I would like to thank the late Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eugene Genovese, James Roark, Grant Wacker, and especially Brooks Holifield for their comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to Emory University and to the Filson Historical Society of Louisville for grants that allowed me to conduct much of the research for this article.

1. Courier (Charleston), April 12, 1842; Charleston Patriot, April 18, 1842.

2. In addition to the prominence of anti-Catholic violence in surveys of American religious history, numerous studies focus on Protestant antipathy toward Catholics. These include: Augustina, Mary, American Opinion of Roman Catholicism in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936 Google Scholar); Billington, Ray, The Protestant Crusade: 1800–1860 (New York: Macmillan, 1938 Google Scholar); and Massa, Mark Stephen, Anti- Catholicism in America: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (New York: Crossroad, 2003 Google Scholar). Jenny Franchot argues that fascination with Catholicism often lingered beneath the surface of anti-Catholicism in Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). For examples of the centrality of anti-Catholicism in surveys of American Catholicism, see Ellis, John Tracy, American Catholicism, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 42, 63Google Scholar; Greeley, Andrew M., The Catholic Experience (New York: Image, 1969), 19, 28Google Scholar; and Morris, Charles R., American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America's Most Powerful Church (New York: Random House, 1997 Google Scholar).

3. England, John, Works of the Right Rev. John England, First Bishop of Charleston, ed. Reynolds, Ignatius Aloysius (Baltimore: John Murphy and Co., 1849), 1:52 Google Scholar; Mills, Samuel J. and Smith, Daniel, Report of a Missionary Tour through that part of the United States which lies West of the Allegany Mountains (Andover: Flagg and Gould, 1815), 11 Google Scholar. Flaget did insist that the missionaries allow him to examine the translation first.

4. Berlin, Ira and Gutman, Herbert, “Natives and Immigrants, Free Men and Slaves: Urban Workingmen in the Antebellum American South,” American Historical Review 88, no. 5 (December 1983): 1178, 1187CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Of the surveys of American Catholicism, only one devotes significant space to southern Catholicism: Shea, John Gilmary, History of the Catholic Church in the United States, 4 vols. (New York: J. G. Shea, 1886–1892 Google Scholar). Several other exceptions to this rule are early histories by prominent southern Catholics: Hopkins, Thomas F., St. Mary's Church, Charleston, S.C.: The First Catholic Church in the Original Diocese of Charleston: An Historic Sketch of the Church from Its Beginning to the Present Time (Charleston: Walker, Evans and Cogswell, 1898 Google Scholar); O’Connell, J. J., Catholicity in the Carolinas and Georgia: Leaves of Its History (Sadlier, 1879)Google Scholar; Spalding, Martin John, Sketches of the Early Catholic Missions of Kentucky; from their Commencement in 1787 to the Jubilee of 1826–7 (Louisville: B. J. Webb, 1844)Google Scholar. More reliable are a handful of relatively contemporary regional studies: Crews, Clyde F., Presence and Possibility: Louisville Catholicism and Its Cathedral (Louisville: n.p., 1973 Google Scholar); Kenny, Michael, Catholic Culture in Alabama: Centenary Story of Spring Hill College, 1830–1930 (New York: America Press, 1931)Google Scholar; Madden, Richard C., Catholics in South Carolina: A Record (New York: University Press of America, 1985 Google Scholar); and Mattingly, Mary Ramona, The Catholic Church on the Kentucky Frontier (1785–1812), Catholic University of America Studies in American Church History, vol. 25 (Washington: Catholic University Press, 1936 Google Scholar). I know of only one work that deals with Catholics throughout the antebellum South: Miller, Randall and Wakelyn, Jon, eds., Catholics in the Old South (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

6. Code, Bernard, Dictionary of the American Catholic Hierarchy (New York: Longmans, Green, 1940), 417–21Google Scholar. South here refers to the states that joined the Confederacy plus the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland, while North refers to the states that joined the Union. Dioceses west of those states bordering the Mississippi plus Texas are excluded. Kenneth Zanca gives the ratio of northern to southern dioceses in 1860 as 24:18, but his criteria for determining northern and southern is unclear ( Zanca, Kenneth J., American Catholics and Slavery: 1789–1866 [Lanham, MD.: University Press of America, 1994], 47 Google Scholar).

