concern was especially true of the Whigs, who in the upcoming elections hoped to cut into the Native American vote. Anti-Catholicism aside, almost all senators had principled doubts about the constitutionality of the treaty’s language. Thanks to Westcott and Davis, Article IX now made no mention of religion at all. In response, Virginian James M. Mason moved to add the following sentence to the article, along with a guarantee of full civil rights to Mexicans living in the cession: The Mexicans in the territories aforesaid shall be secured in the free exercise of their religion without any restriction; and those who may desire to remove to the Mexican republic shall be permitted to sell or export their effects at any time whatever without being subject in either case to the payment of any duties. Senators voted forty-two to four in favor and, presumably, the debate over Article IX was over.22 Alas, however, Mason’s changes did not end the dispute, for on March 8 the Senate refused to approve the altered Article IX. Senator John Bell seized this opportunity and moved to strike the entire article from the treaty. He failed by sixteen votes but realized that while many senators would refuse to remove large portions of the article, those same senators might have little difficulty in deleting individual phrases and sentences. (Two years later Stephen Douglas used a similar method to achieve what became known as the Compromise of 1850.) Using this new tactic, Bell and fellow Whig John J. Crittenden met with success. In three consecutive

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votes the Senate deleted Article IX piece by piece. Once these votes were finished, Crittenden proposed new wording which was to stand as the final version. After a blustery and extended debate the Senate approved the now much-shorter version of Article IX, which in its entirety read: The Mexicans who, in the territories aforesaid, shall not preserve the character of citizens of the Mexican Republic, conformably with what is stipulated in the preceding article, shall be incorporated into the Union of the United States and be admitted, at the proper time (to be judged by the Congress of the United States) to the enjoyment of all the rights of citizens of the United States according to the principles of the Constitution; and in the mean time shall be maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty and property, and secured in the free exercise of their religion without restriction. Thus, the Senate had whittled Article IX from three paragraphs to one and had transformed the two that had dealt with Roman Catholicism into an ambiguous clause within a sentence. All mention of Roman Catholicism, corporate Catholic property, and the Mexican hierarchy had been stricken.23 Polk felt anxious about these changes. On March 9, he confided in his diary: “Several important modifications have been made to it, and I fear they are of such a character as to jeopard[ize] its ratification by Mexico.” He accused Whigs of intentionally trying to make the treaty unpalatable, because they were afraid of the political consequences of actually voting it down. But with Article IX finally approved, the Senate ratified the treaty the next day, March 10. Many senators voted in favor of the treaty not necessarily because they were happy with it, but because they were tired of war and saw no better option. Polk, still worried that Mexico might reject the treaty and begin the war anew, quickly dispatched an entourage of commissioners to Mexico to exchange ratifications and get the Mexicans to accept the altered treaty.24 In the opinion of Vice President George M. Dallas, Article IX had originally been designed by anxious Mexican bishops who believed that the war was “a crusade against the Catholicism of Mexico” aimed at plundering churches and weakening priestly power. From Dallas’s standpoint these accusations were “absolutely false” but he was aware that Mexicans believed them. He could thus say sympathetically that Mexican prelates had inserted that section of the treaty out of “affectionate solicitude,”



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not “bigoted cunning.” He did not stop to question what lay behind the Mexicans’ fears nor did he acknowledge the many calls for just such a “crusade” by American newspapers, ministers, soldiers, recruiters, and politicians. Instead, Dallas insisted that Mexicans simply could not “comprehend or appreciate the theory and action of our system as regards to the freedom of divine worship.” He hoped that Mexico would trust in the promise of religious liberty contained in the article’s final wording.25 When Secretary Buchanan gave instructions to peace commissioner Ambrose H. Sevier, the senator who headed to Mexico along with Attorney General Nathan Clifford, he mentioned three articles from the treaty that required sensitive and careful diplomacy. These were Articles IX, X, and XII. Concerning Article X, Buchanan instructed Sevier to inform Mexico that the United States would never honor Mexican authority over land grants in Texas. Concerning Article XII, however, Buchanan said that the United States would be willing to renegotiate the Senate’s amendments pertaining to the payment of $15  million to Mexico. Buchanan urged Sevier to portray the changes to Article IX as “comparatively unimportant” on the grounds that anything in the original article “which relates to the Catholic Church” had already been stated in previous treaties dealing with Louisiana and Florida. Therefore, according to Buchanan, it was Polk’s opinion that “the amendment could not finally jeopard[ize] the fate of the present Treaty.” This proved to be the case, for Mexico accepted the modified treaty.26 The Senate’s deliberations over Article IX of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the All Mexico discussion in Congress revealed just how extensive the political relevance and malleability of anti-Catholic sentiment had become thanks to the war. With immigration and the fear of Catholicism familiar topics by the late 1840s, congressmen, whether they supported or opposed the annexation of Mexico, turned to the almost universal discourse of anti-Catholicism. Derogatory depictions of Mexican religion by soldiers made this even more effective. The limited territorial acquisitions spelled out in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, however, meant that Americans were not going to evangelize—and therefore republicanize—the entirety of Mexico after all. Some Americans began to question whether the Manifest Destiny of the United States really did include the absorption of all North America. The same religious triumphalism and ethnic exceptionalism that once seemed to favor a continental republic now proved that it also could provide strong grounds to oppose such expansion.27

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For those disappointed that the United States had not annexed All Mexico nor torn the Man of Sin from his throne in Mexico, one thing that still offered hope in 1848 for the advent of a Protestant, republican world was the growing political turbulence in Europe. Yet even there the Polk Administration seemed to stand in the way. In this case, Polk decided that the presence of a U.S. minister in Rome would encourage Pius IX to expand his vaunted liberal policies in the new Europe. Debate raged in Congress and among Protestant evangelicals over this proposition even while the Senate was busy debating Article IX. Not surprisingly, Levin led the fight against the mission, lamenting that “sympathy for the Pope has grown almost into a fashion.” Asserting that “no Pope can be a reformer,” Levin called the bill an “insult” to “the majesty of the people by the desecration of their Constitution.” The Daily Sun similarly attacked the diplomatic mission as one of the “gigantic schemes of the Church of Rome to establish an empire in the United States.” Congress ultimately sided with Polk, not Levin, and on March 30 confirmed Jacob L. Martin (not, as it turns out, Bishop Hughes) as the chargé ďaffaires to Rome.28 The praise of Pius IX, which Levin referred to as “a fashion,” had begun in November 1847, when political leaders gathered in New  York City to support the “noble attitude of Pius IX.” This group included the mayors of New York and Brooklyn, Horace Greeley, and Theodore Sedgwick. George M. Dallas, Martin Van Buren, James Buchanan, Thomas Hart Benton, and a number of senators did not attend but sent public letters of encouragement. Supporters of Pius IX’s liberal policies held a similar rally in Philadelphia two months later. At that time, the Daily Sun called the public demonstrations a charade meant only “to court the Catholic vote.” Just about the time the furor over these rallies died down in the religious and nativist press, the revolutions in Europe, treaty debates, and the proposed opening of diplomatic relations with Rome once again fueled anti-Catholic feeling.29 Evangelical Protestants joined the denunciatory chorus of nativist voices. Some predicted that the “Irishman” and “papist” General James Shields would receive the appointment and then “disgrace this country by kissing the Pope’s slipper.” They also warned that having a papal representative in the United States would only make the plans uncovered by Samuel F. B. Morse in the 1830s that much easier to fulfill. It would strengthen clerical control of the Catholic vote, because “if there was a Legate or other high functionary of the Roman Hierarchy here among us,



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all [Catholics] must obey his will.” The Christian Reflector endorsed Levin’s view, claiming diplomatic relations with Rome was the latest part of the Jesuitical plan to make “Popery” dominant in the United States, where the pope already had “millions of subjects.”30 The New York Herald responded to this criticism of the Roman mission by praising Pius IX as “the most liberal and enlightened pontiff that has occupied the chair of St. Peter for the last thousand years.” Of Levin’s assertions about papal conspiracies, the Herald declared them “fit for amusing children, not for men of the present age of intelligence.” This was quite a charge, considering that popular literature based on such theories had been a staple of the American reading public for years. Nevertheless, the newspaper argued, as did Polk, that “a minister from the United States republic to the Vatican” would broaden “the liberal progress of the age.” The U.S. Magazine and Democratic Review concurred with the Herald, but for a slightly different reason. The Magazine acknowledged that Pius IX might promote liberalism in a Europe that obviously seemed to be on the cusp of a republican golden age. It also argued that the pope’s “spirit of reform” would so enlighten Catholics that their church would fall victim to “a new era of religious and political enlightenment.” In other words, through his own actions Pius IX was sewing the seeds not only of his own doom but also that of the Roman Catholic Church. Finally, the Magazine noted excitedly, the Puritans’ “transatlantic prayer” for America to be a city on a hill “has pervaded Italy and the Roman Church”31 The confluence of apparent republican victories in 1848 not only in Europe but also in North America affected the way almost all white Americans interpreted the religious meaning of the Mexican-American War. As the last American troops left Mexico City for home in June 1848, they brought with them fresh stories of life in Mexico that reached the public’s ears and eyes at the same time as news of continued European convulsions. Pope Pius IX and the papacy itself seemed to be on the verge of annihilation at the hands of the Austrian army. Defeated Mexico itself might remain open to Protestant missionaries but even if it did not the United States had added a vast territory filled with Catholics. The eviction of Catholic tenants by Protestant landlords in Ireland continued to send famine-stricken Irish to American shores. Meanwhile, the American president was trying to open relations with Rome. For evangelicals, there were lots of decisions to be made about the pace of evangelization and just who needed to hear the Gospel first.

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One significant effect of the religious and moral questions swirling around the war’s end was a split between abolitionist and anti-slavery forces. Just before the treaty was signed, the anti-slavery National Era and the Liberty Party’s Albany Patriot came out in favor of All Mexico. Weighed in the balance, their fear of Catholicism had overcome their hatred of slavery. William Lloyd Garrison responded by vigorously attacking both papers. More than just the usual fight among editorial activists for readership, abolitionists and anti-slavery advocates were engaged in a struggle for the soul of their consanguine movements, with each recognizing the power of anti-Catholic sentiment among their supporters. For example, the Patriot claimed that it did not want to leave Mexicans in thrall to “priestcraft,” which is what would happen when the American military departed. The National Era lamely responded to Garrison’s criticism by pointing out that it supported only voluntary annexation in the hopes that it could demonstrate the possibility of racial equality by making non-white Mexicans Protestant and republican.32 Many voluntary societies, like the anti-slavery advocates, also underwent a rapid transformation amid the turbulence of 1848. The Pope’s troubles in Italy and the American victory against Mexico united disparate evangelical efforts aimed at Catholics while making them hemispheric and global. Prior to 1848 the official mission of the American Protestant Society (APS) had been to convert Catholic immigrants and un-churched native Americans to Protestant Christianity. But in July 1848, due to a popular groundswell from its members, the APS for the first time called for the mass evangelization of another country, Mexico. By November it launched efforts to bring Mexicans a pure gospel and Protestant Bibles. In 1849 the APS merged with Lyman Beecher’s Christian Alliance and the Foreign Evangelical Society. This new, unified organization aimed to proselytize Roman Catholics worldwide.33 The APS believed that the war had demonstrated “the American spirit of liberty” to Mexicans. How could one only worry about barbarism and Catholicism on the American frontier when hordes of Catholic barbarians lived just over the border in Mexico?34 By 1848 the American Bible Society (ABS) also had become convinced that Mexico was now safe enough to put the Rev. John C. Smith’s plan of May 1847 into action. At its annual meeting the ABS declared that “the door is opening in Mexico for the distribution of the Bible there,” although it decided that Spanish Bibles sent to Mexico would not bear the imprint of the Protestant ABS. The society appointed the Rev. W.  H. Norris as its agent in Mexico. Secretary of War William Marcy publicly warned the



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ABS that its activities might reignite the war by turning Mexico’s bishops against the treaty. Remarkably, however, Marcy privately offered his support to Norris and gave the clergyman letters of introduction to smooth the way with American generals. Without an occupying army to protect him after the departure of American troops, Norris returned from Mexico in late 1848. He boasted that while in Mexico he had distributed Bibles to “hundreds of families” in such a way “that they will not be subject to the order of wicked priests, but will be preserved and read.” By 1849, though, the ABS apparently decided that Mexico was no longer exotic enough to garner sufficient public support for its missionary work. Instead, the ABS expressed thanks for the annexation of Mexico’s ports in California and turned its attention to Asia and the Pacific Ocean’s uncountable inhabited islands.35 The American Home Missionary Society (AHMS) in 1848 prodded its members to “convey the pure gospel” through any means available to “the new and yet unexplored regions of Oregon, New Mexico, or California.” Unlike the APS and ABS, the AHMS was interested only in the ceded territories and not in Mexico itself. It thus remained true to its name. The question, according to the AHMS, was not if the West would be proselytized, but by whom: “whether they shall be intelligent or ignorant, whether they shall depend on preaching for success, or on processions and genuflexions.” Acknowledging the presence of Catholics in the Mexican cession who were also non-white Spanish-speakers, the Rev. Albert Barnes preached in New  York and Philadelphia in early 1849 on behalf of the society and urged Protestant Americans to act before it was too late. That same year, the AHMS issued its qualified support for Manifest Destiny. Although it had never backed annexation through conquest, the AHMS had come to believe that God had preserved California for Protestant Anglo-Saxons so that they, and not papists, could convert the rowdy miners drawn to the region’s rich gold deposits.36 Smaller evangelical organizations simply floated along with the tide and thereby benefited from the war’s territorial outcome as well. The Ladies’ Society for the Promotion of Education at the West, a creation of Edward N.  Kirk and Edward Beecher, concentrated exclusively on education among westerners to stave off ignorance and Romanism. With few young Protestant women willing to move west to serve as teachers, Beecher and the Ladies’ Society feared that settlers would have no choice but to send their children to Catholic schools. In 1848 the Ladies’ Society successfully sought Spanish-speaking white American women to teach in

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Texas and New Mexico. At one such teacher’s school in Texas, forty-five out of sixty students were Catholic Mexicans. However, the Ladies’ Society never made pro-war declarations of any kind. It merely expanded its operations into areas that the United States had won through military conquest, thus making it one of the few Protestant success stories of Mexican evangelization following the war.37 Another minor voluntary society that stepped up its Mexico-oriented activities immediately after the ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was the American Sunday School Union. The Sunday School Union advocated Sunday instruction for adults as well as children. The Union originally had come out tepidly in favor of the war. At its June 1846 annual meeting in Philadelphia, one speaker promised to “carry the truth all through the country, to Texas, and to California, and if heaven crown our arms with success, as far as Mexico.” Not all spectators approved of the speech but by the time the U.S. Senate approved ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo the American Sunday School Union’s worker in Texas (James Burke, also the Texas American Bible Society agent) had received several large donations. His best selling point was the promise that his proximity to Mexico would lead to easy evangelization of that country. So while the Sunday School Union never officially advocated war with Mexico, it wasted no time before pursuing the evangelical possibilities created by the success of American arms.38 As the actions of these voluntary societies show, the debate over how best to spread republican principles and institutions, not to mention the Gospel, had become more than theoretical by 1848. Moreover, as with politicians during the Senate’s debate over Article IX of the treaty, Protestant leaders feared that the Polk Administration might allow Roman Catholicism to remain the official religion of Mexico as well as New Mexico and California. Since they believed that Mexico was in such poor shape because it was papist in the first place, this would be an unpardonable crime on Polk’s part. Some evangelicals allayed such concerns by placing the Mexican-American War in the context of the European revolutions, arguing that God was moving with a miraculous and mighty hand to restore religious and civil liberty around the world. Others foreswore all predictions and comparisons and instead simply continued to portray Mexican priests in a negative light in an effort to raise funds for missionary work.39 Protestant preachers with an anti-Catholic bent readily lent their support to this rapid advance into the Mexican cession, regardless of



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their initial opinion of the war, their stance on All Mexico, or their views on the justice of conquest. The Rev. W.  A. Scott went so far as to declare “the day of Representative Republicanism” second only to “the day of the Incarnation.” Thus, he had no qualms about annexing California and New Mexico in order to bring them under republican rule. In fact, he suggested that Americans might easily “win the love” of the conquered by establishing schools, building roads, and spreading new technologies like the telegraph. Additionally, Scott wanted to bring “the Bible. . . and the institutions of the pure gospel” to the Mexicans. He hoped that the changes American Protestants would bring to the Mexican cession would usher in “the last and eternal funeral of civil and religious despotism.”40 Evangelicals who placed the defeat of Mexico within the context of republican and Protestant ascendancy worldwide were sorely disappointed with the failure of the 1848 European revolutions. Yet when liberals established a republic in Rome in 1849 and forced Pope Pius IX to flee the city, evangelicals feared he might at long last come to North America and establish a stronghold in the vast expanse of land west of the Mississippi River. After French forces crushed the short-lived Roman Republic and restored the Pope to Rome, some American Protestants sounded the alarm that a revived Catholic Church, buoyed by European despots, was now poised to renew its attack on the American republic. Thus, with or without a pope in Rome, the West remained at the center of Catholic designs. Visions of a papal army composed of the millions of German Catholics who had already begun fleeing post-revolutionary Europe for the United States aggravated these suspicions.41 Even as many evangelicals called on “every intelligent American” to support the cause of republicanism against “Popery” in Europe, other preachers concerned themselves with issues closer to home. This latter group argued that regardless of affairs in Europe, the United States still faced a daunting mission on its own continent if republicanism and its Protestant foundation there were to remain secure. The most influential advocate of this endeavor was the Rev. Nicholas Murray. During the war, he had emerged as a leading anti-Catholic orator and author. Writing under the pseudonym “Kirwan,” Murray had penned letters to Bishop Hughes. These had appeared in Protestant and secular newspapers in 1846 and 1847 and were published in book form in the middle of 1847. By the end of that year, over 100,000 copies had been sold, most of them after the news leaked out that “Kirwan” was actually Murray.

