Notes
185 notes Introduction 1. John carroll to Joseph Edenshink, April–June 1785, in The John Carroll Papers, 1755–1815, ed. thomas o’Brien hanley (3 vols., notre Dame, 1976), i, 186. 2. the Sacred congregation, now called the congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, is the international agency within the Roman catholic church that since the seventeenth century has been in charge of spreading catholicism and regulating ecclesiastical matters in noncatholic countries. Regarding carol’s concern about foreign interference, see Joseph Agonito, The Building of an American Catholic Church: The Episcopacy of John Carroll (new York, 1988), 16–29. 3. Much of the older scholarship on catholicism in the early republic has been institutional—“steeples and peoples” studies. Part of a long tradition of religious denominations carefully recording places and names in their past, catholic histories of the trans-Appalachian West generally have been celebratory descriptions of leading personages and institutional growth. Although thoroughly researched, most tend to treat catholic communities in isolation, as though they had been insulated from the influence and opinion of non-catholics. An exception is Sister Mary Ramona Mattingly’s The Catholic Church on the Kentucky Frontier, 1785–1812 (Washington, D.c., 1936), which connects the development of catholicism in the Bluegrass state with that of Protestant denominations. other early institutional histories include Martin John Spalding, Sketches of the Early Catholic Missions of Kentucky (louisville, 1844), and Sketches of the Life, Times, and Character of the Rt. Rev. Benedict Joseph Flaget (louisville, 1852); John Gilmary Shea, History of the Catholic Church in the United States, 1763–1815 (Akron, 1888); Benedict Webb, The Centenary of Catholicity in Kentucky (louisville, 1884); Joseph William Ruane, The Beginnings of the Society of St. Sulpice in the United States, 1791–1829 (Washington, D.c., 1935); and leo F. Ruskowski, French Émigré Priests in the United States, 1791–1815 (Washington, D.c., 1940). For a more recent study of Kentucky catholicism, see clyde F. crews, An American Holy Land: A History of the Archdiocese of Louisville (Wilmington, 1987). 4. Ray Allen Billington’s and Jenny Franchot’s works are the definitive studies of early American anti-catholicism. Billington’s The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (new York, 1938) focuses on anti-catholicism’s roots in colonial America and its rematerialization among nativists in the 1830s. Franchot’s more recent exploration of anti-catholic discourse as a crucial point of contact between catholic and Protestant cultures is concerned with the antebellum period, long after the initial years of religious interaction between Protestants and catholics in the trans-Appalachian West. See her Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley, 1994). the degree to which trans-Appalachian catholics and Protestants held each other in fascinated disgust or admiration has been understated. Whereas Franchot explores the Protestant observation of catholics, the present study emphasizes the reverse. in addition, it outlines the mutual observation and selfcomparison in the decades before the 1830s, when Franchot’s work begins. it should be noted that it was Sydney E. Ahlstrom’s suggestion that the origins of this American Protestant sympathizing fascination with old World catholicism lie in an earlier period of romanticization, when catholics began moving to the western edges of the United States in 1785–1830. See Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (new haven, 1972), 548. A work that does give close attention to the early republican period and which argues that anti-catholicism continued unabated, though it was accompanied by new, more positive opportunities for Protestant-catholic interaction, is ira M. leonard and Robert D. Parmet’s American Nativism, 1830–1860 (new York, 1971). Although he has little to say about religion or the frontier, Paul Foik shows that anti-catholicism had an important role in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century politics. See Foik, “Anti-catholic Parties in American Politics, 1776–1860,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 36 (March 1925): 41–69. 5. in general, catholics have been left out of the recent pivotal treatments of frontier religion and of religion in the early republic, which focus on Protestant evangelicalism. nathan o. hatch’s and Jon Butler’s immensely influential books on late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury religion do not cover the spread of catholicism nor the vibrant interaction of catholics and Protestants in this period. See hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (new haven, 1989), and Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (cambridge...
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