7. These schools were not only the first founded but also proved to be the most long lasting. Of the fourteen Catholic men's colleges founded by 1819, the four that are still in operation are all in the South or border the South: Spring Hill College, St. Louis University, Georgetown University, and Mount St. Mary's College.

8. Hill, Samuel S., ed., Religion in the Southern States: A Historical Study (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1983 Google Scholar). Donald Mathews similarly traces the ascendancy and eventual dominance of evangelical Protestantism in the South in his Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).

9. Harrell, David Edwin Jr., “Religious Pluralism: Catholics, Jews, and Sectarians,” in Religion in the South: Essays, ed. Wilson, Charles Reagan (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 59–82 Google Scholar. The final article in this volume, Edwin Gaustad's “Regionalism in American Religion,” 155–72, buttresses the view of Protestant hegemony by identifying Baptists as the “culture religion” of the South.

10. Miller, Randall, “Catholic in a Protestant World: The Old South Example,” in Varieties of Southern Religious Experience, ed. Hill, Samuel S. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 130 Google Scholar.

11. Studies of particular regions of the South often pay more attention to Catholics. See, for example, Boles, John B., Religion in Antebellum Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976 Google Scholar). Jon F. Sensbach discusses the importance of Catholics along the Gulf Coast to early southern religious history in an essay entitled “Before the Bible Belt: Indians, Africans, and the New Synthesis of Eighteenth- Century Southern Religious History.” The title of the volume in which the essay appeared, however, aptly summarizes historians’ views of southern religious history: Schweiger, Beth Barton and Mathews, Donald, eds., Religion in the American South: Protestants and Others in History and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004 Google Scholar).

12. Belcher, Joseph, The Religious Denominations of the United States: Their History, Doctrine, Government and Statistics (Philadelphia: J. E. Potter, 1854), 764 Google Scholar; O’Connell, , Catholicity in the Carolinas and Georgia, 37, 88, 111, 114Google Scholar; Rameur, E., “The Progress of the Church in the United States,” Catholic World 1, no. 1 (April 1865): 9 Google Scholar; Salzbacher, Joseph, Meine Reise Nach Nord-Amerika im Jahre 1842 (Vienna: Wimmer, Schmidt and Leo, 1845), 388–89Google Scholar; Herman Schauinger, J., Cathedrals in the Wilderness (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Company, 1952), 18, 54, 232, 307Google Scholar; Schmidt, Raymond H., “An Overview of Institutional Establishments in the Antebellum Southern Church,” in Catholics in the Old South, ed. Miller, and Wakelyn, , 63 Google Scholar; Spalding, Sketches of the Early Catholic Missions of Kentucky, 192, 298; V. F. O’Daniel, “Bishop Flaget's Report of the Diocese of Bardstown to Pius VII, April 10, 1815,” Catholic Historical Review 1 (April 1915–January 1916): 313–19; “Report of Bishop England to the Cardinal Prefect of Propaganda (Rome, 1833),” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia (hereafter referred to as ACHS) 8, no. 3 (September 1897): 321.

13. Hopkins, , St. Mary's Church, 9, 19, 54Google Scholar.

14. O’Connell, , Catholicity in the Carolinas and Georgia, 134 Google Scholar.

15. England, Works of the Right Rev. John England, 4:332.

16. Mattingly, , Catholic Church on the Kentucky Frontier, 96, 98Google Scholar.

17. Ibid., 89; Spalding, , Sketches of the Early Catholic Missions of Kentucky, 262 Google Scholar.

18. Crews, , Presence and Possibility, 17 Google Scholar. Spalding estimated the total amount raised at $3,000 and also noted that Protestants were the major donors (Sketches of the Early Catholic Missions of Kentucky, 262). Protestants also served as members of the Corporation, the chartered body of Charleston Catholics. This arrangement, however, became a source of controversy when England clashed with the Corporation. As a result, he decided in January of 1822 to require all members to subscribe to articles of faith “as only Roman Catholics can with a safe conscience subscribe to” ( Hopkins, , St. Mary's Church, 47–48 Google Scholar).