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In 1851, Murray assembled many of his thoughts on the world events of the late 1840s into one lecture and book. The title reveals how hardened anti-Catholic forces interpreted the broader context of the American victory over Mexico: The Decline of Popery. In it, Murray argued that all states “from which the Protestant element has been excluded” were masses of immorality and ignorance. He traced “the advancing influence of Protestantism” on what he called a “moral map of the world.” As a critical part of that advance, he cited “the bringing under our influence in a few months the papal states of Texas, New Mexico, and California.” If Europe was beyond repair for the time being, then Americans still had the immense task of finishing the job of driving “popish mummeries” out of the West.42 Beginning in 1848 historians sought to interpret the meaning of the war just as evangelicals had done. They flooded Americans for the next several years with books about the Mexican-American War. In most cases, these books expressed an unequivocal belief in Manifest Destiny, with all of its religious accoutrements, that was every bit as strong as the sermons and speeches of preachers and politicians. For example, Emma Willard in one popular book argued that God had “made the American armies the means of chastising the Spanish Mexicans,” because of the latter’s Roman Catholic bigotry. That bigotry, said Willard, had prevented Mexico from experiencing the blessings of Protestant institutions like tract, Bible, and missionary societies. The historians’ consensus mirrored that of even non-evangelicals:  Roman Catholicism had made Mexican religious and political progress impossible.43 Americans may have disagreed about the degree to which congenital biological inferiority played a role but the common culprit that always made an appearance in any breakdown of Mexico’s incorrigibility was religion. Brantz Mayer’s entrance into this burgeoning vogue of historical publishing in 1848 and 1851 provides good evidence of this. His History of the War between the United States and Mexico and Mexico: Aztec, Spanish, and Republican built on the success of his earlier works about Mexico. Mayer agreed with the nay-sayers who spoke against Mexico’s capacity for self-improvement. Expecting Mexico to be republican was too much to ask of a “mongrel race of Spaniards and Indians,” admitted Mayer. But, said Mayer, even without Mexicans’ racial defects, Roman Catholicism would hinder the growth of republican institutions. The immorality of Mexico’s Roman Catholic clergy “was satisfactorily proved by the state in which the Catholic church of the United States found the parishes of Texas at the period of annexation.” Mayer did not doubt “that many more flagrant



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instances of laxity will be unveiled in New Mexico and California.” He assured his readers that he was not impugning all Catholics but only “the Catholic church in Mexico.” Since his pre-war writings, Mayer had grown more cautious in his criticism of Catholicism, and even referred to the American priests sent to examine the annexed parishes as “our enlightened and pure Catholic clergymen.” At least in the pages of Mayer, American Catholics because of the war were well on their way to enjoying the benefits of whiteness.44 Even as late as the 1930s, in what is still considered by many to be the best comprehensive history of the Mexican-American War, historian Justin Smith perpetuated the views of these historians from the 1840s and 1850s. Citing works by Stapp, Kendall, and Thompson to support his claims, Smith described Mexicans as “always tricky, obstinate, indolent, peevish, and careless” and “almost crazed by superstitious fears.” Indians, in Smith’s opinion, were “ragged, stupid” and “little more human in appearance than the donkeys they drive.” Most Mexicans were under “the more effective domination of the priests” as “the keeper of confessional secrets and family skeletons.” Of the clergy, Smith said “nearly all” were immoral and ignorant.45 Popular literature using the war as a setting also earned an audience by 1848. Indeed, the readers of romance and adventure novels were not usually the same people who enjoyed poring over volumes of Mayer’s turgid historical works. Publishing houses in New  York and Boston competed for readers with numerous books subtitled “A Tale of the Mexican War.” Most were replete with tempestuous señoritas, gallant dons, American heroines, and brave Yankee soldiers. Authors interwove into their fictitious accounts historical incidents, reports of actual battles, and real personages. In an entertaining way, they presented the stereotypical view of Mexico that had been transmitted by American soldiers. These authors wrote about Mexican religious practices because this was the best means to convey the foreignness of Mexican culture to the average American reader. In such instances, there was little overt anti-Catholicism. For example, the novels of Newton M. Curtis provided detailed descriptions of Catholic rites. His Mexican characters rarely finish speaking without pausing to swear “by the Holy Cross” or by “the Holy Mass,” but in this they were not unlike Shakespeare’s Polonius in “Hamlet.” To enhance their stories about Mexico, many novelists and poets went beyond these relatively benevolent caricatures and drew on standard anti-Catholic themes already familiar to American readers. These themes included the usual crafty Jesuits, fat and

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wicked Mexican priests, Irish American deserters, and even dungeon-like convents, such as those made famous in novels like Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures. In one of the novels of Joseph E. Badger, a Mexican priest and an Irish deserter even describe the act of desertion as “throwing off your uniform, and turning Catholic.”46 Popular poets also relied on anti-Catholic themes when writing about the war with Mexico. In La Gran Quivera; or, Rome Unmasked, James Webb Rogers wrote: Here oft assembled, in fandango glee The youth of Monterey to dance and sing, While vari-colored lamps from every tree, On beds of flowers their dreamy lustre fling. Here, too, her virgin priests their hours wing, Lascivious as goats, albeit less grave In their demeanor, till the matins ring, Then fly to hear confessions, and enslave Still more the burthened soul which they pretend to save! According to Rogers, Mexico displayed the “pious fraud” of Roman Catholic charitable institutions, as well as Catholic immorality and superstition. Poet William F. Small likewise criticized Mexican Catholic rites: Religion, too, o’erloaded with the forms That crafty priests for profit, put upon her, Displays no more those pure and holy charms Which once a simple world’s glad worship won her. . . . He described Mexican priests as those Who, while they rob, afflict and vex the nation, Insist upon its grateful admiration. Small depicted Mexicans in places as serpents, the implication being that, like the serpent in Genesis, they had tainted what should have been a paradise. Conversely, he portrayed Americans as “God’s own chosen people,” embarked on a “quest of liberty” to reestablish Eden in North America.47



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Anti-Catholic literature had thus come full circle with the Mexican-American War. Having initially played a critical role in forming American preconceptions about Mexico’s Catholic culture, it now capitalized on the public demand for writings that reported or even fictionalized the negative consequences of Roman Catholicism. Adamant nativists like Lewis C. Levin had needed little convincing, of course, that their suspicion of a Polk-Catholic conspiracy and opposition to Irish immigration had been right all along. More important, then, was the myriad ways in which the war offered seemingly concrete evidence to convince the wavering and non-sectarian about the truth of anti-Catholic tales and nativist conspiracy theories. The war may have thematically enhanced anti-Catholic literature, enlivened nativist conspiracism, and further clarified the anti-Catholic assumptions inherent to American identity, but politically it failed to boost the Native American Party’s hopes in the face of a Whig resurgence in 1848. As a result, the Native Americans had little choice but to rally behind the Whig presidential candidate, war hero Zachary Taylor. This strategy further attenuated their party by demonstrating its inability to field national candidates. From 1848 to 1850, debates over slavery in the Mexican Cession sealed the Native Americans’ demise, as accusations about the existence of a controlling slaveocracy seemed more believable to Americans than predictions of Catholic dominion west of the Mississippi River. After the Mexican-American War, slavery, not popery, threatened the West. The death of the Native American Party did not end nativism’s ability to sway Americans, for events soon gave rise to the strongest anti-Catholic party yet seen in American politics. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, along with the expansion and slavery issues it tried to address, shattered the Whig Party and caused discord in the northern Democracy. Unwilling to support either the antislavery stance of the new Republicans or the proslavery platform of the Democrats, many men shifted their allegiance to the American Party. More commonly known as the Know-Nothings, the strongest bond in this national coalition was anti-Catholic sentiment. So successful was the new party in state and local elections in 1854 and 1855 that many predicted voters would elect a Know-Nothing to the presidency in 1856. But just as they had done in 1850, anti-slavery advocates and abolitionists captured the country’s attention. The American Party responded during its 1856 campaign by mistakenly deemphasizing nativism, the one issue that had a chance of dampening sectionalism in the party. As a result its national

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influence quickly declined and voters elected to the presidency James K. Polk’s secretary of state, the Democrat James Buchanan. Secession and civil war were more tangible and urgent threats than papal intrigue. Nativism did not return as a political force until late in the nineteenth century. After 1848 evangelicalism only grew stronger and at least before the Civil War evangelicals remained mindful of Beecher’s warnings about the West. Toward the end of the Mexican-American War they had redefined their goals in light of an expected advent of republicanism only to find that they had to redefine them again. Maybe republicanism’s failure in Europe was only temporary. Maybe it was not. Regardless, they had a continent to save from barbarism and the Roman menace. In linking evangelical Protestant Christianity more closely than ever before to republican government and the Anglo-Saxon race, they lent their tacit approval to the conquest of more territory in the name of Manifest Destiny. Their dashed hopes for the 1848 revolutions in Europe led them to realize that spreading the Gospel and republican principles worldwide would be a long and arduous task. Yet they felt confident in knowing that as far as North America was concerned, they were off to a good start.

Notes

In t roduc t ion 1. By intention the scope of this book is concerned with what the interplay between religion and the war tells us about mid-nineteenth-century America. Even so, it inevitably touches on the Mexican religious perspective because it contains much about wartime American activities in Mexico. A monograph needs to be written about the ways in which religion shaped Mexican opinion not just of the war and the Americans but also of the dramatic Mexican defeat at the hands of a Protestant nation. 2. George Washington, “Farewell Address,” 1896. http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/ documents/farewell/transcript.html 3. Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1981), 9–24; Ander Stephanson, Manifest Destiny:  American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (New  York:  Hill and Wang, 1995), 4–5, 43, 52–55; John Higham, Strangers in the Land:  Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 9. Hietala and Horsman do not connect Mexico’s Roman Catholicism to the American denigration of Mexico. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 1–2, 208–12; Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design:  Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 1985), 154–66. 4. “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.” Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book IV, Chapter 7 (1011b-25). 5. Philip Jenkins, The New Anti-Catholicism:  The Last Acceptable Prejudice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 7.

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6. Richard J.  Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), xiv–5. 7. Lyman Beecher, A Plea for the West (Cincinnati:  Truman and Smith, 1835; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1977), 11, 41, 50–59, 76–77, 105, 110, 116–19, 135–6, 145–50. 8. Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 188. 9. Holt, Rise and Fall of the Whig Party, 188–9; Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860:  A  Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Macmillan, 1938; reprint, Chicago, Quadrangle Books, 1964), 201–2; Clay to Frelinghuysen, May 22, 1844, in Melba Porter Hay, Carol Reardon, et al., eds., The Papers of Clay (11 vols., Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1959–1992, 10: 63. 10. Frelinghuysen to Clay, 9 Nov. 1844, Millard Fillmore to Clay, 11 Nov. 1844, in Hay, Papers of Clay, 10: 144; Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2005), 574. 11. Edward J. Blum, Tracy Fessenden, et al., “American Religion and ‘Whiteness,’ ” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 19 (Winter 2009): 9, 11–15, 19; Edward J.  Blum, Reforging the White Republic:  Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865–1898 (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 3–11, 16–19, 213. For how Protestant and Jewish Americans negotiated the unsteady terrain between Jewishness and American identity, see Eric Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006). 12. Kevin Kenny, “Diaspora and Comparison: The Global Irish as a Case Study,” Journal of American History 90 (June 2003):  155; Edward Blum, Tracey Fessenden, et al. “American Religion and ‘Whiteness,’ ” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 19 (2009): 12; Patrick Q. Mason, The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South (Oxford University Press, 2011), 13; Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 3–6, 16–31. For a thorough look at the whitening of the Irish, see Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge Press, 1995). For details on the Mexican-American War’s contribution not only to the process of whitening, but also to the Mexicans’ entrance into Americans’ racial perceptions and fears, see Najia Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848–82 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 19–29. 13. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color:  European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge and London:  Harvard University Press, 1998), 40–48. 14. Washington Daily Union, June 5, 1847. 15. Robert Ryal Miller, Shamrock and Sword:  The Saint Patrick Battalion in the U.S.-Mexican War (Norman:  University of Oklahoma Press, 1989); Peter



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F.  Stevens, The Rogue’s March:  John Riley and the St. Patrick’s Battalion (Washington: Brassey’s Press, 1998); Dennis Joseph Wynn, “The San Patricios and the United States-Mexican War of 1846–48” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Loyola University, 1982); The Chieftains featuring Ry Cooder, San Patricio (Hear Music, 2010); One Man’s Hero, Orion Pictures, 1999. 16. Dennis Joseph Wynn, “The San Patricios and the United States-Mexican War of 1846–1848” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Loyola University, 1982), 35, 205–6; John Porter Bloom, “With the American Army into Mexico, 1846–1848” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Emory University, 1956), 175; Peter F. Stevens, The Rogue’s March: John Riley and the St. Patrick’s Battalion (Washington: Brassey’s Press, 1999), 76, 93, 295. 17. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1964), 21. 18. [Luther Giddings,] Sketches of the Campaign in Northern Mexico in 1846–1847. By an Officer of the First Regiment of Ohio Volunteers (New York: George P. Putnam and Company, 1853), 54; Joseph W.  Revere, A Tour of Duty in California (New York: C.S. Francis and Co., 1849), 9; John F. Meginness Journal, March 15, 1848, John F. Meginness Papers, University of Texas at Arlington, Special Collections; [Giddings], Sketches, 242; George T. M. Davis, Autobiography, 293; Robert Anderson to Lisa, February 13, 1848, Mexican War Collection, University of Texas at Arlington, Special Collections; Francis Collins, ed., “Journal of Francis Collins,” 88–89; Taylor, The Broad Pennant, 110–11; William Seaton Henry, Campaign Sketches, 122, 241–2; Robert Ryal Miller, ed., The Mexican War Journal of Ralph W. Kirkham, 32, 40; A Prisoner, Encarnacion Prisoners, 59–60; George Ballentine, Autobiography, 165, 210.

C h a p t er   1 1. William C.  Brownlee, Popery:  An Enemy to Civil and Religious Liberty, and Dangerous to Our Republic (New York: John S. Taylor, 1836), 121. 2. Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Macmillan, 1938; reprint, New York: Quadrangle Books, 1964), 19–24; Francis D. Cogliano, No King, No Popery: Anti-Catholicism in Revolutionary New England (Wesport and London: Greenwood Press, 1995), 3. Although Jay Dolan emphasized a sort of “republican interlude” between the Revolutionary War and the rise of anti-Catholicism in the 1830s, recent historians who have reexamined incidents first identified by Billington find much more complexity in the tale of the growth of religious liberty in the United States. For example, see Jason Duncan, Citizens or Papists?:  The Politics of Anti-Catholicism in New York, 1685–1821 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005)  and Michael S.  Carter, “Under the Benign Sun of Toleration:  Mathew Carey, the Douai Bible, and Catholic Print Culture, 1789–1791,” Journal of the Early Republic (Fall 2007): 437–69.

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3. Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 53–68. Historian Bruce Dorsey rightly observes “the irony behind this anti-Catholic literature was that in an effort to expose the supposed sexual iniquities of Catholics, nativists produced a form of popular pornography for a broad antebellum reading public.” Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), 238. 4. Lyman Beecher, Lectures on Political Atheism and Kindred Subjects (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1852), 136, 189–90, 320, 326, 331–34; Lyman Beecher, The Works of the Rev. Lyman Beecher (3 vols., Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1852–1853), 2: 417–22. 5. Billington, Protestant Crusade, 68–76; Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 238–40; Nancy Lusignan Schultz, Fire and Roses: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834 (New York: The Free Press, 2000), 105. 6. Schultz, Fire and Roses, 105. 7. Samuel Danforth, A Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge:  S.G.  and M.F., 1671), in A.  W. Plumstead, editor, The Wall and the Garden:  Selected Massachusetts Election Sermons, 1670–1775 (Minneapolis-St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 1968), 70; Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1956), 1–15. 8. Lyman Beecher, A Plea for the West (Cincinnati:  Truman and Smith, 1835; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1977), 11, 41, 50–59, 76–77, 105, 110, 116–19, 135– 36, 145–50. 9. Samuel F. B. Morse, Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States (New York: Leavitt, Lord, and Co., 1835), 51, 53, 55, 104–5, 119; Samuel F. B. Morse, Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States through Foreign Immigration, and the Present State of the Naturalization Laws (New York: E. B. Clayton, 1835; reprint, New  York:  Arno Press, 1969), 8–20, 28; Kenneth Silverman, Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse (Cambridge, Mass.: De Capo Press, 2003), 140; Billington, Protestant Crusade, 128. 10. Billington, Protestant Crusade, 119–20. 11. Billington, Protestant Crusade, 119–20; Silverman, Lightning Man, 135. The editor of the anti-Catholic newspaper, Downfall of Babylon, Samuel B.  Smith, elaborated greatly on Morse’s conspiracy theory in his 1836 book, The Flight of Popery from Rome to the West (New York: n.p., 1836). Smith described in great detail how the Pope planned to settle in the West and lead an army of Catholic immigrants against the American republic. 12. Harry L.  Watson, Liberty and Power:  The Politics of Jacksonian America (New  York:  The Noonday Press, 1990), 43–45; Samuel F.  B. Morse to R.  S. Willington, May 20, 1835, in Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and His Journals, 2 vols. (1914; reprint on demand, Filiquarian Publishing, 2011), 1:26. 13. Watson, Liberty and Power, 45–46.



