Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 1835-1860

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. The best study to date outlining the relationship between religion and politics in the antebellum period is Richard J. Carwardine’s Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). “Evangelical” is a fluid term that can have many applications depending on the period and group to which it refers. For the purposes of this book, the chief characteristics of antebellum evangelicalism include the belief that the Bible possesses moral authority as the word of God, and that this moral authority includes both proscriptions and prescriptions for private and public behavior; that salvation is between the individual and God, and true salvation manifests in transformed personal behavior; that the public declaration of the gospel is the principle duty of the church; that the traditions of the church are secondary to the authority of Scripture and the individual’s relationship with God; and that the Christian life includes commitments to both personal and social improvement. 2. See James Oscar Farmer, The Metaphysical Confederacy: James Henley Thornwell and the Synthesis of Southern Values (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986), 66, 133, 190–92. 3. The belief that America was a unique yet precarious experiment in self-government was not limited to any particular region in the national period. Important studies suggesting that political and social instability was a common fear in the national period include: Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965), 3–23; Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, — 153 — MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1992); and Steven Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers: America’s Pre–CivilWar Reformers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 3–15. 4. See Anne C. Loveland, Southern Evangelicals and the Social Order, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), chaps. 5 and 6; Edward R. Crowther, Southern Evangelicals and the Coming of the Civil War (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000); and Robert M. Calhoon, Evangelicals and Conservatives in the Early South, 1740–1861 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988). O N E . New England Sets a Pattern 1. William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 291; Louis Filler, The Crusade against Slavery , 1830–1860 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 97; and Frank Otto Gattell, ed., “Postmaster Huger and the Incendiary Publications,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 64 (October 1963): 193–201. 2. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War against Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 149; and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “The Abolitionists’ Postal Campaign of 1835,” Journal of Negro History 50, no. 4 (October 1965): 230. 3. Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan, 150–51. 4. John C. Calhoun, Southern Patriot, August 4, 1835, September 30, 1835; and Clement Eaton, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), chap. 8. 5. Flag of the Union, August 22, 1835, quoted in Eaton, Freedom-ofThought Struggle, 199. 6. Wyatt-Brown, “Abolitionists’ Postal Campaign,” 231. 7. Jackson to Kendall, August 9, 1835, Correspondence of Andrew Jackson , ed. John Spencer Bassett, 7 vols. (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institute of Washington, 1926–35), 5:360–61. 8. Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963), 68–69. 9. Ibid., 69–71. 10. Rebecca Reed, Six Months in a Convent (Boston: Russell N. Hall, 1835). 11. Billington, Protestant Crusade, 71–72. Notes to Pages 3–10 — 154 — 12. Nancy Lusignan Schultz, Fire and Roses: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834 (New York: Free Press, 2000), 165–67. Ray Billington notes that it is possible, but not certain, that a conspiracy to destroy the convent was afoot prior to Beecher’s sermons. See Billington, Protestant Crusade, 73. 13. Billington, Protestant Crusade, 84. 14. Lyman Beecher, The Autobiography of Lyman Beecher, 2 vols. (Cambridge , MA: Harvard University Press, 1901), 2:251. 15. Ibid., 2:251–52. Five years before he gave his anti-Catholic sermons in Boston, Beecher declared that Catholicism was a threat to the future of the country. In July 1830, in a letter to his daughter Catherine, he stated that the “moral destiny of the nation” hinged on the development of a Protestant educational network in the West that could combat “Catholics and...