19. Richard R. Duncan, “Catholics and the Church in the Antebellum Upper South,” in Catholics in the Old South, ed. Miller and Wakelyn, 80. Spalding estimated the total amount raised in the first subscription at $12,000–14,000 (Sketches of the Early Catholic Missions of Kentucky, 243). 20. Benedict Joseph Flaget, “Subscription for Funds to Finish the Building of the St. Louis Church in Louisville,” February 26, 1817.

21. Spalding, , Sketches of the Early Catholic Missions of Kentucky, 160 Google Scholar.

22. Fox, Columba, The Life of the Right Reverend John Baptist Mary David (New York: U. S. Catholic Historical Society, 1925), 130 Google Scholar.

23. O’Connell, , Catholicity in the Carolinas and Georgia, 70 Google Scholar.

24. John England to William Gaston, Charleston, September 21, 1822, ACHS 18, no. 4 (December 1907): 382.

25. United States Catholic Miscellany, August 14, 1822.

26. Fox, , Life of the Right Reverend John Baptist Mary David, 117 Google Scholar. The quality of Catholic education evidently impressed Clay. Years later, in response to a friend's request for information on education for young women, he recommended the Catholic college at Bardstown and a Catholic girls’ school in Lexington. Henry Clay to Joshua Folsom, Zanesfield, Ohio, December 20, 1839, in The Papers of Henry Clay, ed. Robert Seager II (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988), 9:368.

27. Spalding, , Sketches of the Early Catholic Missions of Kentucky, 283–84Google Scholar.

28. Crews, , Presence and Possibility, 5 Google Scholar.

29. W. J. Howlett, “Bishop Flaget's Diary,” ACHS 29, no. 1 (March 1918): 46, 48.

30. Crews, , Presence and Possibility, 25 Google Scholar.

31. Cited in Mattingly, , Catholic Church on the Kentucky Frontier, 28 Google Scholar.

32. Courier (Charleston), April 12, 1842.

33. Ibid., April 7, 1854.

34. Cited in Mattingly, , Catholic Church on the Kentucky Frontier, 106 Google Scholar.

35. England, John, Diurnal of the Right Rev. John England, D.D. (Philadelphia: American Catholic Historical Society, 1895), 65 Google Scholar.

36. Cited in Crews, , Presence and Possibility, 21 Google Scholar.

37. John England to William Gaston, Charleston, December 18, 1824, ACHS 19, no. 1 (March 1908): 102.

38. Hopkins, , St. Mary's Church, 1 Google Scholar.

39. For the most recent analysis of the letter's impact, see John F. Quinn, “‘Three Cheers for the Abolitionist Pope!’: American Reaction to Gregory XVI's Condemnation of the Slave Trade, 1840–1860,” Catholic Historical Review 90, no. 1 (January 2004): 67–93. In Supremo Apostolatus continued a centuries-old papal critique of slavery's excesses. The slave trade had come under papal censure two centuries earlier when Urban VIII condemned it and forbade Christian participation. For an overview of papal pronouncements on slavery, see Rice, Madeleine Hooke, American Catholic Opinion in the Slavery Controversy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), 11–24 Google Scholar.

40. William Hogan to John C. Calhoun, Boston, November 12, 1844, in The Papers of John C. Calhoun, ed. Clyde Wilson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 238.

41. John Macpherson Berrien, “To the People of Georgia,” Rockingham, Georgia, September 4, 1855, cited in Miller, Stephen F., The Bench and Bar of Georgia: Memoirs and Sketches (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1858), 94 Google Scholar.

42. In the North, in contrast, nativists depicted Catholics as tools of the southern slaveocracy. See Bean, William G., “An Aspect of Know- Nothingism—The Immigrant and Slavery,” South Atlantic Quarterly 23, no. 4 (October 1924): 319–34Google Scholar.