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14. Patrick Carey, An Immigrant Bishop: John England’s Adaptation of Irish Catholicism to American Republicanism (Yonkers: U.S. Catholic Historical Society, 1979), 89; Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, §14–20. 15. Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, §17–20; Romans 13:2. 16. Carey, An Immigrant Bishop, 89–91, 163; Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 47. See Orestes Brownson, The American Republic:  Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny (New York: P. O’Shea, 1866) and John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths:  Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (New  York:  Sheed and Ward, 1960). 17. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1964), 21. 18. Nathan Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), 170–75. 19. Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 99–108. 20. Michael Feldberg, The Turbulent Era:  Riot and Disorder in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 9–18; New Englander, July 7, 1844. 21. Feldberg, Turbulent Era, 19–20; Michael Feldberg, The Philadelphia Riots of 1844: A Study in Ethnic Conflict (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1975), 102–7. 22. Feldberg, Turbulent Era, 21–23; Feldberg, The Philadelphia Riots, 107–14. 23. David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828–1861:  Toward Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 218–19. 24. The Truth Unveiled; or, A Calm and Impartial Exposition of the Origin and Immediate Cause of the Terrible Riots in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: M. Fithian, 1844), found in Raymond H. Schmandt, ed., “A Selection of Sources Dealing with the Nativist Riots of 1844,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 80 (1969): 152–55, 166–75; Sr. Mary Gonzaga to Mother Xavier, quoted in Schmandt, “A Selection of Sources,” 109; Freeman’s Journal, May 11, 1844. 25. Christian Reflector, May 23, 1844; Presbyterian, June 15, 1844; Peter A.  Browne, Premonitory Letters, upon the Subject of Romanism and the Pope (Philadelphia: Barrett and Jones, 1846), 8–9; The Full Particulars of the Late Riots with a View of the Burning of the Catholic Churches (Philadelphia:  n.p., 1844), found in Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 80 (1969): 116; “Native Americans,” broadside, found in The Full Particulars, 117–18; New Englander, July 7, 1844. 26. Diary of Bishop Francis Patrick Kenrick, July 4, 1844, quoted in Schmandt, “A Selection of Sources,” 104. 27. Feldberg, Turbulent Era, 28–32; Feldberg, The Philadelphia Riots, 145–57; Charles Sellers, James K. Polk, Continentalist, 1843–1846 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 152–53. 28. J. T. Buckingham, Golden Sentiments: Being an Address to the Native Americans of New York. . . Together with the Declaration of Sentiments of the Native Americans

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of Boston (Boston: H. B. Skinner, 1844), 2–6; Ira M. Leonard, “New York City Politics, 1841–1844:  Nativism and Reform” (Ph.D. Dissertation, New  York University, 1965), iv–17. 29. Buckingham, Golden Sentiments, 8–12. 30. Ibid,. 10. 31. Proceedings of the Native American State Convention, Held at Harrisburg, February 22, 1845 (Philadelphia: William F. Geddes, 1845), 6, 8–21.

C h a p t er   2 1. Waddy Thompson, Recollections of Mexico (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846), 38–45, 55, 101–15. 2. Robert J. Breckinridge, “Romanism—Political and Religious,” in Papism in the United States in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: David Owen and Son, 1841), 19–21, 26–29. 3. John N. McLeod, Protestantism: The Parent and Guardian of Civil and Religious Liberty. A Lecture, Delivered, March 26, 1843, under Appointment of the New York Protestant Reformation Society (New  York:  Robert Carter, 1843), 16–21, 25–26, 30–33; L. Giustiniani, Papal Rome as It Is. By a Roman (Baltimore: Publication Rooms, 1843; Philadelphia: James M. Campbell, 1845), 194, 215–30, 243. 4. Congressional Globe, 28 Cong., 1 Sess., 525; Ibid., 28 Cong., 2 Sess., 43; The Declaration of Independence Made by the Delegates of the People of Texas, in General Convention, at Washington, on March 2d, 1836 (Houston: Office of the Telegraph, 1838), 5. Belser switched to the Whig Party in 1848 and by the mid-1850s had become a leading member of the American Party, serving as president of the Alabama State American Republican Convention in 1855. 5. Congressional Globe, 28 Cong., 1 Sess., Appendix, 557. 6. Congressional Globe, 28 Cong., 1 Sess., Appendix, 576; Congressional Globe, 28 Cong., 1 Sess., 655. 7. Congressional Globe, 28 Cong., 1 Sess., Appendix, 446, 450. 8. Jason K. Duncan, Citizens or Papists? The Politics of Anti-Catholicism in New York, 1685–1821 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 39–41, 72. 9. Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Macmillan, 1938; reprint, New York: Quadrangle Books, 1964), 37. By 1815, according to Daniel Walker Howe, Catholics already numbered around 150,000. Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 198. 10. Congressional Globe, 28 Cong., 2 Sess., 96–97, 227, 286. 11. Congressional Globe, 28 Cong., 1 Sess., Appendix, 557, 726; ibid., 28 Cong., 2 Sess., 43, 86, 393. 12. Ibid., 236, 299, 622, 764–73.



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13. Congressional Globe, 28 Cong., 2 Sess., Appendix, 384, 410; Congressional Globe, 28 Cong., 2 Sess., 335. 14. Congressional Globe, 28 Cong., 2 Sess., 281, 332; Congressional Globe, 28 Cong., 2 Sess., Appendix, 388–9. 15. Charles Joseph Latrobe, The Rambler in Mexico (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1836), 24–25, 87, 115–8, 125–27; Congressional Globe, 28 Cong., 2 Sess., Appendix, 388; Henry Stuart Foote, Texas and the Texans: Or Advance of the Anglo-Americans to the South-West (2 vols., Philadelphia: Thomas and Copperthwait, 1841), 1: 13–15, 24–32, 82–91, 103–10; 2: 7, 23, 27, 33–37, 56. 16. William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico (3 vols., Chicago: Hooper, Clarke, and Co., 1843; reprint, London: George Rutledge and Sons, 1874), 1: 45–71; Lyon Oliver Rathbun, “The Representation of Mexicans and the Transformation of American Political Culture, 1787–1848” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1994), 240–48. 17. Prescott, History, 1: 71, 246–7, 305, 343; 3: 181. 18. Ibid., 3: 298–99. 19. Climate and latitude as the ultimate causes of congenital inferiority were common explanations among British and American writers in the mid-nineteenth century for the political instability of Mexico and South America. For an exploration of a much stronger connection between freedom, religion, and whiteness, on the one hand, and blackness, enslavement, and Catholicism, on the other, see Edward J. Blum, Tracy Fessenden, et al., “American Religion and ‘Whiteness,’ ” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 19 (2009):1–35. 20. George Wilkins Kendall, Narrative of the Texas and Santa Fe Expedition (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1844), 1: 337–41, 378; 2: 34, 112–14, 214–17, 238, 294–95, 340–45, 365–66, 395. 21. Brantz Mayer, Mexico as It Was and as It Is (New York: J. Winchester, New World Press, 1844), 151–52, 327–31, 347–55. 22. William Preston Stapp, The Prisoners of Perote, Containing a Journal Kept by the Author, Who was Captured at Mier, December 25, 1842, and Released from Perote, May 16, 1844 (Philadelphia: G. B. Zieber and Company, 1845), 118, 131–32, 139–44. 23. For a view that argues the opposite, see John Higham, Strangers in the Land:  Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 9. 24. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 2008), 87. 25. On Jews as outsiders and a racial/ethnic conundrum under the category of “white,” see Eric Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness:  Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), 6–31. 26. Steven E. Woodworth, Manifest Destinies: America’s Westward Expansion and the Road to the Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 91–104; Lilburn Boggs, Missouri Executive Order 44 (1838).

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1. The United States Democratic Review 6 (November 1839): 426–30. 2. Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 524–29. 3. Paul H. Bergeron, The Presidency of James K. Polk (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987), 18. 4. Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 188–89; Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Macmillan, 1938; reprint, Chicago, Quadrangle Books, 1964), 201–2. 5. Richard Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993; reprint, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 40; Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, 188–89. 6. Holt, Rise and Fall of the Whig Party, 188–89; Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 201–2; Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics, 19. 7. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics, 19, 85; Holt, Rise and Fall of the Whig Party, 188; Freeman’s Journal, Aug. 24, 1844. 8. Henry Clay to Theodore Frelinghuysen, May 22, 1844, Clay to Thomas Ewing, June 19, 1844, Clay to George M. Davis, August 31, 1844, in The Papers of Henry Clay, ed. Melba Porter Hay (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1991), 10: 63, 71, 107. See Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 573. Wilentz argues that Whigs and their Native American allies “planted stories that as president Clay would tighten up immigration and naturalization laws,” and that Clay waited too long “to distance himself from the nativists.” Yet Clay’s own letters reveal that Clay himself first planted these stories, deciding only later to squelch them. 9. Paul H. Bergeron, The Presidency of James K. Polk (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987), 12–16. 10. Charles Sellers, James K. Polk, Continentalist, 1843–1846 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 159. 11. Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 573–74; Holt, Rise and Fall of the Whig Party, 197. 12. Frelinghuysen to Clay, 9 Nov. 1844, Millard Fillmore to Clay, 11 Nov. 1844, in Hay, Papers of Clay, 10; 143–45; Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 574. 13. U.S. Statutes at Large 5: 797–98; Sellers, Polk, Continentalist, 205–8; 215. 14. Congressional Globe, 28 Cong., 1 Sess., Appendix, 557, 726; ibid., 28 Cong., 2 Sess., 43, 86, 393. 15. Sellers, Polk, Continentalist, 225; Justin H.  Smith, The War with Mexico, 2  vols. (New  York:  Macmillan, 1919; reprint, Gloucester:  Peter Smith, 1963), 1:86–101; Polk to William H.  Marcy, July 28, 1845, Polk to George M.  Dallas, August 28, 1845, in Correspondence of James K. Polk, ed. Wayne Culter, 12 vols. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), 10:107–8, 189–91.



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16. Polk to Dallas, August 28, Anson Jones to Polk, November 112, Polk to Sam Houston, Dec. 29, 1845, in Culter, Correspondence of Polk, 10:189–91, 368, 445– 46; Bergeron, Presidency of Polk, 61. 17. The United States Democratic Review 6 (November 1839): 426–30; Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, §14–20. 18. United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17 (July-August 1845): 5–10. There is no evidence that O’Sullivan was active in New York Catholic circles. 19. Thomas Jefferson Farnham, Mexico:  Its Geography—Its People—and Its Institutions (New York: H. Long and Brother, 1846), preface, 5–28, 69–74, 80. Farnham also contended that because of the Indian superstitions prevalent in Mexican Catholicism, “an American Catholic would scarcely recognize it as his own religion.” As the journals and letters of American soldiers in the Mexican-American War reveal, in this he was quite wrong. 20. Albert M. Gilliam, Travels over the Table Lands and Cordilleras of Mexico, During the Years 1843 and 1844 (Philadelphia: John W. Moore, 1846), 68–69, 72, 87–88, 109–11, 250, 280–81, 349, 356–61. 21. Waddy Thompson, Recollections of Mexico (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846), 8–9, 239. 22. Ibid., 54–55, 58, 91, 101, 151, 186, 204, 243. 23. Ibid., vi, 38–45, 55, 101–15. 24. Ibid., 171, 235–39, 245. 25. The American Protestant (June 1845): 1–5; (July 1845): 40; (August 1845): 98–105; (November 1845): 164, 171–74; (December 1845): 206, 222; (March 1846): 289; (April 1846): 323; (May 1846): 23; Circular: To Christians and Citizens of the United States (New  York:  American Protestant Society, 1847), 16; “Civis,” Romanism Incompatible with Republican Institutions (New  York:  American Protestant Society, 1845), 52, 56–58, 79, 91–92. 26. James K. Polk, Message to Congress, May 11, 1846.

C h a p t er   4 1. An American Officer, The Rough and Ready Songster (New  York:  Nafis and Cornish, ca. 1848), 20. 2. John S. D. Eisenhower, So Far from God: The U.S. War with Mexico, 1846–1848 (New  York:  Random House, 1989; reprint, Norman:  University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 71–75. 3. Ibid., 81–84. 4. John C. Pinheiro, Manifest Ambition: James K. Polk and Civil-Military Relations during the Mexican War (Westport, Connecticut and London: Praeger Security International, 2007), 41–43. 5. Maurice Garland Fulton, ed., Diary and Letters of Josiah Gregg (2  vols., Norman:  University of Oklahoma Press, 1941, 1944), 1:  199–200; Douglas W. Richmond, “Andrew Trussell in Mexico: A Soldier’s Wartime Impressions,

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1847–8,” in Essays on the Mexican War, ed. Douglas W.  Richmond (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1986), 96; Baptist Banner and Western Pioneer, July 16, 1846. 6. Richard F.  Pourade, ed., The Sign of the Eagle:  A  View of Mexico—1830–1855 (San Diego:  Union-Tribune Publishing Co., 1970), 31, 54; Ulysses S.  Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.  S. Grant (2  vols., New  York:  Charles L.  Webster and Company, 1894), 1:  53; Ulysses S.  Grant to Julia Grant, July 28, 1846, in The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, ed. John Y. Simon (24 vols. to date, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967– ), 1: 99. 7. James Lynch, With Stevenson to California (Tierra Redonda: n.p., ca. 1896), 34. 8. Daily American Star, February 23, 1848. 9. Horace Greeley, ed., The Writings of Cassius M. Clay (New York: Harper, 1848), 475–76; Cassius M.  Clay to Mrs. Clay, December 29, 1847, Cassius M.  Clay Papers, Filson Historical Society, Louisville; Liberator, August 21, 1846. 10. John Blout Robertson, Reminiscences of a Campaign in Mexico; by a Member of “The Bloody-First” (Nashville: John York and Co., 1849), 101–2, 211. 11. George Winston Smith and Charles Judah, eds., Chronicles of the Gringos: The U.S. Army in the Mexican War, 1846–1848, Accounts of Eyewitnesses and Combatants (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1968), 57–58. 12. Wiley Pope Hale to Mother, July 26, 1846, Mexican War Collection, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville; Ruth C.  Carter, ed., For Honor, Glory, and Union: The Mexican and Civil War Letters of Brig. Gen. William Haines Lytle (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 52; Robertson, Reminiscences, 101–3. 13. Joseph E.  Chance, ed., The Mexican War Journal of Captain Franklin Smith (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991), 11. 14. [Luther Giddings], Sketches of the Campaign in Northern Mexico. In Eighteen Hundred Forty-Six and Seven. By an Officer of the First Regiment of Ohio Volunteers (New York: George P. Putnam and Co., 1853), 53–54. 15. Thomas Jefferson Farnham, Mexico:  Its Geography—Its People—and Its Institutions (New York: H. Long and Brother, 1846); Thomas Jefferson Farnham, Travels in the Californias, and Scenes on the Pacific Ocean (New York: Saxton and Miles, 1844); Albert M.  Gilliam, Travels over the Table Lands and Cordilleras of Mexico, During the Years 1843 and 1844 (Philadelphia:  John W.  Moore, 1846); Samuel Gregory, Gregory’s History of Mexico (Boston:  F.  Gleason, 1847); George Wilkins Kendall, Narrative of the Texas and Santa Fe Expedition (2 vols., New York: Harper and Brothers, 1844); Brantz Mayer, Mexico as it Was and as It Is (New York: J. Winchester, New World Press, 1844); William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico (3  vols., Chicago:  Hooper, Clarke, and Co., 1843; reprint, London:  George Rutledge and Sons, 1874); Waddy Thompson, Recollections of Mexico (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846). 16. Christian Reflector, June 25, 1846; Baptist Banner and Western Pioneer, June 17, July 2, 1846; Journal of Commerce, July 15, 1846; Christian Advocate and Journal,



Notes

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October 27, 1847; Daily American Star, December 3, 4, 1847; Boston Recorder, October 21, 1847; New York Herald, May 28, 1847; New York Tribune, 2, May 3, 1846; North American (Mexico), January 12–14, 1848. 17. National Intelligencer, June 8, 1846. 18. John R.  Kenly, Memoirs of a Maryland Volunteer. War with Mexico (Philadelphia:  J.B. Lippincott and Co., 1873), 293–94, 417; H.  Judge Moore, Scott’s Campaign in Mexico (Charleston: J.B. Nixon, 1849), 40–43; Madison Mills Diary, July 31, 1847, Filson Historical Society; [Giddings], Sketches, 26; Fitch Taylor, The Broad Pennant: Or, a Cruise in the United States Flag Ship of the Gulf Squadron, During the Mexican Difficulties. . . (New York: Leavitt, Trow, and Co., 1848), 70; William Preston Journal, November 27, 1847, Preston Family Papers, Typescript, Filson Historical Society; John F. Meginness Journal, February 26, 1848, University of Texas at Arlington, Special Collections; Richard McSherry, El Puchero: Or, a Mixed Dish from Mexico. . . (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, and Co., 1850), 137, 146–47; William S.  Henry, Campaign Sketches of the War with Mexico (New  York:  Harper and Brothers, 1847), 114; Joseph E.  Chance, ed., Mexico Under Fire, Being the Diary of Samuel Ryan Curtis. . . 1846–1847 (Ft. Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1994), 61. 19. William McCarty, ed., National Songs, Ballads, and Other Patriotic Poetry, Chiefly Relating to the War of 1846 (Philadelphia: William McCarty, 1846), 36. 20. An American Officer, The Rough and Ready Songster (New  York:  Nafis and Cornish, ca. 1848), 20. 21. American Star, November 21, 1847. 22. Laura Wilson Polk Tate to James K. Polk, Sept. 14, James K. Polk to Laura Wilson Polk Tate, Sept. 24, 1846, in Correspondence of James K. Polk, ed. Wayne Culter, 12 vols. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), 11: 318–19, 327–28. 23. Milo Milton Quaife, ed., The Diary of James K.  Polk During His Presidency, 1845–1849, 4 vols. (Chicago: A.C. McClurg and Company, 1910), 1: 408; James Buchanan to John R. G. Hassard, November 8, 1864, in Thomas F. Meehan, “Archbishop Hughes and Mexico,” Historical Records and Studies 19 (1929): 33–34. 24. Quaife, ed., The Diary of Polk, 1: 409–10; James Buchanan to John R. G. Hassard, November 8, 1864, in Meehan, “Archbishop Hughes and Mexico,” 34. Bishop Hughes later served the U.S. government as an envoy to England during the Civil War. 25. Quaife, ed., The Diary of Polk, 1: 411. 26. Ibid., 1:  411; William L.  Marcy to John McElroy, May 21, 1846, in Thomas F. Meehan, “Catholics in the War with Mexico,” Historical Records and Studies 12 (1918): 61–62. 27. William Marcy to Zachary Taylor, May 29, 1846, in Meehan, “Catholics in the War,” 62–63; Quaife, Diary of Polk, 1:408–11; John McElroy, “Chaplains for the Mexican War—1846,” Woodstock Letters 16 (1887): 227. 28. New York Herald, May 29, July 2, 1846; Billington, Protestant Crusade, 148–57.

