At Peace with All Their Neighbors: Catholics and Catholicism in the National Capital, 1787-1860 by William W. Warner (review)

292 BOOK REVIEWS tie statistical information on Louisiana Catholicism. The editors really could have helped those interested in Louisiana Catholicism had they provided such information. And lastly, the book does not address the important issue of placing Louisiana Catholicism in the context of Southern Catholicism or Catholicism in general. Still, despite these shortcomings, Cross, Crozier, and Crucible is a factual goldmine for anyone interested in how the Catholic Church developed in Louisiana over the last 200 years. Michael V. Namorato University ofMississippi At Peace withAll Their Neighbors: Catholics and Catholicism in the National Capital, 1787-1860. By William W. Warner. (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. 1994. Pp. xi, 307. $29.95.) It is not unusual for an author to exceed his mandate, but in this case what began as a history of a single parish by the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Beautiful Swimmers was transformed in the doing into a sweeping retrospective of regional Catholic history during the nation's first half-century. Attention to Holy Trinity, the oldest parish in the District of Columbia, pretty much ends at Chapter Two; the rest is devoted to an exploration of the role of the leading Catholic families of Maryland, not only in the establishment of the Federal city, but also in the development of an outward-looking attitude among Catholics toward their fellow citizens which featured an openness, lively concern, and selfconfidence that belied their minority status. The significance of this so-called Maryland Tradition has long been discussed byAmerican historians. Widely read works by Spalding and Dolan, for example, point to a distinctly American Catholic attitude toward church-state relations and ecumenism that developed during the years of colonial persecution and the era of toleration associated with the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Warner has taken a close look at the lives and careers of individuals who made up the Maryland tradition and in the process validates this historical assumption. He deftly guides the reader through the genealogical maze of interrelated families from their appearance in Lord Baltimore's colony to their role in the feisty political and commercial arena of pre-Civil War Washington. Some of these names survive in popular memory merely as geographical curiosities— Queen's Chapel, Fenwick Island, Brentwood. Warner shows them, along with the more familiar Neale, Sentîmes, Mudd, and Mathews families, to have been exemplars of charity and public service. In the case ofJames Hoban (who married into the Maryland aristocracy), the resulting full-length portrait reveals the decisive role played by the Irish architect, builder, businessman, and politician in the development of the capital. BOOK REVIEWS 293 As might be expected, the extended Carroll clan is treated in detail. Especially useful is the chapter devoted to Daniel Carroll of Duddington, the area's major landholder and, along with his Catholic relative Notley Young, one of the proprietors with whom George Washington struck a deal for the acquisition of city land. Warner convincingly demonstrates that civic-mindedness, not commercial gain, was the dominating motive in these transactions. He goes on to show how this civic-mindedness, along with well-known Catholic support for education and charities, helped blunt nativist attempts to organize anti-Catholic sentiment in Washington in the 1850's. Obviously in such a broad survey some nuances are lost. For example, I wonder what Warner's take is on the Neale-Grassi agreement, theJesuits' unsuccessful effort to wrest control of St. Patrick's church and other popular missions. In the end an exasperated Father William Matthews, the doughty patriarch of St. Patrick's, recommended that the archbishop grant the Jesuits a parish "east of the Tiber," to still their disruptive but persistent effort to gain a foothold among the Federal city's parishes (in the end they were given St. Aloysius on swampy North Capitol Street). Despite the author's effort to provide a proper context, I also believe he paints too sanguine a picture of race relations in Catholic society . As Albert Foley and others suggest, strict segregation in all but St. Patrick's church and the exclusion of African Americans from Catholic institutions led many black Catholics to embrace the idea of a...