A History of the Catholic Church in the American South, 1513–1900 (review)

Citing James O’Toole’s The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America (Cambridge, MA, 2008) as a recent example of Catholic historians who “have tended to overlook their own denomination within the South” (p. xiii), James Woods sets out to provide a concise, well-documented overview of Southern Catholicism through 1900. Woods’s South extends beyond the eleven Confederate states to include Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Southern Catholicism forms “a tapestry of faith. . . . a rich heritage of Roman Catholicism that had been present in the southern region since the sixteenth century” (p. xv).

Part 1, “The Colonial Context, 1513–1763, ” explores Catholic origins in Spanish Florida, Spanish Texas, French Lower Louisiana, and the English Colonies. Part II, “American Republicanism and European Decline, 1763–1845, ” examines Southern Catholics in the new American republic, church and state as European empires erode, and the Church in the expanding South. Part III, “Resistance, Rebellion, Reconstruction and Regionalism, 1845–1900, ” concludes with a chapter on growth, expansion, and the limited role of Catholic immigrants compared to the North.

Woods, who has written extensively on Arkansas Catholicism, weaves his tapestry from modern scholarship, census data, and original documents into a readable narrative. The growth of the local church is interspersed with numerous thumbnail sketches of the early bishops; of clergy such as Jeremiah O’Neill (a priest of Savannah), Thomas O’Reilly (a Georgia priest who served at the notorious Andersonville prison camp), and Abram Ryan (priest-poet of the Confederacy); of religious men and women such as St. Katharine Drexel of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, Mercy Sister Austin Carroll, and Capuchin Father Antonio de Sedella of New Orleans; and of laity such as Charles Carroll, Daniel Rudd (whose life is traced after the five national Congresses of Colored Catholics), and William Joseph Gaston (called “the most highly respected Catholic in antebellum North Carolina, ” p. 247).

Woods’s narrative is enriched with frequent, interesting details such as Bishop Dionisio Resino’s 1709 appointment as La Florida’s first resident bishop and his rapid departure, the state-by-state expansion of religious freedoms in the early Southern colonies, the beginnings of Georgetown University, the 1850 and 1860 status of Irish immigrants in the South, the fate of the three Maryland Catholics associated with John Wilkes Booth, and the Little Rock diocesan archives document explaining Bishop Edward Fitzgerald’s vote against papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council. He also delves beneath the chronological narrative with analysis such as the negative impact of the Spanish colonial practice of conscripted Indian labor on the early missionary endeavor.

The author provides present-day landmarks for early locations and events. The 1597 Guale Indian revolt against the Spanish began in the village of Tolomato, “on the Georgia mainland near present-day Harris Neck near Sapedo Island” (p. 12).

Modern scholarship is cited throughout the volume: Diana Meyers on the role of women in seventeenth-century Maryland; Carl Brasseaux on Acadian religious practices; Clyde Crews concerning Bishop Benedict Joseph Flaget’s reputation for tireless apostolic work and unfailing graciousness; and Thomas Spalding’s assessment of the Second Plenary Council of Baltimore, among many others.

The 1195 footnotes and forty-page bibliography of secondary sources provide a comprehensive window through which to view more than eight decades of scholarship on the Catholic South, beginning with the 1920s works by Claude Vogel, Peter Guilday, and Lawrence Hill, in addition to a few earlier, familiar volumes by John Gilmary Shea, Benedict Webb, Francis Parkman, Kate M. Rowland, and Reuben Gold Thwaites. Local historians will note some needed additions. The related articles in The American Catholic Parish: A History from 1850 to the Present, edited by Jay Dolan (New York, 1987), come to mind.

In such a vast overview, often relying on the scholarship of others, some errors understandably appear. For example, the Catholic Church...