184

Notes

29. Boston Daily Advertiser, May 30, 1846; Jonesborough Whig and Independent Journal, June 10, 1846; New York Tribune, June 6, 1846. 30. Philadelphia Daily Sun, July 7, 22, 1846. 31. Ibid., June, 3, 9, 18, July 22, 1846. 32. Ibid., July 18, September 16, 1846, February 10, 1847. 33. Freeman’s Journal, May 30, 1846; New York Herald, May 21, 1846. 34. Freeman’s Journal, May 30, 1846; New York Herald, May 21, 1846; Albert Lombard, The “High Private,” with a Full and Exciting History of the New York Volunteers (New York: privately printed, 1848), 8; DeAlva Stanwood Alexander, A Political History of the State of New York, 3 vols. (Port Washington, N.Y.: I. J. Friedman, 1909), 2: 178, 325, 333. 35. Freeman’s Journal, May 30, 1846; Boston Pilot, May 23, June 20, 1846. 36. Samuel E. Chamberlain, My Confession (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956), 31; H. Judge Moore Diary, January 24, 1847, as quoted in Paul W. Foos, “Mexican Wars,” 197; Robertson, Reminiscences, 115. 37. Jonesborough Whig and Independent Journal, June 10, 17, 27, 1846. 38. Ibid., July 8, 1846. 39. U.S. Catholic Miscellany, June 13, 1846. 40. Catholic Telegraph, October 28, 1847; Freeman’s Journal, April 10, 1847; U.S. Catholic Miscellany, April 24, 1847. 41. U.S. Catholic Magazine (October 1846), 522–24, 538–43. 42. Catholic Telegraph, July 23, 1846, October 28, 1847; U.S. Catholic Magazine (May 1846), 263, 265. 43. U.S. Catholic Miscellany, July 18, 1846; Boston Pilot, July 4, 1846. 44. Pinheiro, Manifest Ambition, 114–120, 201. For the munity and Frémont’s ensuing trial, see ibid., 121–26. 45. Will Fowler, Santa Anna of Mexico (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 250–55. 46. Robert H. Ferrell, ed., Monterrey Is Ours! The Mexican War Letters of Lieutenant Dana, 1845–1847 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990), 122. 47. Ibid. 48. Catholic Telegraph, May 27, 1848; Fr. Rey to Fr. McElroy, January 4, 1847, in “Chaplains for the Mexican War—1846” Woodstock Letters 17 (1888): 158. 49. James K.  Polk to William H.  Polk, 2 Oct. 1846, in Wayne Culter, editor, Correspondence of James K.  Polk, 11  vols. (Knoxville:  University of Tennessee Press, 2004), 11:336–38. 50. Pinheiro, Manifest Ambition, 46, 55. 51. Henry, Campaign Sketches, 222; Reid, Scouting Expeditions 226; Allen, Mexican Treacheries, 7. 52. Chance, ed., Mexico Under Fire, 30, 61,72, 84–5, 132–33, 180–81. 53. William L.  Marcy to Zachary Taylor, March 2, 1846, in Senate Executive Documents, 29 Cong., 1 Sess., No. 337, “Message of the President of the United States,” 84 (Ser. 476).



Notes

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54. House Executive Documents, 30 Cong., 1 Sess., No. 60, “Messages of the President of the United States,” 120, 145, 150, 167, 182, 262, 287, 911, 937, 973, 1054–59, 1264–65 (Ser. 520); House Executive Documents, 30 Cong., 1 Sess., No. 41, “Notes of a Military Reconnaissance,” 40–1 (Ser. 517); House Executive Documents, 29 Cong., 2 Sess., no. 19, “Occupation of Mexican Territory,” 19–21, 102–3 (Ser. 499); Fayette Robinson, An Account of the Organization of the Army of the United States, 2  vols. (Philadelphia:  E.H. Butler and Co., 1848), 1:  271; Boston Daily Advertiser, March 11, 1847; Daily American Star, December 29, 1847; Matamoros Reveille, July 15, 1846; National Intelligencer, October 5, 6, 1846, March 9, April 12, 1847; New Orleans Daily Picayune, September 11, 1846, April 13, May 20, 1847; New York Herald, May 22, 1846, November 2, 1847, January 8, February 13, 1848; New York Observer, October 30, 1847; The Presbyterian, May 30, 1846; Washington Daily Union, January 10, 1848; Boston Pilot, April 18, 1846. 55. Benjamin Blied, “Catholic Aspects of the Mexican War, 1846–8,” Social Justice Review 40 (1948): 367; Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair, 25–27; Boston Pilot, April 18, 1846; Catholic Telegraph April 2, 9, 16, 30, 1846; New York Herald, July 2, 1846; New  York Observer, August 22, 1846; U.S. Catholic Miscellany, April 18, 1846.

C h a p t er   5 1. Thomas O. Larkin to James Buchanan, June 18, 1846, Dispatches from United States Consuls in Mexico, Record Group 59, National Archives. 2. Washington Daily Union, April 13, 1847. 3. New  York Herald, September 13, 1847; Philadelphia Public Ledger, August 20, September 4, 1846; U.S. Magazine and Democratic Review (February 1847): 100; (April 1847): 296–99; (August 1847): 93–101. 4. Congressional Globe, 29 Cong., 2 Sess., 459. 5. Congressional Globe, 29 Cong., 2 Sess., Appendix, 130; Catholic Telegraph, December 9, 16, 1847; New York Herald, November 10, 1847; New York Tribune, November 30, December 2, 1847; U.S. Magazine and Democratic Review (April 1848):  301–8; Proceedings of a Public Meeting of the Citizens and County of Philadelphia, Held January 6, 1848, to Express Their Cordial Approval of the Liberal Policy of Pope Pius IX (Philadelphia: Joseph Severns and Co., 1848), 3–24, passim. 6. National Intelligencer, June 12, October 31, 1846, June, 17, 30, October 18, 1847; Nashville Whig, May 21, 1846. 7. Meredith P. Gentry, Speech of Mr. M. P. Gentry, of Tenn., upon the Resolution to Refer so Much of the President’s Message as Relates to the Mexican War. . . (no publication data, ca. 1847), 2–5, 13–6; Congressional Globe, 29 Cong., 1 Sess., Appendix, 949–50, 956. 8. John C. Pinheiro, Manifest Ambition: James K. Polk and Civil-Military Relations during the Mexican War (Westport: Praeger Security International, 2007), 47–57.

186

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9. Congressional Globe, 29 Cong., 1 Sess., Appendix, 683, 687. 10. Congressional Globe, 29 Cong., 1 Sess., Appendix, 763; Luther Giddings, Speech of Mr. Giddings, of Ohio, upon. . . the Mexican War (Washington, D.C.: J. and G. S. Gideon, 1846), 12. 11. Thomas Corwin, “Speech of Mr. Corwin of Ohio, on the Mexican War,” in Speeches on the War with Mexico, 1846-8 (no publication date, ca. 1848), 8, 18–19; Washington Daily Union, August 12, 1847. 12. Congressional Globe, 29 Cong., 2 Sess., Appendix, 132–33. 13. Boston Pilot, May 29, 1847; Freeman’s Journal, June 27, September 26, 1846, April 24, May 1, 1847. 14. Congressional Globe, 29 Cong., 1 Sess., 813. 15. Congressional Globe, 29 Cong., 2 Sess., Appendix, 387. 16. Philadelphia Daily Sun, July 4, 1846. 17. Philadelphia Daily Sun, 30 June, 6, July 17, 1846; Lawrence J.  McCaffrey, The Irish Catholic Diaspora in America (Washington, D.C.:  Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 92; Judith Amanda Hunter, “Before Pluralism:  The Political Culture of Nativism in Antebellum Philadelphia” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University, 1991), 10, 32, 44, 51, 104–9, 178–80. 18. Philadelphia Daily Sun, August 14, 1846, February 26, March 17, 1847. 19. New York Journal of Commerce, May 15, 19, 27, 30, June 3, 5, 10, 20, July 17, 1846. 20. New York Journal of Commerce, August 5, 15, 1846. 21. New York Journal of Commerce, April 7, May 5, 15, June 2, 30, 1847. 22. Will Fowler, Santa Anna of Mexico (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 262–63. 23. Fowler, Santa Anna, 263–65; Santa Anna, quoted in Fowler, Santa Anna, 265. 24. Ibid., 266–70; Otis A.  Singletary, The Mexican War (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 78–81; John S. D. Eisenhower, So Far from God: The U.S. War with Mexico, 1846–1848 (New York: Random House, 1989; reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 278–83. 25. Fowler, Santa Anna, 271. 26. Washington Daily Union, May 11, 1847; Freeman’s Journal, May 22, 1847; New Orleans Daily Picayune, October 11, 15, 1846; New York Tribune, May 14, 21, 1847. 27. Washington Daily Union, May 18, 1847; Catholic Telegraph, May 27, June 3, 1847; U.S. Catholic Magazine (September 1847): 559; United States Catholic Miscellany, May 22, June 12, 19, 26, 1847. 28. Freeman’s Journal, June 12, 1847. 29. National Intelligencer, May, 5, 17, 19, June 9, 1847. 30. Milo Milton Quaife, ed., The Diary of James K. Polk During His Presidency, 1845– 1849. 4 vols. (Chicago: A.C. McClurg and Company, 1910), 1:351–53. 31. New York Evening Express, May 14, 16, 22, June 22, 1847; Freeman’s Journal, June 26, July 3, 1847.



Notes

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32. Jonesborough Whig and Independent Journal, July 9, October 13, 1847. 33. National Intelligencer, July 2, 1847; Washington Daily Union, June 2, 29, July 1, 1847. 34. Boston Daily Advertiser, August 4, 1847; Christian Observer, August 6, 1847; Jonesborough Whig and Independent Journal, August 4, 11, 1847; Journal of Commerce, August 10, 1847; National Intelligencer, July 27, 1847, August 7, 1847; New  York Herald, August 1, 5, 1847; Philadelphia Public Ledger, August 2, 1847; Washington Daily Union, August 9, 1847; McCalla, Romanism Not “A Religion which Comes from God” (Philadelphia:  J.  Shipley Jones, 1846); Peter A.  Browne, Premonitory Letters, upon the Subject of Romanism and the Pope, Addressed to the People of the United States (Philadelphia:  Barrett and Jones, 1846). 35. Quaife, ed., The Diary of Polk, 3: 103–5. 36. Ibid., 2: 187–91; Boston Pilot, August 28, 1847; Freeman’s Journal, August 7, 14, 1847; U.S. Catholic Magazine (September 1847):  504–5; United States Catholic Miscellany, August 7, 1847. 37. “Notes now Published on the Revd. McCalla’s false Publication about the Catholic Chaplains—1847,” James K. Polk Papers, Library of Congress; Washington Daily Union, August 6, 7, 1847. 38. Freeman’s Journal, Aug. 7, 1847; John Hughes to Polk, August 10, 1847, Polk Papers, LC. 39. Singletary, The Mexican War, 89–91. 40. As of 2012, a monument to the San Patricio’s leader, John Riley, stood in his hometown of Clifden, Ireland, and in Mexico City. In Clifden, both a street and a festival are named after the San Patricios. 41. Robert Ryal Miller, Shamrock and Sword:  The Saint Patrick Battalion in the U.S.-Mexican War (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 23; Dennis Joseph Wynn, “The San Patricios and the United States-Mexican War of 1846– 1848” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Loyola University, 1982), 29–33, 35, 45–6, 49–51, 205–6; John Porter Bloom, “With the American Army into Mexico, 1846–1848” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Emory University, 1956), 175–76; Peter F.  Stevens, The Rogue’s March: John Riley and the St. Patrick’s Battalion (Washington: Brassey’s Press, 1999), 58, 76, 93, 290–95; Freeman’s Journal, February 6, 1847; New York Herald, May 17, 1846; Paul Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair: Soldiers and Social Conflict during the Mexican-American War (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 67. 42. Pedro de Ampudia, “Army of the North,” 1846, broadside, University of Texas at Arlington, Special Collections; Antonio López de Santa Anna, “Headquarters,” April 1847, broadside, “The President of the Mexican Republic to the troops engaged in the Army of the United States of America,” August 15, 1847, broadside, ibid.; Antonio López de Santa Anna, “Mexicans to Catholic Irishmen,”

188

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1847, broadside, in New Orleans Daily Picayune, October 7, 1847; New  York Herald, October 17, 1847. 43. Boston Pilot, May 23, December 12, 1846, June, 3, 10, 17, 26, July 24, 1847. 44. Justin H. Smith, The War with Mexico, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan Co., 1919), 2: 318–19; Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair, 68–69; 90–96; Wynn, “The San Patricios and the United States-Mexican War of 1846–1848,” 29–33, 35, 45–46, 49–51, 205–6; Bloom, “With the American Army into Mexico, 1846–1848,” 175–76. 45. William Orr and Robert Ryal Miller, eds., An Immigrant Soldier in the Mexican War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995), 55, 73. 46. Semmes, The Campaign of General Scott, 316; Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair, 169–70; Boston Pilot, May 1, 1847; Catholic Telegraph, October 22, 1846; Freeman’s Journal, October 9, 1847; New Orleans Daily Picayune, October 28, 1846; National Intelligencer, September 17, 1847; New York Herald, June 13, 1846, September 19, 1847. 47. Miller, Shamrock and Sword, 33–34, 174. 48. New Orleans Daily Picayune, September 9, 1847; Chamberlain, My Confession, 124; [Giddings], Sketches, 276–77; Orr and Miller, eds., An Immigrant Soldier, 55; S. Compton Smith, Chile Con Carne; Or, the Camp and Field (New York: Miller and Curtis, 1857), 247. 49. Anderson, An Artillery Officer, 315; Banner of Peace, June 19, 1846; Baptist Banner and Western Pioneer, February 11, 1847; Catholic Telegraph, June 11, 1846; Journal of Commerce, May 19, June 20, 1846; New York Herald, May 23, 1846; U.S. Catholic Miscellany, October 2, 1847. 50. William L.  Marcy to Zachary Taylor, March 2, 1846, in Senate Executive Documents, 29 Cong., 1 Sess., No. 337, “Message of the President of the United States,” 84 (Ser. 476); “An Address to the Native Americans of Fayette Congressional District,”1847, broadside, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky; American Citizen, Party Spirit and Popery: or, the Beast and his Rider (New York: Baker and Scribner, 1847), i–iv, 118–22, 126. 51. Davis, Autobiography, 224; National Intelligencer, October 23, 1847; New York Herald, January 9, 1848; North American (Mexico), December 7, 24, 1847, January 7, 1848. 52. American Citizen, Party Spirit and Popery:  or, the Beast and his Rider (New York: Baker and Scribner, 1847), i–iv, 118–22, 126. 53. James D.  Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1907 (11 vols., Washington, D.C.: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1897–1908), 4:  546; Thomas Ritchie to Polk, ca. December 4, 1847, “Draft of Message 1847,” “Rough Notes of paragraphs for President’s Message of December 1847,” “Mexico, Buchanan’s Draft,” Polk Papers, LC. 54. Paul H.  Bergeron, The Presidency of James K.  Polk (Lawrence:  University of Kansas Press, 1987), 81.



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C h a p t er   6 1. Christian Observer, May 20, 1848. 2. For an analysis of romanticism’s overall impact on the war with Mexico, see Robert W. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). For a detailed look at the relationship of masculinity to the war, see Amy S.  Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 3. McElroy, “Chaplains for the Mexican War—1846,” Woodstock Letters 16 (1887): 227–29. 4. Edward Constantine Davidson to Brother, February 3, 1848, Edward Constantine Davidson Letters, University of Texas at Arlington, Special Collections; Eleanor Damon Pace, ed., “The Diary and Letters of William P.  Rogers, 1846–1862,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 32 (1929), 268, 271; William W.  Carpenter, Travels and Adventures in Mexico. . . (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1851), 285– 88; Rhoda van Bibber Tanner Doubleday, ed., Journals of the Late Brevet Major Philip Norbourne Barbour. . . (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1936), 70; George Winston Smith and Charles Judah, eds., Chronicles of the Gringos:  The U.S. Army in the Mexican War, 1846–1848, Accounts of Eyewitnesses and Combatants (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1968), 126. 5. Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 2002), 227–35; Lawrence J.  McCaffrey, The Irish Catholic Diaspora in America (Washington: Catholic University Press, 1976; reprint, 1997), 93–94. 6. John Scott, Encarnation, or the Prisoners in Mexico (Louisville:  G.H. Monsarrat, and Co., 1848), 8; [Giddings], Sketches, 51, 53–54, 87; Lawrence R.  Clayton and Joseph E.  Chance, eds., The March to Monterrey:  The Diary of Lieutenant Rankin Dilworth, U.S. Army (El Paso:  Texas Western Press, 1996), 35; William H.  Daniel Military Diary, no date, 12, Filson Historical Society; Tennessee Cavalry, 2d Regt. Journal, 12, April 20, 1847, University of Tennessee, Special Collections Library; Samuel C.  Reid, The Scouting Expeditions of McCulloch’s Texas Rangers. . . (Philadelphia:  G.B. Zieber and Co., 1847), 42; William King to Mother, September 22, 1846, William King Papers, University of Tennessee, Special Collections Library; William A.  McClintock, “Journal of a Trip through Texas and Northern Mexico in 1846–1847,” 3 pts., Southwestern Historical Quarterly 34 (1930–1931): 144, 157, 232; Columbus Goodwin to Tom, date unknown, Columbus Goodwin Letter, Filson Historical Society; L.W. Jordan, “A Letter from Mexico,” Tennessee Historical Magazine 9 (1926): 280. 7. Philip St. George Cooke, The Conquest of New Mexico and California in 1846– 1848 (New  York:  G.P Putnam’s Sons, 1878; reprint, Chicago:  the Rio Grande Press, 1994), 275; Robertson, Reminiscences, 10–11.

