Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America by William B. Kurtz (review)

Nativism, reinforced by the massive influx of immigrants during the Irish famine of the 1840s, revitalized perceptions of American incompatibility with Catholic loyalty to Rome. Debates over manifest destiny, the U.S.-Mexican War, abolitionism, and sectionalism exacerbated the Catholic Church’s embattled condition in the Civil War era. William B. Kurtz’s study of Catholicism at a pivotal juncture in American history effectively documents a tumultuous progression.

Kurtz initially unscrambles bitter sectional tensions disrupting northern Catholic fidelities to church, region, and party before and during the Civil War. Most Catholics opposed prowar Republicans, he notes, but wartime service allowed War Democrats to enhance their prospects as “true Americans” (p. 43). Catholic colleges supported the Union army, while the reputations of New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania regiments soared. Commanders Thomas F. Meagher and Michael Corcoran, alongside other soldiers, supported emancipation, temporarily affirming the compatibility between faith and patriotism. The more than six hundred nuns who bolstered the national Catholic profile more than “the actions of Catholic chaplains or soldiers” contributed much, Kurtz continues, but ethnic prerogatives continued to challenge assimilation prospects (p. 68). Bishops’ indecisiveness on emancipation neutralized the value of Catholic military service for many northerners, while debates over abolition sidelined the repeal movement for Irish Americans committed to their home-land’s independence. Catholic advocator Orestes A. Brownson’s prowar, pro-emancipation stance confronted the conservative stance of New York’s Archbishop John Hughes, who based his opposition in economic and faith concerns and not in mere “unprincipled obstructionism,” Kurtz argues (p. 109).

The brutality of incensed Irish New Yorkers who lashed out against conscription in the 1863 draft riots is adroitly counterpoised against bishops’ efforts to renounce the violence and contextualize factors of “patriotism, disaffection, ethnicity, class, and racism” underpinning the clash (p. 110). The virtual erasure of Irish Catholic sacrifice in the Union army from contemporary culture is recognized, while Kurtz positions the failure to exempt clergy from the draft against Protestant hostility to Pope Pius IX’s “mostly humanitarian” appeal for an end to the war (p. 121). But Protestant antipathy to a cohort associated with such violence, and therefore seen as incompatible with America’s founding principles, eclipsed the pope’s call. Proposals for Catholic veterans to defend the Papal States against Italian nationalist forces seemed to confirm Catholic disloyalty as Thomas Nast’s cartoons kept draft riot memories alive. Kurtz concludes that while Knights of Columbus and Ancient Order of the Hibernians commemorations of Irish Civil War heroism asserted local and regional Catholic cultural empowerment, negative perspectives remained until their abatement during World War II.

Several focuses merit additional scrutiny, including Father Edward Purcell and the Cincinnati-based Catholic Telegraph’s “fierce advocacy of the war and emancipation,” Horace Greeley’s anti-Catholic attitudes, curtailment of U.S.-Vatican diplomatic relations in 1867, and Catholic cohorts other than Irish or German (p. 123). Kurtz is unduly cavalier in citing Irish priority of church over radical nationalism, but deft in summarizing that “[s]upport for Ireland, the working class, and the church were not necessarily incompatible, and were in many cases simply three different but related parts of Irish Catholic Americans’ daily lives” (p. 132). His contention of Catholic aspirations to “uphold law, order, and stability” also warrants further exploration, while the “separate Catholic America” of the title is somewhat disingenuous—Catholics arguably forged a distinct, rather than “separate,” religious culture in the modernizing United States (p. 91). Any book tackling such thorny topics should inevitably prompt such questions, however. Kurtz is to be commended for his masterful interrogation of the fusion of faith, national crisis, and ethnic identity at a critical moment in American history. This is a notable and welcome contribution to Catholic, Civil War...