43. John Carroll to John Thayer, Baltimore, July 15, 1794, ACHS 20, no. 1 (March 1909): 58–59.

44. Stephen Badin to John Carroll, Washington County, July 5, 1799, ACHS 19, no. 4 (December 1908): 478.

45. W. J. Howlett, “Bishop Flaget's Diary,” ACHS 29, no. 3 (September 1918): 246.

46. Report of Bishop England to the Cardinal Prefect of the Propaganda, 1833, ACHS 8, no. 3 (September 1897): 329.

47. England to Paul Cardinal Cullen, Charleston, February 23,

1836. ACHS 8, no. 2 (June 1897): 224. 48. Cited in Rice, American Catholic Opinion in the Slavery Controversy, 134. Rice argues that Gaston's outspokenness reflected a legacy of antislavery sentiment in North Carolina (136). In at least one case, a similar sentiment appeared in an official Catholic publication. The Miscellany of September 29, 1827, included a column from a correspondent in Ceylon who argued that slavery was incompatible with a country's moral improvement.

49. John England to Paul Cullen, Charleston, February 23, 1836, ACHS 8, no. 2 (June 1897): 219–21. 50. Miller, Randall M., “The Failed Mission: The Catholic Church and Black Catholics in the Old South,” in Catholics in the Old South, ed. Miller, and Wakelyn, , 157 Google Scholar.

51. Madden, , Catholics in South Carolina: A Record, 68 Google Scholar.

52. Mattingly, , Catholic Church on the Kentucky Frontier, 105 Google Scholar.

53. David to Carroll, September 17, 1814, Archives of the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

54. England, Works of the Right Rev. John England, 3:107–8.

55. Ibid., 112.

56. Courier (Charleston), April 12, 1842, cited in England, Works of the Right Rev. John England , 1:22.

57. Spalding, Martin, “Dissertation on the American Civil War,” cited in Zanca, American Catholics and Slavery, 209 Google Scholar.

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59. Verot, Augustin, A Tract for the Times: Slavery and Abolitionism, being the substance of a sermon, preached in the Church of St. Augustine, Florida, on the 4th day of January, 1861, day of public humiliation, fasting and prayer (New Orleans: Catholic Propagator, 1861 Google Scholar).

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62. McGreevy, John, Catholicism and American Freedom (New York: Norton, 2003), 57–61 Google Scholar. For an overview of abolitionist anti- Catholicism, see Walker, Peter, Moral Choices: Memory, Desire, and Imagination in Nineteen-Century American Abolition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978 Google Scholar).

63. John England to Paul Cullen, Charleston, February 23, 1836, ACHS 8, no. 2 (June 1897), 222.

64. Miscellany, August 26, 1826.

65. Ibid., October 15, 1831.

66. Ibid., October 5, 1831; see also McGreevy, , Catholicism and American Freedom, 52–56 Google Scholar.

67. McGreevy, , Catholicism and American Freedom, 51 Google Scholar; Rice, , American Catholic Opinion in the Slavery Controversy, 83 Google Scholar.

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70. Ignatiev, Noel, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), 159 Google Scholar.

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73. U.S. Catholic Intelligencer, reprinted in Miscellany, October 15, 1831.

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75. Guardian (Louisville), January 14, 1860, cited in Zanca, , American Catholics and Slavery, 133 Google Scholar.

76. Guardian (Louisville), November 24, 1860, cited in Rice, , American Catholic Opinion in the Slavery Controversy, 137 Google Scholar.

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82. Miscellany, June 5, 1822.

83. Courier (Charleston), August 6, 1854.

84. Benedict Joseph Flaget to Joseph Octavius Plessis, Loretto, June 18, 1816, ACHS 18, no. 1 (March 1907): 24.

85. Miscellany, November 24, 1827.

86. Ibid., August 7, 1822.

87. Ibid., July 3, 1822.

88. Ibid., December 8, 1827; see also January 12, 1825, and September 9, 1826.

89. Ibid., September 23, 1826.

90. Guilday, Peter, The Life and Times of John England, First Bishop of Charleston (New York: America Press, 1927), 2:158 Google Scholar.

91. John England to Paul Cullen, Charleston, May 25, 1835, ACHS 8, no. 2 (June 1897): 214.

92. Ibid., 224.

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94. Miscellany, July 28, 1827.

95. Courier (Charleston), March 15, 1858.

96. John Cleves Short to Charles Wilkins Short, Montreal, June 17, 1849, Filson Historical Society.

97. Diary of John Brown, Wednesday, October 24, 1821, Filson Historical Society.

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