190

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8. Graham A.  Barringer, ed., “The Mexican War Journal of Henry S.  Lane,” Indiana Magazine of History 53 (1957): 426; Jacob S. Robinson, A Journal of the Santa Fe Expedition Under Colonel Doniphan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1932; reprint of the 1848 edition), 62; Raphael Semmes, The Campaign of General Scott, in the Valley of Mexico (Cincinnati: Moore and Anderson, 1852), 364–65; New York Tribune, December 22, 1847. 9. American Star, October 31, 1847; Dain, A Hideous Monster, 27–30. 10. Ballentine, Autobiography, 232–33; Baylies, A Narrative, 26; Amasa Gleason Clark, Reminiscences of a Centenarian (Bandera: Mrs. Amasa Clark, 1930), 24; Davis, Autobiography, 291; Miller, The Mexican War Journal of Ralph W. Kirkham, 32, 40; Taylor, The Broad Pennant, 110. 11. General Scott and His Staff. . . (Philadelphia:  Grigg, Elliot and Co., 1848), 113; George Gordon Meade, The Life and Letters of George Gordon Meade, 2  vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 1: 120; John Hammond Moore, ed., “Private Johnson Fights the Mexicans, 1847–1848,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 67 (1966):  218; Mark L.  Gardner and Marc Simmons, eds., The Mexican War Correspondence of Richard Smith Elliot (Norman:  University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 176; Robertson, Reminiscences, 264–65; New  York Herald, March 5, 1848; St. George L.  Sioussat, ed., “Mexican War Letters of Colonel William Bowen Campbell of Tennessee, Written to Governor David Campbell, of Virginia, 1846–1847,” Tennessee Historical Magazine 1 (1915): 165. 12. William King to Mother, undated, William King Papers, University of Tennessee, Special Collections Library. 13. Francis Baylies, A Narrative of Major General Wool’s Campaign in Mexico in the Years 1846, 1847, and 1848 (Albany: Little and Company, 1851), 11; McSherry, El Puchero, 139; Robertson, Reminiscences, 115–16. 14. Robert H. Ferrell, ed., Monterrey Is Ours! The Mexican War Letters of Lieutenant Dana, 1845–1847 (Lexington:  University Press of Kentucky, 1990), 144; Levi White to Sarah White, October 3, 1846, Levi White Letters, Filson Historical Society. 15. Jordan, “A Letter from Mexico,” 280; Robertson, Reminiscences, 263–64. 16. Richard M. Creagh to Brother, September 26, 1846, Richard M. Creagh Letters, Filson Historical Society. 17. John F. Meginness Journal, March 10, April 2, 30, May 15, 1848, John F. Meginness Papers, University of Texas at Arlington, Special Collections; Henry S. Lane to General Samuel Stone, November 5, 1846, typescript, Miscellaneous Papers of Henry Smith Lane, Filson Historical Society; Barringer, ed., “The Mexican War Journal of Henry S. Lane,” 426–27. 18. John A.  Newman to General John Russwurm, July 8, 1846, John Russwurm Papers, Tennessee State Library and Archives; Pace, ed., “Diary and Letters,” 268; Baylies, A Narrative, 62; Samuel G. French, Two Wars: An Autobiography of General Samuel G. French (Nashville: Confederate Veteran, 1901), 45; Robert



Notes

191

Anderson, An Artillery Officer in the Mexican War, 1846–1847 (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1911), 175, 181, 270; Henry, Campaign Sketches, 49–50, 241–42; Carter, ed., For Honor, Glory, and Union, 52–53; Robertson, Reminiscences, 29–33, 271–72; Captain of the Volunteers, The Conquest of Santa Fe and Subjugation of New Mexico by the Military Forces of the United States (Philadelphia: H. Packer and Co., 1847), 12–13; George T.  M. Davis, Autobiography of the Late Col. Geo. T.  M. Davis, Captain and Aid-de-Camp [sic] Scott’s Army of Invasion (Mexico), from Posthumous Papers (New York: Press of Jenkins and McCowan, 1891), 259; Maria Clinton Collins, ed., “Journal of Francis Collins, an Artillery Officer in the Mexican War,” Quarterly Publication of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio 10 (1915): 88–89; Henry A. Wise, Los Gringos; Or, an Inside View of Mexico and California, with Wandering in Peru, Chili [sic], and Polynesia (New York: Baker and Scribner, 1849), 82–83; J.F.H. Claiborne, ed., Life and Correspondence of John A. Quitman, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, Publishers, 1860), 1: 396; Corrydon Donnavan, Adventures in Mexico: Experienced during a Captivity of Seven Months in the Interior. . . with a View of the Present War. . . (Cincinnati: Robinson and Jones, 1847), 109–11; Kenly, Memoirs, 300; Daily American Star, December 23, 1847; New Orleans Daily Picayune, May 12, 1847; New York Herald, September 20, 1847, February 14, 1848; North American (Mexico), November 23, December 10, 1847, January 10, 1848. 19. Emma Jerome Blackwood, ed., To Mexico with Scott: Letters of Captain Ephraim Kirby Smith to His Wife (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1917), 170; Albert G. Bracket, General Lane’s Brigade in Central Mexico (Cincinnati: H. W. Derby and Co., 1854), 122; Carpenter, Travels and Adventures in Mexico, 40; Chance, ed., Mexico Under Fire, 84; A  Prisoner, Encarnacion Prisoners:  Comprising an Account of the March of the Kentucky Cavalry. . . in Mexico (Louisville: Prentice and Weissinger, 1848), 33; Ferrell, ed., Monterrey Is Ours!, 104–5; Kenly, Memoirs, 376; Livingston-Little, The Mexican War Diary, 27–28; McCaffrey, ed., “Surrounded by Dangers of All Kinds,” 63; McClintock, “Journal of a Trip,” 142; Scribner, A Campaign in Mexico, 31, 46–47; Tennessee Cavalry, 2d Regiment Journal, April 12, 1847, University of Tennessee, Special Collections Library; Levi White to Sarah White, October 3, 1846, Levi White Letters, Filson Historical Society. 20. Robert S. Levine, Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden, Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 106– 19, 163; Boston Daily Advertiser, June 16, 1846; Oswandel, Notes, 403; New York Evangelist, July 16, 1846; Henry F. Dobyns, ed., Hepah California! The Journal of Cave Johnson Couts from Monterey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico, to Los Angeles, California during the Years 1848–-1849 (Tucson: Arizona Pioneers’ Historical Society, 1961), 61; Donnavan, Adventures in Mexico, 75; Oswandel, Notes, 220, 479; Daniel Runyon to David M. Runyon, November 19, 1847, Runyon Family Papers, Filson Historical Society; John Todd Roberts to Mr. Knott, January 5, 1847, John Todd Roberts Papers, Filson Historical Society; William Preston Journal, November

192

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27, 1847, typescript, Filson Historical Society; Kenly, Memoirs, 157, 410–13; Benjamin Franklin Scribner, Camp Life of a Volunteer (Philadelphia:  Grigg, Elliot and Co., 1847), 56. 21. Robert Ryal Miller, ed., Journal and Letters of Ralph W.  Kirkham (College Station: Texas A and M University Press, 1991), 25–27, 30, 32, 38, 40. 22. H. Grady Howell, Jr., ed., A Southern Lacrimosa:  The Mexican War Journal of Dr.  Thomas Neely Love, Surgeon, Second Regiment Mississippi Infantry, U.S.A. (Madison, Miss.: Chicksaw Bayou Press, 1996), 60, 83, 105, 130; Edmund Kirby to Wife, May 2, 1847, Edmund Kirby Letter, University of Texas at Arlington, Special Collections; Reid, The Scouting Expeditions, 22. 23. Clayton and Chance, eds., The March to Monterey, 33, 35; Davis, Autobiography, 190; Raphael Semmes, The Campaign of General Scott, 152–53; General Taylor and His Staff: Comprising the Memoirs of Generals Taylor, Worth, Wool, and Butler. . . (New  York:  Leavitt, Trow and Co., 1848), 106–7; New Orleans Daily Picayune, December 23, 1846; Washington Daily Union, January 1, 1847; New York Herald, October 15, 1847; New York Tribune, January 1, November 11, 1847. 24. Israel Uncapher Diary, July 8, 1847, Uncapher Papers, University of Texas at Arlington, Special Collections; Oswandel, Notes, 205–8, 219–20, 374. 25. Sketches of the War in Northern Mexico (New  York:  Appleton and Company, 1848), 41–42; McSherry, El Puchero, 50, 56–57; Washington Daily Union, May 4, 1847. See also William Preston Journal, December 19, 1847, typescript, Filson Historical Society. 26. Frank S.  Edwards, A Campaign in New Mexico with Colonel Doniphan (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1847), 99–100. 27. Doubleday, ed., Journals of Philip Barbour, 27; Allan Peskin, ed., Volunteers: The Mexican War Journals of Private Richard Coulter and Sergeant Thomas Barclay, Company E, Second Pennsylvania Infantry (Kent:  Kent State University Press, 1991), 275–76; Ferrell, ed., Monterrey Is Ours!, 104; Smith, Chile Con Carne, 74; Joseph E. Chance, ed., My Life in the Old Army: The Reminiscences of Abner Doubleday from the Collections of the New York Historical Society (Ft. Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1998), 265; Winston and Judah, eds., Chronicles of the Gringos, 411; William King to Mother, March 31, 1847, William King Papers, University of Tennessee, Special Collections Library. 28. Connelly, Doniphan’s Expedition, 69; McCaffrey, “Surrounded by Dangers of All Kinds,” 66; Barringer, “The Mexican War Journal of Henry S. Lane,” 416–17. 29. Fulton, ed., Diary & Letters of Josiah Gregg, 2: 276–77, 294–95. 30. Livingston-Little, ed., The Mexican War Diary of Thomas D. Tennery, 27–28, 76. 31. Carpenter, Travels in Mexico, 148; Chamberlain, My Confessions, 138; Kenly, Memoirs, 376–77; John Todd Roberts to Joseph Roberts, November 11, 1846, John Todd Roberts Papers, Filson Historical Society; Moore, Scott’s Campaign in Mexico, 103; Smith, Reminiscences, 37; Smith and Judah, eds., Chronicles of the Gringos, 410.



Notes

193

32. Blackwood, ed., To Mexico with Scott, 187; Semmes, The Campaign of General Scott, 92; William H.  Daniel Military Diary, November 20, 1846, Filson Historical Society; Mary Ellen Rowe, ed., “The Mexican War Letters of Chesley Sheldon Coffey,” Journal of Mississippi History 44 (1982):  244; Peskin, ed., Volunteers, 275–76; Donnavan, Adventures in Mexico, 39–40; New Orleans Daily Picayune, June 1, August 8, 1847; Miller, ed., The Mexican War Journal and Letters of Ralph W. Kirkham, 26–27. 33. Carpenter, Travels and Adventures, 229; Donnavan, Adventures, 37, 52; House Executive Documents, 30 Cong., 1 Sess., No. 41, “Notes of a Military Reconnaissance,” 34 (Ser. 517); Reid, The Scouting Expeditions, 35; William H.  Daniel Military Diary, no date, 27–28, Filson Historical Society; William Preston Journal, May 25, 1848, typescript, Filson Historical Society; Baptist Banner and Western Pioneer, May 28, 1846; Daily American Star, November 21, 1847; North American (Mexico), January 10, 1848; The Picket Guard. May 13, 1847. 34. Carpenter, Travels and Adventures, 83; National Intelligencer, April 20, 1847. 35. Smith, Chile Con Carne, 197–98; John Scott, Encarnation, or the Prisoners of Mexico (Louisville:  G.  H. Monsarrat and Co., 1848), 81; Edward C.  Davidson to Brother, February 3, 1848, Edward Constantine Davidson Letters, Filson Historical Society; Judge Zo Cook, “Mexican War Reminiscences,” Alabama Historical Quarterly 19 (1957): 457; Edwards, A Campaign, 61–62; New Orleans Daily Picayune, June 13, July 3, 1847; Jonesborough Whig and Independent Journal, February 24, 1847; The Mountaineer, April 7, 1848. See Edwards, A Campaign, 157 and Carpenter, Travels and Adventures, 239. Both are the same description of Mexican devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe. 36. Edwards, A Campaign, 69, 72–74, 99–101, 157. 37. Zachary Taylor to Robert C. Wood, July 20, 1847, in William K. Bixby and William H. Samson, eds., Letters of Zachary Taylor from the Battlefields of the Mexican War (Rochester: William K. Kirby, 1908; reprint, New York: Kraus Reprint Company, 1970), 117–18; New Orleans Daily Picayune, August 26, 1846, September 7, 1847; Journal of Commerce, July 17, 1847. 38. Bracket, General Lane’s Brigade, 121–22, 125; Boston Daily Advertiser, June 16, 1846; Edwards, A Campaign, 74; Carpenter, Travels and Adventures, 82; A  Prisoner, Encarnacion Prisoners, 28, 69, 72–74; Wynn, “The San Patricios,” 55. 39. Donnavan, Adventures in Mexico, 94–96, 106–7; Baptist Banner and Western Pioneer, January 13, 1848; National Intelligencer, February 15, 1848; Freeman’s Journal, January 15, 1848; U.S. Catholic Magazine (March 1848), 157. 40. Blackwood, ed., To Mexico with Scott, 145; McSherry, El Puchero, 23; Fulton, ed., Diary and Letters of Josiah Gregg, 2: 59; Hartman, A Private’s Own Journal, 21; Bailey, “Diary of the Mexican War,” 141; Peskin, ed., Volunteers, 128; Kenly, Memoirs, 335; Wynn, “The San Patricios,” 55; Otis A.  Singletary, The Mexican War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 144–46. 41. McSherry, El Puchero, 50.

194

Notes

42. Smith and Judah, eds., Chronicles of the Gringos, 343. 43. Orr and Miller, eds., An Immigrant Soldier, 75l. 44. J. A.  Quitman and Lic. Leandro Estrada, “Office of the Civil and Military Governor/Secretaria del Gobernador Civil y Militar,” October 6, 1847, broadside, University of Texas at Arlington, Special Collections. 45. Madison Mills Diary, October 12, 13, 1847, Filson Historical Society. 46. Smith, War with Mexico, 2: 459. 47. Pedro Santoni, Mexicans at Arms: Puro Federalists and the Politics of War, 1845– 1848 (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1996), 167–70. 48. Washington Daily Union, May 11, 18, 1847; Smith, War with Mexico, 2:  459; Liberator, October 15, 1847; Freeman’s Journal, May 29, 1847. 49. Freeman’s Journal, May 20, June 3, 1848. 50. Edwards, A Campaign, 99; Peskin, ed., Volunteers, 281; Baptist Banner and Western Pioneer, November 19, 1846; Boston Daily Advertiser, August 28, 1847; Catholic Telegraph, June 8, 1848; Chamberlain, My Confession, 75; New York Evening Express, May 13, 1847; Freeman’s Journal, May 20, 1848; Fr. Rey to Fr. McElroy, January 4, 1847, in “Chaplains for the Mexican War—1846,” Woodstock Letters 17 (1888): 158. 51. Ferrell, ed., Monterrey Is Ours!, 197; Sr. Blanch Marie McEniry, “American Catholics in the War with Mexico” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Catholic University of America, 1937), 136; Journal of Commerce, May 19, 1847. 52. U.S. Catholic Magazine (September 1847), 559. 53. Vermont Free Press, quoted in National Intelligencer, June 17, 1847. 54. New York Herald, May 30, 1847. 55. Catholic Telegraph, 8, June 29, 1848; New  York Evening Express, May 13, 1847; Freeman’s Journal, May 20, 1848; Fr. Rey to Fr. McElroy, January 4, 1847, in “Chaplains for the Mexican War—1846” Woodstock Letters 17 (1888): 158. 56. Christian Observer, May 20, 1848.

C h a p t er   7 1. William F.  McRee to Polk, May 20, 1846, James K.  Polk Papers, Library of Congress. 2. Clayton Sumner Ellsworth, “The American Churches and the Mexican War,” American Historical Review 45 (1940): 303–4. 3. Christian Advocate and Journal, November 11, 1846. 4. Ellsworth, “The American Churches,” 312–13; New York Observer, June 5, 1847; Southern Presbyterian Review (September 1847), 103, 105. 5. Daily American Star, January 25, 1848. 6. Ibid., 311. 7. Quoted in Ellsworth, “The American Churches,” 306. 8. Banner of Peace, July 3, 1846; New York Evangelist, July 16, 1846; Presbyterian, May 2, June 6, 1846.



