1. Nevins, Allan and Thomas, Milton Halsey, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong, 4 vols. (New York, 1952), 4:357.Google Scholar

2. Works that stress the reactionary side of the American response to the Commune include: Samuel Bernstein, “The American Press Views the Commune,” in his Essays in Political and Intellectual History (New York, 1955), pp. 169–183;Google ScholarCherry, George L., “American Metropolitan Press Reaction to the Paris Commune of 1871,” Mid-America 32 (1950): 3–12;Google ScholarGargan, Edward T., “The American Conservative Response,” in Rougerie, Jacques, ed., 1871: Jalons pour une histoire de la Commune de Paris (Assen, The Netherlands, 1972), pp. 240–249;Google ScholarHeale, M. J., American Anticommunism: Combating The Enemy Within, 1830–1970 (Baltimore, 1990), pp. 21–30;Google ScholarLandy, A., “La Commune et les intellectuels américains,” Europe 70 (1951): 111–126;Google Scholarand Recht, Jean-Jacques, “La Commune de Paris et les Etats-Unis,” La Penséeno. 164 (1972): 99–120.Google Scholar

3. The best general study of the Commune in English is Edwards, Stewart, The Paris Commune: 1871 (London, 1971).Google ScholarFor a good introduction to the ideological contention that has always surrounded the Commune, see the two entries under “Paris Commune,” in Kernig, C. D., ed., Marxism, Communism and Western Society, 8 vols. (New York, 1972–1973).Google Scholar

4. For a description of this flood, see Katz, Philip Mark, “Americanizing the Paris Commune, 1861–1877” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1994), esp. chapters 4 and 6.Google Scholar

5. Quilibet, Philip [pseud.], “Drift-Wood,” Galaxy 11 (1871): 731;Google ScholarThe Nation, 13 April 1871, p. 251;Google ScholarAtlanta Constitution, 28 May 1871;Google ScholarDaily Connne (Utah) Reporter, 11 April 1871.Google Scholar

6. New York Herald, 11 August 1871; Cleveland Leader, 8 April, 19 May, 1 June 1871;Google ScholarBrockett, , Paris Under the Commune (New York, 1871), pp. 71, 90.Google Scholar

7. Cleveland Leader, 22 March, 1 April 1871; New York Times, 24 March 1871; Philadelphia Ledger, 12 April 1871, quoted in Cherry, “American Metropolitan Press Reaction,” p. 6;Google ScholarChicago Tribune, 22 March 1871, quoted in Gargan, “The American Conservative Response,” pp. 243–244. In fact, the Commune never managed to produce a truly revolutionary social policy.Google Scholar

8. Sorge to the General Council of the International Workingman's Association [IWA], 20 June 1871, N.A.F.C. Copybook, p. 27, IWA papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin.Google Scholar

9. Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, 22 July and 2 September 1871. Woodhull & Clafiin's Weekly espoused a variety of radical doctrines including Marxism, anarchism, women's suffrage, and free love; it was usually anticlerical.Google Scholar

10. Goldstein, Robert Justin, Political Repression in Modern America, From 1870 to the Present (Boston, 1978), p. 25.Google ScholarSee also Sexton, Patricio Cayo, The War on Labor and the Left: Understanding America's Unique Conservatism (Boulder, Col., 1991), pp. 124–126;Google ScholarLynch, Denis Tilden, The Wild Seventies (New York, 1941), p. 1; and most of the studies cited in note 2.Google Scholar

11. Fredrickson, George M., The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York, 1965), pp. 23–24.Google Scholar

12. See May, Henry F., Protestant Churches and Industrial America (New York, 1949), pp. 37–87;Google ScholarMead, Sidney E., The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (New York, 1963), pp. 142, 156–157.Google Scholar

13. The Independent, “The End of the Commune,” 1 june 1871, p. 6.Google Scholar

14. Nevins, Allan and Thomas, Milton Halsey, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong, 4:364. Strong was a vestryman at one of New York's elite Episcopal churches.Google Scholar

15. The Independent 13 April 1871, p. 4.Google Scholar

16. Hopkins, Mark, “Modern Skepticism,” Association Monthly 2 (07 1871): 145–147.Google Scholar

17. New York Times, 29 May 1871;Google Scholarcompare Rev. Everett, Edward Hale in the Boston Balloon Post, 17 April 1871.Google Scholar

18. For Boynton's sermon, see the New York Herald, 10 July 1871. For other attempts to link the Commune, the International, and American irreligion, see the Congregationalist, 1 June 1871; the Watchman and Reflector, 6 July 1871;Google ScholarWarren, Sidney, American Freethought, 1860–1914 (New York, 1943), p. 216;Google ScholarMay, Henry F., Protestant Churches, pp. 46, 58–59.Google Scholar

19. Brownson, Orestes A., “The Recent Events in France,” Catholic World 14 (1871): 303;Google ScholarBrownson, , “The International Association,” Catholic World 14 (1872): 705–706.Google ScholarCompare Brownson, “Essay in Refutation of Atheism” (1872), in Brownson, Henry F., ed., The Works of Orestes A. Brownson, 20 vols. (Detroit, 1882–1898), 2:3–4;Google ScholarWashburne, Elihu B., Account of the Sufferings and Death of the Most Rev. George Darboy, Late Archbishop of Paris (New York, 1873);Google Scholar“The Jesuit Martyrs of the Commune,” Catholic World 19 (1874): 505–525.Google Scholar

