Frontiers of Faith: Bringing Catholicism to the West in the Early Republic

Introduction

1 introduction Father John carroll saw great promise in the nation’s future, particularly in its lands to the west. in the spring of 1785, two years after the treaty of Paris had ended war with England and only months after his appointment as head of the missions of the Roman catholic church in the United States, carroll described for a European colleague the rich forests and potential farmlands spread between the seaboard states and the Mississippi River. he asked his friend to convince American catholics training for the priesthood abroad to return home, where the shortage of clergymen was acute. not only were older parishes growing rapidly, particularly in Pennsylvania and Maryland, carroll wrote, but thousands of catholics were moving westward; “nothing withholds them but the dread of wanting the ministrations of Religion.” in fact, carroll added, there were “repeated offers of liberal grants of land for the support of clergymen there.” Most surprising, said carroll, was that “indeed some protestants, with a hope of having their lands speedily settled, have been induced to give their bonds for the conveyance to a catholic priest of very ample property.”1 Protestants willing to supply land to attract Roman catholic priests—the situation was as astonishing as it was promising. catholic-Protestant relations had been improved by the French alliance during the American Revolution, and John carroll and his clergy were attuned to the increasing spirit of toleration. Yet experience taught caution. only weeks earlier, carroll himself had ended a three-month delay by accepting the Vatican’s offer to appoint him to lead the American church. his superiors knew about the hostility of Protestant and republican Anglo-Americans 2 introduction toward bishops. they cautiously offered him the title of prefect apostolic of the United States—an office without episcopal authority. carroll appreciated this discretion, but he was more concerned that by not holding the office of bishop with a diocese grounded in the United States, he would be seen by Americans as a mere agent of Rome, by way of the Sacred congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. he feared the semblance of foreign interference in a nation that had just won its independence.2 As carroll glanced backward across the Atlantic toward the source of his authority and looked ahead to the future of his church in the West, he knew he could not avoid considering the opinion of America’s non-catholics. Unlike the more populated East where catholics might have been a minority easily ignored, in the sparsely settled countryside and small towns in the early West even small concentrations of catholics stood out. carroll’s reign and those of his successors would involve constant negotiation with American Protestants and other non-catholics. catholics living in the trans-Appalachian West interacted with noncatholics at a variety of religious and social contact points during the early republic. time and again catholic clergy and laity successfully pursued strategies of growth in frontier regions, in the midst of Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, deists, and others of different religions or of no belief. For forty years catholics and Protestants contested the trans-Appalachian frontier with a degree of fluidity not possible earlier because of the insignificant catholic population, and not likely later because of worsening sectarian relations. Most important decisions made by catholic clergy and the episcopacy during these middle decades were shaped by, or at least deliberately considered closely against, the shadow of Protestant opinion. Despite this rich period of sectarian interaction, the catholic church and the various Protestant denominations have been treated by historians as though they developed in isolation or, at best, along parallel tracks.3 When historians have considered Protestantcatholic interaction in early America, they have tended to concentrate on the colorful friction of anti-catholicism before the American Revolution or in the antebellum period.4 it is clear instead that from the catholic perspective, the growth of the church in frontier areas in introduction 3 the intervening period of the early republic took place in a context both of cooperation and of competition with American Protestantism prior to the hardening of sectarian animosities in the 1830s. in fact, catholicism in the new West had more in common with the quickly spreading evangelical Protestant denominations so famous for their triumphs than scholars of early American religion have recognized.5 catholic clergy did not simply keep to their own and quietly work to expand the...