Notes

195

9. Presbyterian, September 26, 1846; Christian Observer, October 16, 1846. 10. Covenanter (April 1846): 290; (May 1846): 320. 11. Banner of Peace, June 5, 12, 1846. 12. Christian Reflector, October 12, December 10, 17, 1846; Christian Watchman, September 18, October 16, 1846. 13. Baptist Banner and Western Pioneer, April 30, June 4, 1846. 14. New Englander (January 1847): 141–42; Boston Recorder, July 23, 1846. 15. Liberator April 24, May 15, 22, June 12, 19, August 7, 1846. 16. Ibid., January 22, December 3, 1847. 17. Ibid., April 30, May 21, October 15, 1847. 18. Banner of Peace, May 21, 1847; Baptist Banner and Western Pioneer, February 4, March 11, April 1, 8, November 18, December 9, 1847; Christian Advocate and Journal, January 6, February 17, 1847; Christian Reflector, April 29, May 20, July 1, October 14, 28, 1847; New York Evangelist, July 8, 15, 1847. Philadelphia’s Presbyterian Evangelical Repository likened the United States to “Assyria of old.” Whereas God had used Assyria to punish “the Jews,” God was now using the United States as a “rod of anger against” the “idolatrous people of Mexico.” (It does not seem to have occurred to the editors of the Evangelical Repository that in their metaphor Americans were pagans and Mexicans merely wayward Christians.) Evangelical Repository (May 1847), 621. In 1847 only the Congregationalist Boston Recorder continued its unwavering opposition to the war, although it did from time to time point out that Mexico’s problems stemmed from a Catholic disdain for the Bible. Boston Recorder, May 13, 1847. 19. Baptist Banner and Western Pioneer, October 8, 1846, January 7, 28, May 13, June 6, 1847; Boston Recorder, July 23, 1846; Episcopal Recorder, October 12, 1846; New York Observer, July 18, August 22, 1846. 20. Baptist Banner and Western Pioneer, February 11, 1847; Episcopal Recorder, June 13, 1846; New York Observer, December 18, 1847. 21. Banner of Peace, July 23, 1847; Baptist Banner and Western Pioneer, July 22, 1847, May 5, 1848; Boston Recorder, May 6, 1847; Christian Advocate and Journal, August 4, 1847; Christian Watchman, May 21, September 10, 1847; New  York Observer, May 1, 1847; Presbyterian, June 26, 1847. 22. Bushnell’s views on the Trinity later led to charges of heresy against him. 23. Ray Allen Billington, “Anti-Catholic Propaganda and the Home Missionary Movement, 1800–1860,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 22 (1935–1936): 361– 372, 381; American Home Missionary Society (AHMS), Twenty-First Annual Report (New  York:  William Osborn, 1847), 4–6, 114–42; AHMS, Fourteenth Annual Report (New York: William Osborn, 1840), 86. 24. Horace Bushnell, Barbarism the First Danger:  A  Discourse on Home Missions (New York: American Home Missionary Society, 1847), 20–27; William Bement, The Mexican War and War in General, Considered in Two Sermons, Preached at East-Hampton, October 17, 1847 (Northampton:  John Metcalf, 1847), 7, 13–14;

196

Notes

The Home Missionary (October 1846), 137–38, (February 1849), 237; Ray Allen Billington, “Anti-Catholic Propaganda and the Home Missionary Movement, 1800–1860,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 22 (1935–1936), 361–84. 25. Edwin S.  Gaustad, ed., The American Tract Society Documents, 1824–1925 (New York: Arno Press, 1972), 12, 23–24, 50–58. 26. Secretary of the American Tract Society, A, Home Evangelization: A View of the Wants and Prospects of Our Country (New York: American Tract Society, 1849), 9, 69; Gaustad, ed., The American Tract Society Documents, 13–18, 98–108; Christian Advocate and Journal, July 22, 1846. 27. New York Observer, July 3, 1847. 28. Boston Recorder, June 18, 1846; New  York Evangelist, June 18, 1846, August 6, 1846; New York Journal of Commerce, June 12, 1846; New York Observer, June 20, 1846; New York Tribune, June 16, 1846. 29. Franklin Chase to James Buchanan, June 18, 1846, January 31, 1847, Ann Chase to Buchanan, 9 September (two separate letters), November 8, 1846, Dispatches from the United States Consuls in Mexico, Record Group 59, National Archives; Boston Recorder, December 16, 1847; Presbyterian, December 25, 1847; Washington Daily Union, December 24, 1847. 30. Baptist Banner and Western Pioneer, July 5, 1848; Presbyterian, February 26, May 13, 1848. 31. Annual Report of the American Bible Society (1847), 120–23, 146; New  York Evangelist, May 18, 1848. 32. Annual Report of the American Bible Society (New York: American Bible Society, 1847), 56–57; Annual Report of the American Bible Society (New York: American Bible Society, 1849), 101, 104; [Luther Giddings], Sketches of the Campaign in Northern Mexico (New  York:  George P.  Putnam and Co., 1853), 21; Albert Lombard, The “High Private,” with a Full and Exciting History of the New York Volunteers (New  York:  Printed for the Publisher, 1848), 45–46; Daniel Runyon to Asa R.  Runyon, October 9, 1847, Runyon Family Papers, Filson Club Historical Society, Louisville; John Scott, Encarnation, or the Prisoners in Mexico (Louisville:  G.H. Monsarrat and Co., 1848), 73; Baptist Banner and Western Pioneer, June 25, 1846; Catholic Telegraph, September 23, 1847; Christian Reflector, June 25, 1846, May 27, 1847; Christian Watchman, May 22, 1846; Jonesborough Whig and Independent Journal, November 10, 1847; Lincoln Journal, July 9, 1846; New Orleans Daily Picayune, September 9, 1846; Presbyterian, February 26, May 20, 1848; Washington Daily Union, April 16, 1847. 33. William L.  Marcy to Winfield Scott, September 23, 1847, in House Executive Documents, 30 Cong., 1 Sess., No. 60, “Messages of the President of the United States with the Correspondence, Therewith Communicated, Between the Secretary of War and other Officers of the Government, on the Subject of the Mexican War,” 1006 (Ser. 520).



Notes

197

34. New Orleans Daily Picayune, May 26, 1846; Liberator, July 17, 1846; New  York Tribune, June 6, 1846; Allen, Pencillings of Scenes, 8, 9, 11, 17. In the Protestant numbering of the Ten Commandments, the second commandment prohibits the making of graven images. 35. Boston Recorder, 11, March 18, 1847; Christian Advocate and Journal, May 26, 1847; New York Journal of Commerce, May 29, 1847; Presbyterian, July 10, 1847. 36. The American Protestant (July 1846):  44–60; (November 1846):  164–83; (December 1846): 215–16. 37. Ibid. (March 1847): 318–19 (April 1847):, 63; (August 1847): 80–81; (November 1847): 177–79 (December 1847): 204–6, 221–22. 38. Samuel Harris, The Mexican War: A Sermon Delivered on the Annual Thanksgiving, at Conway, Mass., November 26, 1846 (Greenfield: Merriam and Mirick, 1847), 19; Edward N. Kirk, The Church Essential to the Republic (New York: American Home Missionary Society, 1848), 1–21, passim. 39. Rev. John N.  Maffit and His Late Unfortunate Marriage (New York: J. Carner, 1849), 32; National Intelligencer, September 11, 1847; Philadelphia North American and U.S. Gazette, August 27, 1847; Philadelphia Public Ledger, November 8, 1847. 40. Doubleday, ed., Journals of Philip Barbour, 76; Advocate of Peace, January 1848; Journal of Commerce, July 4, 1846; U.S. Catholic Miscellany, May 28, 1846. 41. Doubleday, ed., Journals of Philip Barbour, 76; Baptist Banner and Western Pioneer, July 30, 1846; Evangelical Magazine and Gospel Advocate, August 7, 1846; Liberator, August 7, 1846, January 14, 1848. 42. Rufus W.  Clark, War with Mexico:  A  Sermon Preached in the North Church, Portsmouth, N.H., Sept. 7, 1845 (Portsmouth:  C.W. Brewster, 1845), 16; Boston Recorder, June 30, 1846, December 2, 9, 30, 1847; Theodore Parker, A Sermon of War, Preached at the Melodeon, on Sunday, June 7, 1846 (Boston: I. R. Butts, 1846), 26; Theodore Parker, A Sermon on the Mexican War, Preached at the Melodeon, on Sunday, June 25th, 1848 (Boston: Coolidge and Wiley, 1848), 52–54; Theodore Parker, Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, 2 vols. (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1861), 2: 114. 43. Burdett Hart, Better Things than War: A Discourse Delivered at the Congregational Church in Fair Haven, on the Annual Thanksgiving of 1847 (New Haven:  Peck and Stafford, 1847), 5–8; Christian Reflector, May 27, 1847; Thomas N.  Lord, Cause, Character and Consequences of the War with Mexico: A Discourse Delivered on the Day of the Annual Fast, April 8, 1847 (Portland: Thurston and Co., 1847), 15; John Leyburn, National Mercies, Sins, and Duties:  A  Discourse, Preached to the Congregation of the Presbyterian Church, Petersburg, Virginia, On the Sabbath Morning, July 5th, 1846 (place unknown: n.p., 1846), 22–23. 44. Samuel D.  Burchard, Causes of National Solicitude:  A  Sermon Preached in the Thirteenth Street Presbyterian Church, New  York, on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 25, 1847 (New York: S.W. Benedict, 1848), 21–2.

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45. Samuel F. B. Morse to Sidney E. Morse, May 8–13, 28, 1847, LC, Samuel F. B. Morse Papers. 46. Morse to Sidney E. Morse, October 29, 1846, LC, Morse Papers. 47. The Trial of the Pope. The Antichrist, or Man of Sin, for High Treason Against the Son of God, on the Testimony of the Sovereigns of Europe, the President of the United States, and the Reformers and Martyrs. . . (New  York:  New  York American and Foreign Christian Union, 1847; reprint, 1856), 90. The only name attached to this work was that of Herman Norton, author of the introduction and corresponding secretary for the American Protestant Society. Samuel J. Cassels, Christ and Antichrist, or Jesus of Nazareth Proved to Be the Messiah and the Papacy Proved to Be the Antichrist Predicted in the Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1846), 332, 346–47. 48. William Hogan, High and Low Mass in the Roman Catholic Church; with Comments (Nashua:  Charles T.  Gill; Boston:  Jordan and Wiley, 1846), 45–48, 65–66, 172–202. 49. Milton P. Braman, The Mexican War: A Discourse Delivered on the Annual Fast, 1847 (Danvers: Courier Office, 1847), 18–20.

C h a p t er   8 1. E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848 (New York: Mentor Books, 1962), 140, 147–62; George Ballentine, Autobiography of an English Soldier in the United States Army (New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1853), 283–84. 2. K. Jack Bauer, The Mexican War, 1846–1848 (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1974), 306–7; Trist to Buchanan, August 24, 1847, in William R. Manning, ed., The Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States:  Inter-American Affairs, 1831–1860, 12 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1932–1939), 8: 927–29. 3. One of the most contentious issues during the discussions was Mexico’s desire to exclude slavery from any territory that it ceded to the United States. The Mexican diplomats, aware of anti-Catholicism among the American population, drew this pointed comparison to emphasize the Mexican distaste for slavery: What “if it were proposed to the people of the United States that the Inquisition should be therein established” on former American territory? See Trist to Buchanan, September 4, 1847, in Manning, ed., Diplomatic Correspondence, 8: 938–99. 4. Trist to Buchanan, October 25, 1847, in ibid., 8: 958–59, 962. For the fluid situation in the Mexican government, see Pedro Santoni, Mexicans at Arms: Puro Federalists and the Politics of War, 1845–1848 (Fort Worth:  Texas Christian University Press, 1996), 210–30. 5. Ibid., 8:  959; Wallace Ohrt, Defiant Peacemaker:  Nicholas Trist in the Mexican War (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1997), 114. 6. Trist to Buchanan, December 7, 1847, in Manning, ed., Diplomatic Correspondence, 8: 988–92.



Notes

199

7. National Intelligencer, December 17, 1847; New York Herald, December 14, 1847, January 3, 1848; Jonesborough Whig and Independent Journal, February 2, 1848. See also John Hughes, Christianity, the Only Source of Moral, Social, and Political Regeneration (New  York:  Edward Dunigan, 1848); New  York Herald, January 9, 1848. 8. Congressional Globe, 30 Cong., 1 Sess., Appendix, 349. 9. Ibid., 87, 427. 10. John Bell, “Speech of John Bell of Tennessee, on the Mexican War,” in Speeches on the War with Mexico, 1846–8 (n.p., ca. 1848), 18–9, 24, 28. 11. Congressional Globe, 30 Cong., 1 Sess., Appendix, 308. 12. Ibid., 344, 421, 453. 13. Ibid., 50–52. 14. George P.  Marsh, Speech of Mr. G.P. Marsh of Vermont, on the Mexican War, Delivered in the House of Representatives of the U.S., February 10, 1848 (Washington, D.C.: J. and G.S. Gideon, 1848), 5; Congressional Globe, 30 Cong., 1 Sess., Appendix, 339. House member Edward C. Cabell of Florida also complained about the accusations of “treason” leveled at the Whigs, noting that Democrats voiced such allegations even when Whigs condemned “the proposition shadowed forth in the Government of this city, to rob the Catholic Churches in Mexico.” See Edward C.  Cabell, “Speech of Mr. Cabell, of Florida, on the Mexican War,” in Speeches on the War with Mexico, 4. 15. Congressional Globe, 30 Cong., 1 Sess., Appendix, 355, 386, 392, 488. 16. Ibid., 442–44; Philadelphia Daily Sun, 10, 17, 28 January, 12, 16, 19, 28 February, March 1, 1848. 17. Bauer, The Mexican War, 378–84; Milo Milton Quaife, ed., The Diary of James K.  Polk During his Presidency, 1845–1849 (4  vols., Chicago:  A.C. McClurg and Company, 1910), 3: 313–15, 345, 347, 351. 18. Senate Executive Documents, 30 Cong., 1 Sess., No. 52, “The Treaty between the United States and Mexico,” 48–49 (Ser. 509); Quaife, ed., Diary of Polk, 3: 365–66, 371. 19. Senate Executive Documents, 30 Cong., 1 Sess., No. 52, “The Treaty between the United States and Mexico,” 18–19 (Ser. 509). See Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo:  A  Legacy of Conflict (Norman:  University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 46, 54, 126. Griswold del Castillo, in the standard interpretation of the debate over this article, places it within the context of citizenship and property rights. He does not remark on its religious implications. 20. Ibid., 19–20. 21. Ibid., 20–21. Apparently satisfied with his own smaller alteration of the treaty, Westcott did not vote in favor of Davis’s motion. 22. Ibid., 21. 23. Ibid., 25–33. Italics added by the author for emphasis. 24. Quaife, ed., Diary of Polk, 3: 376–79; John H. Schroeder, Mr. Polk’s War: American Opposition and Dissent, 1846–1848 (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press,

200

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1973), 158–59; Otis A.  Singletary, The Mexican War (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1960), 161. 25. George M.  Dallas to William White Chew, October 10, 1848, in Mr. Dallas’s Letter on the Mexican Treaty:  Re-printed from the Public Ledger of June 15, 1849 (Philadelphia: United States Book and Job Printing Establishment, 1849), 10–13. 26. Buchanan to Sevier, March 18, 1848, in Manning, ed., Diplomatic Correspondence, 8:  229–33. Clifford resigned as Attorney General in order to accept Polk’s appointment as commissioner to Mexico. 27. My thanks go to Daniel Feller for applying to my description of the 1830s and 1840s the apt phrase, “climate of religious bigotry.” 28. John F.  Meginness Journal, April 26, 1848, John F.  Meginness Papers, University of Texas at Arlington, Special Collections; Lewis C. Levin, Speech of Mr. L. C. Levin, of Penn., on the Proposed Mission to Rome, Delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, March 2, 1848 (Washington: n.p., 1848), 2–4; Philadelphia Daily Sun, March 10, 1848. 29. Proceedings of the Public Demonstration of Sympathy with Pope Pius IX, and with Italy, in the City of New  York, on Monday, November 29, A.D. 1847 (New  York:  William Van Norden, 1847), 3–5, 13–23, 28–32; Proceedings of a Public Meeting of the Citizens and Country of Philadelphia, Held January 6, 1848, to Express Their Cordial Approval of the Liberal Policy of Pope Pius IX (Philadelphia: Joseph Severns and Co., 1848), 3–24, passim; Philadelphia Daily Sun, January 4, 1848. 30. Journal of the Executive Proceedings of the Senate of the United States, 1845–1848 (Washington:  Printed by Order of the Senate, 1845–48; reprint, New  York: Johnson Reprint Company Limited, 1969), 358–60, 374; Christian Watchman, March 17, 31, 1848; Christian Reflector, March 23, April 6, 26, 1848. 31. New York Herald, 5, March 9, 1848; U.S. Magazine and Democratic Review (April 1848): 301–5, 308. 32. Liberator, January 28, April 7, 1848; National Era, February 3, 1848. 33. Billington, Protestant Crusade, 264–65. This new group was known as the American and Foreign Christian Union. 34. The American Protestant (February 1848): 277; (July 1848): 62; (August 1848): 89; (November 1848): 178–79; (December 1848): 222. 35. Annual Report of the American Bible Society (New  York:  American Bible Society, 1849), 68–69, 98–100, 103; Boston Recorder, February 25, 1848; New  York Evangelist, May 18, 1848; Presbyterian, February 12, May 20, 1848; Mary F. Cordato, “Bibles in Times of War and Conflict: The American Bible Society’s Response to the Mexican War, 1846–1848,” Mexican War Journal 12 (2003): 29–31. 36. Albert Barnes, Sermon in Behalf of the American Home Missionary Society: Preached in the Cities of New  York and Philadelphia (New  York:  William Osborn, 1849), 4–5, 36–37, 40–44; Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 279–80.