20. New York Evening Post, 22 May 1871;Google ScholarLieber to Prof. Bluntschli, 23 May 1871, in Perry, Thomas Sergeant, ed., Life and Letters of Francis Lieber (Boston, 1882), p. 411.Google ScholarThe powerful image of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre was not the sole property of conservatives; in 1872, a radical newspaper referred to the suppression of the Commune by the French government as “the ghastly horrors of the modern St. Bartholomew's days of the Barricades” (Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, 8 06 1872).Google Scholar

21. New York World, 23 May 1871. Msgr. Georges Darboy, the Archbishop of Paris, was executed by a Commune firing-squad on 24 May 1871.Google Scholar

22. Christian Union, 24 May 1871, p. 329. Various parts of Thompson's sermon were published in the New York Times, 29 May 1871 (from which he is quoted); New York World, 29 May 1871; and The [New York] Independent, 1 June 1871.Google ScholarA few years later, Thompson, added to his argument that “The Paris commune did not represent the true democracy of France” (“The Drift of Europe, Christian and Social” [1878], in his American Comments on European Questions, International and Religious [Boston, 1884], p. 19).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. “The End of the Commune,” The Independent, 1 June 1871.Google ScholarMelville, Herman made a similar claim for the identity of the Commune with the Scarlet Woman in his epic poem Clarel: “The Red Republic slinging flame / In Europe—she's your Scarlet Dame” (Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, ed. Bezanson, Walter E. [1876; New York, 1960], 2.25.110–111).Google Scholar

24. Beecher, Edward, “The International,” Christian Union, 31 05 1871, p. 345;Google Scholarfor more of Beecher's comments in this vein, see May, Protestant Churches, p. 58.Google Scholar

25. See, for example, Atwater, Lyman H., “The Labor Question in its Economic and Christian Aspects,” Princeton Reviewn.s. 1 (1872), 468–495, an essay that combined a complacent political economy with explicit attacks on the Commune as a model of infidelity and social unrest that must not be repeated here in America.Google Scholar

26. Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, “Jesus Christ and La Commune,” 6 January 1872.Google ScholarIn addition to the activities of the American Board, many Americans also became active supporters of the English clergyman McAll, Robert W., who began a mission to the Parisian working-class just after the Commune; see Louise Seymour Houghton, Fifine: A Story of the McAll Mission (Philadelphia, 1879), esp. 168–170.Google Scholar

27. Ibid. Curiously enough, this article was published next to a large portrait of Karl Marx, the subject of another article on the same page.

28. According to one snide observer, public supporters of American labor and the Commune all tended to be “ex-clergymen” (The Independent, 18 May 1871). Yet active clergy were also among those ranks; for example, see the New York World, 5 June 1871,Google Scholarand Dombrowski, James, The Early Years of Christian Socialism in America (New York, 1936), pp. 77–78.Google Scholar

29. I have found the following works particularly useful in thinking about the missionary impulse as a response to the reinforcing fears of blacks, Indians, and workingmen as sources of unrest in the postbellum period: Davis, Lawrence B., Immigrants, Baptists, and the Protestant Mind in America (Urbana, Ill., 1973);Google ScholarMardock, Robert W., The Reformers and the American Indian (Columbia, Mo., 1971);Google ScholarPrucha, Francis P., American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the Indian, 1865–1900 (Norman, Okla., 1976);Google ScholarSlotkin, Richard, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (New York, 1985).Google Scholar

30. See the discussion of Brace's life and career in Boyer, Paul, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), pp. 94, 96–107.Google Scholar

31. Brace, Charles Loring, The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years' Work Among Them (1872; enlarged 3rd ed., New York, 1880), p. 97.Google ScholarHere I am largely following Slotkin, Fatal Environment, pp. 310–311, who quotes the same passage.Google Scholar

32. Brace, Dangerous Classes, pp. 29–30 (quotes), 25–26, 130–131; “The Nether Classes,” The Nation, 10 October 1872, pp. 237–238; Cleveland Leader, 15 November 1871; Slotkin, Fatal Environment, p. 310.Google Scholar

33. Clark, Clifford E., Jr., Henry Ward Beecher: Spokesman for a Middle-Class America (Urbana, 111., 1978), p. 197.Google ScholarBeecher was the scion of a particularly distinguished American family: his sisters were the feminist Catherine Beecher and the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, and his father and brothers were all prominent churchmen. His popularity sprang less from his family ties, however, than from his ability to articulate middle-class hopes and fears and to epitomize the middle-class “respectability” of the age. For that very reason, his moral influence, though not his fame, severely declined after the scandalous Beecher-Tilton adultery trial of the mid-1870s;Google Scholarsee Waller, Altina L., Reverend Beecher and Mrs. Tilton: Sex and Class in Victorian America (Amherst, Mass., 1982).Google Scholar

34. Clifford, Henry Ward Beecher, p. 190; see also Waller, Reverend Beecher and Mrs. Tilton, pp. 12–37.Google Scholar

35. The sermon was reported in many newspapers, but the text as quoted is from Beecher, Henry Ward, The Sermons of Henry Ward Beecher, in Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, Sixth Series (New York, 1872), pp. 235–248.Google Scholar

36. Ibid., pp. 235–236, 238–239, 241.

37. Ibid., pp. 236–239.

38. Ibid., 239–242.

39. Ibid., pp. 249; compare pp. 248 (the closing words of the sermon).

40. Ibid., pp. 236, 242.

41. Ibid., pp. 242—246. Note that not every clergyman was so sanguine about the influence of the press; the (Episcopal?) Bishop of Western New York, for example, wondered “If journalism is so powerful, who shall save us from such journalism as made the Commune possible in Paris?” (quoted in Frederic Hudson, Journalism in the United States, from 1690 to 1872 [New York, 1873], xix).Google Scholar

42. Beecher, The Sermons, p. 236.Google Scholar