"What shall we say to this liberal age?": Catholic-Protestant Controversy in the Early National Capital

“What shall we say to this liberal age?”: Catholic-Protestant Controversy in the Early National Capital Michael S. Carter T his article focuses on a group of previously unexamined texts that appeared in three of Philadelphia’s national newspapers over the span of several months in 1792 when the city was the federal capital. These took the form of an extended discourse about the history and teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and what those implied about the full assimilation of American Catholics into the new nation. Here I explore the way certain late eighteenth-century Protestant attitudes toward Catholicism were manifested in print, examine Catholic responses to them, and argue that during the early Federalist period a change occurred in the nature of public discussions of the status of Catholicism within the new republic. The significance of this shift hinged on an implicit tension in late eighteenth-century America’s understanding of “liberalism”—an idea that has yet to be adequately explored. This essay will also examine how Roman Catholics positioned themselves in the developing milieu of Early National print culture, and will look at the devices and argumentative techniques they used to shape public perceptions of their beliefs and practices. What was the specific nature of anti-Catholic criticism? Who among members of the Catholic community stepped forward to defend the faith against doctrinal and political attacks during this period, and what does this say about the emerging socio-political structure of the Church in America? The First Post-Constitutional Debate About Catholic Citizenship? Ray A. Billington’s classic work on antebellum American anti-Catholicism, The Protestant Crusade: 1800-1860, though now over sixty years old, remains among the most consistently cited works on the subject. Billington is one of the few historians of anti-Catholicism in America who has argued, convincingly, that Nativism was not completely submerged by the moderate wave of toleration introduced by Revolutionary-era state constitutions. Rather, it was sustained by a 79 “small but persistent propaganda which lasted through the postrevolutionary period.”1 Billington’s study begins with the year 1800, omitting the Federalist period altogether . He states that in 1793 America witnessed its first public controversy between Catholic and Protestant champions—by a Catholic priest and Protestant minister, whose exchanges took the form of a series of lengthy articles in the Boston Gazette. However, Billington is incorrect on two important details. The date of the controversy he describes is in reality earlier than he dates it: in 1791, not 1793, which places it even closer to the passage of the first amendment to the Constitution, when debates over the place of religion in the civic sphere were much less settled.2 Also, while this 1791 controversy was the first protracted public debate over the place of Catholicism in the new republic, it was between clergymen, who were the conventional exponents of religious debate in eighteenth-century America. Billington, writing that this debate occurred in 1793, also missed what is the most unusual public debate over Catholicism in the Early Republic, and one that has never received scholarly attention . It is all the more illuminating because it was initially answered not by a clergyman , but by a Catholic layman—the thirty-one year old Irish-born printer Mathew Carey (1760-1839).3 This hitherto unexamined controversy, the subject of this article, reveals that toleration for Catholicism was not put to rest, as often believed, through the first amendment guarantee of religious freedom at the federal level. The 1792 controversy examined here, which Mathew Carey himself later that year published anonymously as an octavo pamphlet entitled The Calumnies of Verus; Or, Catholics Vindicated, From certain old Slanders lately revived, appeared originally in three of Philadelphia’s newspapers. These were Andrew Brown’s Federal Gazette, Philip Freneau’s National Gazette, and William Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser.4 This public controversy has never been examined, and the letters, col80 U.S. Catholic Historian 1. Ray A. Billington, The Protestant Crusade: 1800-1860 (New York: MacMillan, 1938), 32. 2. Controversy Between The Reverend John Thayer, Catholic Missionary, of Boston, and The Reverend George Leslie, Pastor of a Church, In Washington, New-Hampshire (Georgetown, 1791). The controversy...