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37. Second Annual Report of the Ladies’ Society for the Promotion of Education at the West (Boston:  n.p., 1848), 41; Third Annual Report of the Ladies’ Society for the Promotion of Education at the West (Boston: n.p., 1849), 40. 38. Baptist Banner and Western Pioneer, July 5, 1848; Boston Recorder, June 11, 1846, October 20, 1848. 39. Christian Watchman, March 17, 1848; Christian Reflector and Christian Watchman, December 14, 1848; Evangelical Magazine and Gospel Advocate, August 18, 1848; Boston Recorder, April 28, December 22, 1848; Presbyterian, January 22, 1848; Banner of Peace, March 8, 10, April 21, 1848; Christian Examiner (January 1848), 124–25, 141. The Boston Recorder also argued against annexation on the grounds that Mexicans were such racially inferior barbarians that they might be unable intellectually even to comprehend Protestantism and republicanism. Boston Recorder, January 7, 1848. 40. W. A. Scott, “Home of Republics; or the Elements of Permanence in Modern Civilizations,” in The American National Preacher 23 (March 1849), 68, 75–76. 41. California and Her Gold Regions (Philadelphia:  G.B. Zieber, 1849), 15–16; Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860:  A  Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Macmillan, 1938; reprint, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964), 240–56, 262, 328–30. 42. Theodore Dwight, The Roman Republic of 1849 (New  York:  R.  Van Dien, ca. 1851), 224–29, 240; “Kirwan” [Nicholas Murray], Letters to the Rt. Reverend John Hughes, Roman Catholic Archbishop of New  York (Philadelphia:  Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1847); Nicholas Murray, Bishop Hughes Confuted. Reply to the Right Reverend John Hughes (New York: n.p., 1848); Nicholas Murray, The Decline of Popery and Its Causes: An Address. . . (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1851), 19–23, 28–30, 32; Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 254. In 1852, Murray continued to use Mexico as an example of the dangers of Catholicism, warning in public letters to Chief Justice Roger B.  Taney:  “When the priest gains the ascendent [sic] here, the last rays of the sun of our glory are dying away on the summit of the Rocky Mountains.” According to Murray, Americans would become “as lazy, as poor, as stupid, and as vicious as our neighbors of Mexico” if they adopted Catholicism, because only the differences in religion (not race) separated Mexicans from the people of the United States. See “Kirwan” [Nicholas Murray], Romanism at Home. Letters to the Hon. Roger B.  Taney (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1852), 239–41. 43. Emma Willard, Last Leaves of American History:  Comprising Histories of the Mexican War and California (New  York:  George P.  Putnam, 1849), 21–4, 92, 110–11; George Wilkins Kendall, The War between the United States and Mexico (New York: D. Appleton and Company; Philadelphia: George S. Appleton, 1851), 49; Roswell S. Ripley, The War with Mexico, 2 vols. (New York: Burt Franklin, 1849), 1:27, 2: 644–46; The Republic of the United States of America: Its Duties to Itself, and Its Responsible Relations to Other Countries. Embracing also a Review

202

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of the Late War. . . (New  York:  D.  Appleton and Co.; Philadelphia:  George S. Appleton, 1848), 152–54, 159–65. 44. Brantz Mayer, History of the War between Mexico and the United States (New York and London: Wiley and Putnam, 1848), 5–8; Mayer, Mexico: Aztec, Spanish, and Republican, 2 vols. (Hartford: S. Drake and Company, 1851), 1: 130–62, 308–10. 45. Justin H. Smith, The War with Mexico, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan Co., 1919), 1: 4–8, 18–23, 26, 410. 46. Newton M.  Curtis, The Prairie Guide:  Or, the Rose of the Rio Grande. A  Tale of the Mexican War (New  York:  Williams Brothers, 1847), 18–20, 28, 43–44; Curtis, The Hunted Chief: Or, the Female Ranchero. A Tale of the Mexican War (New  York:  Williams Brothers, 1847), 49; William Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” Act II, Scene 1, 49–51; Thomas W. Whitley, The Jesuit: A National Melo-drama in Three Acts. Founded on Incidents Growing Out of the War between the United States and Mexico (New York: n.p., 1850), 1–26, passim; Harry Halyard, pseud. [Joseph E. Badger], The Heroine of Tampico: Or, Wildfire the Wanderer. A Tale of the Mexican War (Boston: F. Gleason, 1847), 28, 47–48, 50–57, 78–80, 87–89; Halyard [Badger], The Mexican Spy:  Or, the Bride of Buena Vista. A  Tale of the Mexican War (Boston: F. Gleason, 1848), 64–65, 71–73; Harry Halyard [Badger], The Chieftan of Churubusco:  Or, the Spectre of the Cathedral. A  Romance of the Mexican War (Boston: F. Gleason, 1848), 15–19, 31–32, 41, 45–49, 62, 79, 100. The “Legion of Irish Deserters,” led by the “demoniac” Riley, also appeared in other novels. See Ned Buntline, pseud. [Edward Zane Carrol Judson, Magdalena: The Beautiful Mexican Maid. A Story of Buena Vista (New York: Williams Bros., 1846 [misdated; context analysis shows the publication date to be no earlier than late 1847]), 90–92. 47. Sheppard M. Ashe, pseud. [ James Webb Rogers], La Gran Qujivera: Or, Rome Unmasked. A  Poem (2 books in one, New  York:  C.  Shepard and Co., 1852), 1:  v, 3–4, 54, 58, 83, 88, 103, 110, 114–6,119–21, 125, 128, 130, 136–38, 140–42, 162–63, 167, 170–75; 2:  6, 10–12, 15, 38–39, 82, 122, 125; William F.  Small, Guadalupe: A Tale of Love and War. . . By One Who Served in the Campaign of 1846–7 in the Late War with Mexico (Philadelphia: James B. Smith and Co., 1860), 11, 27, 37, 62, 134.

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Samson, William H., ed. Letters of Zachary Taylor from the Battle-Fields of the Mexican War. New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1970. Scott, John. Encarnation, or the Prisoners in Mexico. Being an Account of Their Capture, Treatment and Travels. Louisville: G.H. Monsarrat & Co., 1848. Scott, Winfield. Memoirs of Lieut.-General Scott, LL.D., Written by Himself. 2  vols., New York: Sheldon and Company, 1864. Scribner, Benjamin Franklin. Camp Life of a Volunteer: A Campaign in Mexico; Or, a Glimpse at Life in Camp by “One Who Has Seen the Elephant.” Philadelphia: Grigg, Elliot, and Co., 1847. Semmes, Raphael. The Campaign of General Scott, in the Valley of Mexico. Cincinnati: Moore and Anderson, 1852. Semmes, Raphael. Service Afloat and Ashore during the Mexican War. Cincinnati: W. H. Moore and Co., 1851. Simon, John Y., ed. The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. 24 vols. to date. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–. Sketches of the War in Northern Mexico; with Pictures of Life, Manners, and Scenery. New York: Appleton and Company, 1848. Smith, George Winston, and Charles Judah, eds. Chronicles of the Gringos: The U.S. Army in the Mexican War, 1846–1848, Accounts of Eyewitnesses and Combatants. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1968. Smith, Isaac. Reminiscences of a Campaign in Mexico: An Account of the Operations of the Indiana Brigade on the Line of the Rio Grande and Sierra Madre, and a Vindication of the Volunteers against the Aspersions of Officials and Unofficials. Indianapolis: Chapmans & Spann, 1848. Smith, S. Compton. Chile Con Carne: Or, the Camp and Field. New York: Miller and Curtis, 1857. Stapp, William Preston. The Prisoners of Perote, Containing a Journal Kept by the Author, Who Was Captured at Mier, December 25, 1842, and Released from Perote, May 16, 1844. Philadelphia: G.B. Zieber and Company, 1845. Taylor, Fitch. The Broad Pennant: Or, a Cruise in the United States Flag Ship of the Gulf Squadron, During the Mexican Difficulties; Together with Sketches of the Mexican War. New York: Leavitt, Trow and Co., 1848. Taylor, Zachary. The True Whig Sentiment:  General Taylor’s Two Allison Letters. Boston: Eastburn’s Press, ca. 1848. Thompson, Waddy. Recollections of Mexico. New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846. Tildon, Bryant Parrot, Jr. Notes on the Upper Rio Grande. Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston,1847. Volunteer, A. Mexican Treacheries and Cruelties. Incidents and Sufferings in the Mexican War with Accounts of Hardships Endured. Boston and New York: n.p., 1847. Wise, Henry A. Los Gringos; Or, an Inside View of Mexico and California, with Wandering in Peru, Chili [sic], and Polynesia. New York: Baker and Scribner, 1849. Wislizenus, Adolphus. Memoir of a Tour Through Northern Mexico, Connected with Col. Doniphan’s Expedition, in 1846 and 1847. Washington: Tippin and Streeper, 1848.



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Books Allen, G.N. Mexican Treacheries and Cruelties. Incidents and Sufferings in the Mexican War. Boston and New York: n.p., 1848. American Citizen. Party Spirit and Popery: or, the Beast and his Rider. New York: Baker and Scribner, 1847. American Citizen. The Pope and the Presbyterians: A Review of the Warnings of Jefferson. Philadelphia: James M. Campbell, 1845. Beecher, Edward. The Papal Conspiracy Exposed, and Protestantism Defended, in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture. New  York:  M.W. Dodd, 1855; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1977. Beecher, Lyman. A Plea for the West. Cincinnati: Truman and Smith, 1835; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1977. Beecher, Lyman. The Works of the Rev. Lyman Beecher. 3 vols., Boston: John P. Jewett and Co., 1852–53. Berry, Philip. A Review of the Mexican War on Christian Principles; an Essay on the Means of Preventing War. Columbia: A. S. Johnston, 1849. Breckinridge, Robert J. Papism in the United States in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: David Owen and Son, 1841. Brooks, Nathan Covington. A Complete History of the Mexican War:  Its Causes, Conduct, and, Comprising an Account of the Various Military and Naval Operations, from Its Commencement to the Treaty of Peace. Philadelphia:  Grigg, Elliot, and Company, 1849; reprint, Chicago: Rio Grande Press, 1965. Browne, Peter A. Premonitory Letters, upon the Subject of Romanism and the Pope. Addressed to the People of the United States. Philadelphia:  Barrett and Jones, 1846. Brownlee, William C. Popery: An Enemy to Civil and Religious Liberty, and Dangerous to Our Republic. New York: John S. Taylor, 1836. Brownlee, William C. The Roman Catholic Religion Viewed in the Light of Prophecy and History; its Final Downfall and the Triumph of the Church of Christ. New York: n.p., 1844. Brownlow, William G. Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture. Nashville: Published for the Author, 1856.



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Brownlow, William G. A Political Register, Setting Forth the Principles of the Whig and Locofoco Parties in the United States. . . . Jonesborough: Published at the Office of the “Jonesborough Whig,” 1844. Buntline, Ned, pseud., [Edward Zane Carrol Judson]. Magdalena, The Beautiful Mexican Maid. A Story of Buena Vista. New York: Williams Bros., 1846 [misdated; ca. 1847]. California and her Gold Regions, with Accurate Accounts of All the Country Lately Ceded by Mexico to the United States. Philadelphia: G. B. Zieber, 1849. Capen, Nahum. The Republic of the United States of America. New York: D. Appleton and Co.; Philadelphia: B. S. Appleton, 1848. Cassels, Samuel J. Christ and Antichrist, or Jesus of Nazareth Proved to be the Messiah and the Papacy Proved to be the Antichrist Predicted in the Holy Scriptures. Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1846. Child, David Lee. The Taking of Naboth’s Vineyard, or History of the Texas Conspiracy. New York: S.W. Benedict and Co., 1845. “Civis.” Catholicism Compatible with Republican Government, and in Full Accordance with Popular Institutions; or, Reflections upon a Premium Treatise issued by the American Protestant Society, under the Signature of “Civis.” New York: n.p., 1844. “Civis.” Romanism Incompatible with Republican Institutions. New  York:  American Protestant Society, 1845. Clark, Rufus W. Popery and the United States, Embracing an Account of Papal Operations in Our Country, with a View of the Dangers which Threaten Our Institutions. Boston: J. V. Bean and Co., 1847. Crowell, John. Republics Established and Thrones Overturned by the Bible. Philadelphia: John T. Lange, 1849. Curtis, Newton M. The Hunted Chief: Or, the Female Ranchero. A Tale of the Mexican War. New York: Williams Brothers, 1847. Curtis, Newton M. The Prairie Guide:  Or, the Rose of the Rio Grande. A  Tale of the Mexican War. New York: Williams Brothers, 1847. Dwight, Theodore, Jr. The Roman Republic of 1849. New York: R. Van Dien, ca. 1851. Dwight, Theodore, Jr. Open Convents: Or, Nunneries and Popish Seminaries Dangerous to the Morals, and Degrading to the Character of a Republican Community. New York: Van Nostrand and Dwight, 1836. Farnham, Thomas Jefferson. Travels in the Californias, and Scenes on the Pacific Ocean. New York: Saxton and Miles, 1844. Farnham, Thomas Jefferson. Mexico: Its Geography—Its People—and Its Institutions. New York: H. Long & Brother, 1846. Field, Henry M. The Good and the Bad in the Roman Catholic: Is that Church to be Destroyed or Reformed? New York: G. P. Putnam, 1849. Foote, Henry Stuart. Texas and the Texans, or Advance of the Anglo-Americans to the South-West. 2 vols., Philadelphia: Thomas and Cowperthwait, 1841. Fowler, Henry, ed. The American Pulpit. New York: J.M. Fairchild, 1856.

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Gilliam, Albert M. Travels over the Table Lands and Cordilleras of Mexico, During the Years 1843 and 1844. Philadelphia: John W. Moore, 1846. Giustiniani, L. Papal Rome as It Is; by a Roman. Philadelphia: James M. Campbell, 1845. Gregory, Samuel. Gregory’s History of Mexico. Boston: F. Gleason, 1847. Halyard, Harry, pseud. [Joseph E. Badger]. The Chieftan of Churubusco, or, the Spectre of the Cathedral. A Romance of the Mexican War. Boston: F. Gleason, 1848. Halyard, Harry, pseud. [Joseph E. Badger]. The Heroine of Tampico: Or, Wildfire the Wanderer. A Tale of the Mexican War. Boston: F. Gleason, 1847. Halyard, Harry, pseud. [Joseph E. Badger]. The Mexican Spy: Or, the Bride of Buena Vista. A Tale of the Mexican War. Boston: F. Gleason, 1848. Hogan, William. High and Low Mass in the Roman Catholic Church; with Comments. Nashua: Charles T. Gill; Boston: Jordan and Wiley, 1846. Hughes, John, and John Breckinridge. A Discussion of the Question:  Is the Roman Catholic Religion. . . Inimical to Civil and Religious Liberty? And. . . Is the Presbyterian Religion. . . Inimical to Civil and Religious Liberty? Philadelphia:  Carey, Lea, and Blanchard, 1836. Hughes, John Taylor. Doniphan’s Expedition. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1997; originally published 1847. Jay, William. A Review of the Causes and Consequences of the Mexican War. Boston:  Benjamin B.  Mussey and Co. Philadelphia:  Uriah Hunt and Co.; New York: M. W. Dodd, 1849. Jenkins, John S. History of the War between the United States and Mexico. Auburn: Derby, Miller and Co., 1850. Kehoe, Lawrence, ed. Complete Works of the Most Reverend John Hughes, First Archbishop of New  York. 2  vols., New  York:  The American News Company, 1864–1865. Kendall, George Wilkins. The War between the United States and Mexico. New York: D. Appleton and Company; Philadelphia: George S. Appleton, 1851. “Kirwan” [Nicholas Murray]. Letters to the Rt. Rev. John Hughes, Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York. Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1847. “Kirwan” [Nicholas Murray]. Romanism at Home: Letters to the Hon. Roger B. Taney. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1852. Leahy, Edward. A Narrative of the Conversion of the Writer, Edward Leahy, from Romanism to the Christian Religion. Philadelphia: Barrett and Jones, 1846. Livermore, Abiel Abbot. The War with Mexico Reviewed. Boston:  Wm. Crosby and H. P. Nichols, 1850. McCalla, William L. Romanism Not “A Religion which comes from God.” Philadelphia: J. Shipley Jones, 1846. Mansfield, Edward D. The Mexican War: A History of Its Origin, and a Detailed Account of the Victories which Terminated in the Surrender of the Capital. New  York:  A. S. Barnes & Co., 1848. Marke, Richard. Danger and Duty. New York: n.p., 1844.



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Thomas, Thomas E. Covenant Breaking, and its Consequences. The Present Posture of Our National Affairs in Connecting with the Mexican War. Rossville: J. M. Christy, 1847. Thorpe, Thomas Bangs. Our Army at Monterey . . . Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1848. Thorpe, Thomas Bangs. Our Army on the Rio Grande. Philadelphia:  Carey and Hart, 1846. The Trial of the Pope. The Anti-Christ, or Man of Sin, for High Treason Against the Son of God, on the Testimony of the Sovereigns of Europe, the President of the United States, and the Reformers and Martyrs. . . New  York:  New  York American and Foreign Christian Union, 1847; reprint, 1856. Weeks, William F., ed. Debates of the Texas Convention. Houston: J.W. Cruger, 1846. Whatley, R. The Kingdom of Christ: and the Errors of Romanism. New York: n.p., 1848. Willard, Emma. Last Leaves of American History: Comprising Histories of the Mexican War and California. New York: George P. Putnam, 1849. Wilson, Robert Anderson. Mexico and Its Religion:  With Incidents of Travel in that Country during Parts of the Years 1851–52–53–54. New  York:  Harper and Brothers, 1855.

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Index

abolitionism, 8, 93–94, 108, 129, 133–135, 144, 164 Adams, John Quincy, 54, 59 “All Mexico” debate, 152–156, 161 American Anti-Slavery Society, 133–134 American Bible Society (ABS), 7, 55–56, 139–140, 164–165 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 55 American Colonization Society, 55, 59 American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 133–134 American and Foreign Bible Society, 139–140 American Home Missionary Society (AHMS), 136–137, 165 American Party (Know-Nothings), 171–172 American Protestant Association, 29–30 American Protestant Society (APS), 66, 141–142, 164 American Republicans. See Native American Party American Sunday School Union, 55, 131–132, 166 American Tract Society (ATS), 7–8, 55, 138–140 Ampudia, Pedro, 82 Anglo-Saxonism, 2–4, 38–45, 63; and American identity, 1, 109, 136, 172;

and interplay with religion and republicanism, 8–10, 47–49, 51, 78, 88, 90, 111, 126–127, 144; and territorial expansion, 65, 70–71, 80, 92, 112, 137 anti-Catholicism, 1–2, 19–22, 34–35, 44–45, 56, 64–65, 71; and abolitionism, 93–94, 108, 135, 164; and American identity, 1, 25–28; 109, 136, 146, 172; and Anglo-Saxonism, 38, 48, 78, 126–127; definition of, 4–6; and Democratic Party, 87–88; intensified by Mexican-American War, 125–129, 131, 141, 147, 164–171; and Native American Party, 108; and pacifism, 131, 135, 146; and Whig Party, 89–91, 107 Arista, Mariano, 67 Armijo, Manuel, 81 Association for the Propagation of the Faith, 22 Augustine of Hippo, 24 Badger, Joseph E., 170 Bancroft, George, 100 Baptists, 6, 27, 131–133, 136, 140 Barnes, Albert, 165 Bebb, William, 90 Beecher, Edward, 66, 165 Beecher, Lyman, 1, 17–20, 34, 107, 129; and A Plea for the West, 6–7, 20–21, 137

234

Index

Beecherite Synthesis, 1–2, 6, 20–23, 26–27, 36, 51; and Mexican-American War, 66, 68, 93, 109 Bell, John, 153, 159 Belser, James, 38 Bennett, James Gordon, Sr., 74 Benton, Thomas Hart, 73, 162 Bible, 17–18, 95; and schools controversy, 28–30, 32, 37, 51, 56 Birney, James G., 57–58 Black Legend, 63, 111 blackness, 4, 9, 39, 42–43, 65, 90–91, 95, 111, 154, 179n19. See also race Boggs, Lilburn, 50 Boston, anti-Catholicism in, 16, 18–20; and Native Americans, 29–30, 32–33 Bracket, Albert, 120 Brady, James T., 76 Brazelton, William, 77 Breckinridge, Robert J., 36 Breese, Sidney, 43, 152 Brook Farm, 27, 50 Brown, William J., 42 Browne, Peter A., 100 Brownlee, William C., 37 Brownlow, William G., 77, 99 Brownson, Orestes, 25 Buchanan, James, 43, 60, 72, 86, 100, 139, 150, 161–162, 172 Buck, William, 133 Buena Vista, Battle of, 95 Burchard, Samuel, 66, 144–145 Burke, Edmund, 23 Burke, James, 166 Cabell, Edward C., 199 Calhoun, John C., 54, 68, 89–90, 154–155 California, 86–87; annexation of, 60, 62–63, 66, 69, 90, 150; conquered by United States, 81, 83; Protestant missionaries in, 141, 165–168

Campbell, William W., 92 Cass, Lewis, 58, 152 Catholics. See Roman Catholicism. Cerro Gordo, Battle of, 96, 141 chaplains. See U.S. Army Chapultepec, Battle of, 105 Charlestown, Massachusetts, anti-Catholic rioting in, 15, 17–19, 100, 103, 120 Chase, Ann, 139 Chase, Franklin, 139 Cheever, George B., 66 Chihuahua, 82 Childs, Thomas, 106 Cholula, 116 Christian Alliance, 164 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), 3–4, 9, 27, 49–51, 142 Churubusco, Battle of, 102–103, 150 Clark, Rufus W., 144 Clay, Cassius M., 70, 134 Clay, Henry, 7–8, 39–40, 53; and American Home Missionary Society, 137; and election of 1844, 54–55, 58–59, and immigration, 56–57, 180n8 Clifden, Ireland, 103, 187n40. Clifford, Nathan, 161 Congregationalists, 6, 16, 18, 133, 137, 195n18 Contreras, Battle of, 102. See also Battle of Padierna Corwin, Thomas, 91 Cotton, John, 20 Crittenden, John J., 159–160 Crossman, A. D., 138 Curtis, Newton, 169 Curtis, Samuel Ryan, 84 Dallas, George M., 58, 101, 160–162 Danforth, Samuel, 20 Davis, John, 55, 159



Index

Democratic Party, and Anglo-Saxonism, 42–43; and Catholics, 74, 76, 87–88, 97–101, 153– 156; and election of 1844, 58–59; and immigrants, 8–9, 12, 29, 32, 56; and republicanism, 152; and slavery, 57; and territorial expansion, 42, 61; and Texas annexation, 37–39, 43–44, 59 deserters from U.S. Army, 11, 74, 92, 95–97, 102–106, 136, 170. See also Saint Patrick Battalion and U.S. Army “Dignitatis Humanae,” 25 Doniphan, Alexander, 50, 81–82 Dowling, John, 66 election of 1844, 54–59 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 27 England, John, 25, 42 evangelicalism, and 1848 European revolutions, 150, 166–167, 172; and abolitionism, 8, 93, 129; and anti-Catholic rioting, 31; definition of, 5–6; and the Mexican-American War as a moral dilemma, 12, 94–95, 127–129, 135, 145–146; and Mexico, 10, 63, 86, 89; and millennialism, 5, 26; and nativism, 17, 23, 30, 34–37, 108; and opposition to Indian Removal, 55, 80; and pacifism, 129, 144; and party politics, 57–58, 132, 171–172; and republicanism, 172; and revivalism, 26–27; and voluntary societies, 55, 57, 66, 165–166. See also Protestantism and Second Great Awakening Farías, Gómez, 95, 98 Farnham, Thomas, 63, 71, 78 Federalist Papers, 40–41 Fenwick, Benedict Joseph, 78 Ficklin, Orlando B., 155

235

Fillmore, Millard, 55, 59 Finney, Charles G., 17, 55, 129, 133 Ford, Thomas, 50 Foreign Evangelical Society, 164 Fort Isabel, 67 Fort Texas, 67 Foxe, John, 37 Free Soil Party, 141 Frelinghuysen, Theodore, 7–8, 55–56, 58–59, 137, 139 Frémont, John C., 81 Gaines, Edmund, 136 Gardiner, Julia, 54 Garrison, William Lloyd, 70, 80, 94, 133–134, 144, 164 Georgetown College, 73 German Reformed Church, 137 Gilliam, Albert, 63, 65, 71 Giustiniani, L., 37 “Golden Jesus.” See U.S. Army, and plunder or vandalism of Mexican holy places Grant, Ulysses, S., 70 Greeley, Horace, 162 Greene, Albert C., 154 Gregg, Josiah, 117, 121 Gregory XVI, Pope, 23–24, 62; and Mirari Vos, 24–25 Gregory, Samuel, 71 Harrison, William Henry, 54 Herrera, José Joaquín, 60, 86 Hogan, William, 147 Hughes, John, 151–152; and debates with Protestants, 167; and diplomatic relations with Rome, 162; and Leopold Association, 22; and Mexican-American War, 76, 85, 91, 142; and Philadelphia riots, 30, 56; and reaction to Mirari Vos, 25; and relationship with

236

Index

Hughes, John (Cont.) Polk Administration during Mexican-American War, 73–75, 94, 98–99, 102; and schools controversy, 28–29, 32, 51

liberty, 2, 4, 20, 22–27, 140; and virtue, 19, 114, 125, 152 Liberty Party, 8, 54, 57, 59, 134, 164 Leopold Association, 21–23, 145 Loras, Mathias, 73

immigrants, 42–43, 56, 58, 92, 148; in the U.S. Army, 69, 103 Ingersoll, Charles J., 88

McCalla, William L., 100–102 McCleod, John, 37 McClernand, John A., 43 McElroy, John, 73–74, 83–84, 110–111, 119, 155 McRee, William F., 128, 140 Madison, James, 41 Maffit, John N., 143 "Manifest Destiny," and anti-Catholicism, 66, 76, 86, 144, 146, 165; definition of, 2; origin of the term, 61–62; and republicanism, 151–152 Manuel, Juan, 123 Marcy, William, 68–69, 74, 84, 100, 164–165 “Maria Monk,” 28, 37, 100–101, 127, 170 Marsh, George P., 155 Martin, Jacob L., 162 Mason, James M., 159 Matamoras, 67–68 Mayer, Brantz, 47–48, 71–72, 168 Meija, Francisco, 82 Methodists, 6, 27, 77, 129, 143 Mexico, American Catholic opinion of, 79–81, 91, 110, 111; American literature about, 44–49, 52, 63, 120–121, 134, 168–171; American Protestant missionaries in, 138–140, 163–166; map of, vii; politics in, 60, 95–97, 151; race and, 3, 43, 45–46, 48, 64, 67, 80, 91, 95, 111–113, 153; and recruitment of American deserters, 103, 106; and religion, 37–38, 45–48, 64, 67, 91, 168, 173; and republicanism, 62, 95, 155, 168; Roman Catholic Church in,

Jackson, Andrew, 58 Jay, John, 40–41 Jefferson, Thomas, 62 Jesuits. See Society of Jesus Johnson, Cave, 100 Johnson, Herschel V., 158 Johnson, Isaac, 138 Kansas-Nebraska Act, 171 Kearny, Stephen Watts, 69, 81 Kendall, George W., 47, 71, 104, 169 Kenly, John, 117 Kenrick, Francis Peter, 29, 51 Kenrick, Peter Richard, 73 Kirby, Edmund, 116 Kirk, Edward N., 165 Kirkham, Ralph W., 115 Lacordaire, Henri-Dominique, 25 Ladies Society for the Promotion of Education at the West, 165–166 Lamar, Mirabeau, 47 Lane, Henry S., 114, 117, 120, 126 Lane Theological Seminary, 18 Larkin, Thomas O., 86 Latrobe, Charles J., 45 Lee, Robert E., 102 Levin, Lewis C., and controversies during the Mexican-American War, 75, 92, 100, 155, 162–163, 171; and election of 1844, 32, 56; and Philadelphia riots, 30

48, 63–64, 66, 71, 73, 95, 110, 112–113, 121, 123, 151 Mexico City, 3, 10–11, 60, 73, 81, 84, 87, 89, 135, 187n40; falls to U.S. Army, 102, 133, 150; occupation of by U.S. Army, 105–106, 114, 116, 121–125; U.S. Army departs, 163; unrest in, 95–97 Mier Expedition (1842), 48 millennialism, 5, 26–28, 34, 61, 149 Miller, J.W., 129 Mirari Vos, 24–25 Missouri Compromise, 53 Molino del Rey, Battle of, 105 Monterrey, Battle of, 82–83 Morehead, James T., 43 Mormons. See Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Mormon Battalion, 142 “Mormon Extermination Order,” 50 “Mormon War,” 50–51 Morse, Samuel F. B., 21–22, 32, 34, 94, 107, 134, 162; and opinion of the Mexican-American War, 145 Morse, Sidney, 145 Murray, John Courtney, 25 Murray, Nicholas ("Kirwan"), 167–168, 201n42 nativism, 6, 64, 180n8; and formation of Native American Party, 29; and fusion with anti-Catholic movement, 34–37, 92–93, 147; and the Mexican-American War, 75, 94–95, 106, 108, 142, 144, 156, 171; and Second Party System, 38, 43–44, 56–59, 87; in the U.S. Army, 69, 85, 103–105; and violence against Catholics, 30–33. See also anti-Catholicism, immigrants, and Native American Party

Index

237

Native American Party, 7, 37, 43; and “All Mexico,” 156; and criticism of Polk Administration, 75, 85, 93, 100, 106, 108, 156; and election of 1844, 56–59; and election of 1848, 159, 171; and Mexican-American War, 87, 92–95, 100; and Philadelphia riots, 29–32, 75 Nauvoo Legion, 50 New England Anti-Slavery Society, 133 New Mexico, 54, 123, 169; annexation of by United States, 43, 69, 81, 83, 87, 150, 167–168; Protestant missionaries in, 165–66 New Orleans, 138 New York Protestant Reformation Society, 37 New York City, 16, 21–22, 32, 76; Native American electoral success in, 8, 32, 58; and schools controversy, 28–29, 37, 51, 56; and support for Pius IX, 162–163 Norris, W. H., 164 Oaxaca, 154 Oberlin College, 18 Oneida, 27, 50 Order of Saint Ursula, 15–19 Oregon, 51, 60, 65–66, 92, 165 O’Sullivan, John L., 61–63, 65–66, 87, 126, 138 Oswandel, Jacob, 116 Owsley, William, 90 pacifism, 129, 131, 134, 144, 146 Padierna, Battle of, 102. See also Battle of Contreras Palo Alto, Battle of, 67 Paredes y Arrillaga, Mariano, 60, 86 Parker, Theodore, 144, 146 Parras, 123 Peña y Peña, Manuel, 105

238

Index

Philadelphia, anti-Catholic rioting in, 10–11, 29–34, 38, 56, 74–75, 77, 87, 100, 103, 114, 120; evangelical activity in, 131, 134, 137–138, 143, 162, 166; as hometown of George M. Dallas, 58; Native American electoral success in, 7–8, 32, 56, 131; and schools controversy, 28–29, 37, 51, 100; and support for Pius IX, 162 Pius VII, Pope, 21 Pius IX, Pope, 88–89, 119, 162–163, 167 Polk, James K., 7–8, 68; and conciliation of Catholics, 72–74, 84–85, 87, 106–107, 126, 135–136, 142, 147; and controversies involving Catholics, 94, 97–102, 141, 166, 171; criticism of by nativists, 12–13, 70, 75–77, 85, 93, 100– 101, 106, 108, 134, 156; and diplomatic relations with Rome, 162–163; and election of 1844, 58–60; and Oregon, 60, 66; and territorial expansion, 58, 95; and Texas, 59–61; and Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 156, 160 Posada y Garduño, Emmanuel, 73 Presbyterians, 6, 27, 116–117, 129, 130–132, 136–137, 140, 195n18 Prescott, William H., 45–47, 71, 79 Protestantism, and American identity, 9, 51, 91, 136, 172; and evangelicalism, 5–6, 26, 31, 136; and missionaries in Mexico, 138–140, 163–166; and republicanism, 11, 51, 92, 201n39; and sermons on the Mexican-American War, 142–145; and voluntary societies, 17, 93, 136. See also Baptists, Congregationalists, evangelicals, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians Providence, 1, 4, 6, 16, 19–20, 22, 34, 38, 40–42, 45, 47–49, 52, 61–62, 70–71, 114, 121, 130, 138, 143, 145, 151–153, 156 Puebla, 96–97, 102, 115–116, 120–122

Quebec Act (1774), 41 Quitman, John A., 122 race, and Democratic Party, 38–39, 88, 154; and religion, 9, 39–40, 42, 46, 49, 64–65, 111–112, 142, 179n19; and republicanism, 42, 49, 51, 92, 113, 154; and Whig Party, 89–91. See also blackness and whiteness religion, and race, 9, 39–40, 42, 46, 64–65, 111–112, 125, 142, 179n19; and republicanism, 11, 51, 91, 92, 125–126, 167, 201n39. See also millennialism, Protestantism, Providence, and Roman Catholicism republicanism, 23, 135, 149; and Europe, 149, 163, 166–167; and Mexico, 62, 65, 93, 95, 112–114, 152; and Protestantism, 11, 35, 90, 92–93, 95, 125; and race, 42, 49, 51, 90, 92, 95, 125, 136, 152–154; and religion, 11, 17, 35, 38, 49, 51, 125, 152–153, 167, 179n19; and Roman Catholicism, 7, 17, 25–26, 51, 78, 112–114, 125–126, 147, 163, 168, 171, 201n42 Resaca de la Palma, Battle of, 67 Revolt of the Polkos, 95 Rey, Anthony, 73–74, 82–83, 155 Riley, John, 11, 103 Ritchie, Thomas, 87, 97–99, 106–107, 199n14 Robertson, John Blout, 70 Rogers, James Webb, 170 Roman Catholicism, in Europe, 21–22, 162–163, 167; and immigration to the United States, 42–43; in Mexico, 48, 63–64, 66, 71, 73–74, 91, 93, 95, 110, 112–121, 123, 151; and party politics, 58–59; and republicanism, 25, 51, 91; and Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 157–161; in the United



Index

States, 25, 41–42, 78–81, 91, 102, 106, 124–125 Rome, 162–163, 167 Sabbatarians, 118 San Patricios. See Saint Patrick Battalion Saint Patrick Battalion, 11, 102–106, 110 Santa Anna, Antonio López de, and Mexican politics, 60, 96, 98; and Mexican-American War, 82, 95, 102, 105, 122, 150 Santa Fe Expedition (1841), 47 schools controversy, 28–30, 32, 37, 51, 56, 74, 100 Scott, W. A., 167 Scott, Winfield, and criticism of by Mexican bishop, 123; and Mexico City campaign, 87, 105, 150; and participation in Catholic liturgies, 136, 142; and war planning, 69, 83; and warnings against desertion, 106 Second Great Awakening, 26–27, 41, 118 Second Vatican Council, 25 Sedgwick, Theodore, 162 Sergeant, John, 55 Sevier, Ambrose H., 161 Shakespeare, William, 169 Shields, James, 162 slavery, 90, 93, 129–130, 133, 198n3; as less harmful to liberty than Catholicism, 113 Slidell, John, 61 Slocum, J. J., 28 Small, William F., 170 Smith, Ephraim Kirby, 118 Smith, John C., 141, 164 Smith, Joseph, 27, 49–51 Smith, Justin, 169 Society of Jesus (Jesuits), 20, 22, 37, 73–74, 78, 81, 155, 169 Stapp, William, 47–48, 169

239

Stewart, Richard A., 143–144 Stockton, Robert F., 81 Tampico, 139–140 Taney, Roger, 201n42 Tappan, Arthur, 21, 94, 133 Tappan, Henry P., 66 Tappan, Lewis, 94, 133 Taylor, Zachary, 67, 69, 95, 97; and Roman Catholic Church, 74, 84–85, 120; and election of 1848, 171 Texas, annexation of by United States, 37–39, 43, 52, 59, 60, 62; independence of from Mexico, 54; Protestant missionaries in, 166; and Revolution of 1836, 36, 44 Thompson, Waddy, 63–65, 71–72, 79, 132, 135, 169 Tibbatts, John W., 39 Tilden, Daniel R., 90–91 Tlaxcala, 116 Tocquevílle, Alexis de, 27, 136 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 150, 152, 155–161, 166 Trist, Nicholas, 148–152, 155 Tyler, John, 37, 54, 58, 59 United States Army, and anti-Catholicism, 12–13; Catholic chaplains in, 73–75, 77–78, 83–84, 93, 100–101, 135, 142; and immigrants, 69, 104; nativism in, 69, 85, 103–105; and opinion of Mexican priests, 118–120; Protestant chaplains in, 126, 128, 140; and plunder or vandalism of Mexican holy places, 71, 72, 76–77, 80, 82–85, 97, 120–125; and soldiers’ opinion of Mexican churches and liturgies, 114–118; and violence against Mexican civilians, 121–122; and volunteers, 69; and war preparations, 68

240 Underwood, Joseph, R., 153 Unitarians, 15, 144 Upham, William, 154–155 Upshur, Abel Parker, 54 Ursulines. See Order of Saint Ursula. Vail, F. Y., 138 Van Buren, Martin, 58, 162 Vatican II. See Second Vatican Council Vera Cruz, 69, 96, 139–140 Walker, Robert J., 38–39, 60 Washington, George, 3, 41, 50 Washington Bible Society, 141 Webster, Daniel, 54

Index Wells, Alexander, 76 Westcott, James D., 158–159 Whig Party, and election of 1844, 54–59; and election of 1848, 159; and opinion of Mexico, 155; and Texas annexation, 37–38, 43–44; and use of anti-Catholicism to oppose Mexican-American War, 85, 89–91, 132, 153–154 whiteness, 9–10, 42, 46, 65, 90–91, 111, 154, 179n19. See also race. Willard, Emma, 168 Winthrop, John, 20, 27, 62 Worth, William J., 82, 116 Young, Brigham, 50–51