The Double Doctrine of the Caldwell Sisters

THE DOUBLE DOCTRINE OF THE CALDWELL SISTERS BY C. Walker Gollar* One of Louisville, Kentucky's first multi-millionaires, William Shakespeare Caldwell, managed theaters in his younger days but later amassed a fortune through gas work projects in various Midwestern cities. On December 28, 1853, he married Mary Eliza Breckenridge, a descendant ofa pioneer Bluegrass family and a Protestant who nonetheless had attended the academy of the Sisters of Charity in Nazareth, Kentucky. Shortly after the wedding she was baptized by the Bishop of Louisville, Martin John Spalding, whom one report called the couple 's "intimate friend."1 Ten years later, in Cincinnati, Ohio, she gave birth on October 21, 1863, to her first child, Mary "Mamie" Gwendolin Byrd. A second daughter, Mary Elizabeth "Lina" Breckenridge, was born on December 26, 1865. One hundred years later, the historian David Francis Sweeney, O.F.M., referred for the first time in any published manuscript to certain "serious allegations" which Lina Caldwell had brought against Bishop Spalding's priest-nephew, John Lancaster Spalding. Sweeney did not reveal the nature of Caldwell's "bill of indictment," but he recognized the devastation that these charges brought to Spalding's career. The "complete truth in this episode," Sweeney conceded, "will perhaps never be known." The sociologist Andrew M. Greeley charged that this information should not have been disclosed unless Sweeney had been more willing to tell the "whole story." Since Sweeney's publication a cloud of uncertainty has hovered over John Lancaster Spalding 's integrity. The present work will uncover and explicate the damaging allegations amidst the larger context of the lives of Lina and Mamie Caldwell, and thus will tell the whole story as well as historical records can reveal it.2 *Mr. Gollar is an assistant professor of theology in Xavier University, Cincinnati. 1NeW York Times, November 16, 1904. 2Sweeney, Tbe Life ofJohn Lancaster Spalding (New York, 1965), pp. 308-309; Andrew Greeley, The Catholic Experience (New York, 1967), p. 166. Sweeney's biography was a revised version of his dissertation written in 1963 at the Catholic Uni372 BY C. WALKER GOLLAR 373 A month after the birth of Lina Caldwell, Shakespeare Caldwell moved the family from Cincinnati to New York, where they expected Martin Spalding, then the Archbishop of Baltimore, to come and baptize the newborn. Such frequent travel and high lifestyle soon exhausted the weak constitution of the young mother, who fell ill on January 6, 1867, then suddenly died. Stricken with grief, her husband moved to Richmond, Virginia, and there turned to the Church which offered, as one observer had noted, his wife's "only consolation in her last moments."3 Though from a Catholic family, Shakespeare Caldwell had not received baptism until now at the hands of the Bishop of Richmond, John McGiIl. Mother Columba Carroll of Nazareth, Kentucky , was the godmother. In memory of his wife, Caldwell erected in Louisville Saints Mary and Elizabeth Hospital and placed it under the direction of the Sisters of Charity. Throughout his later years he made similar contributions to numerous Catholic organizations in many of the cities where he entertained personal or business interests. His girls were enrolled at the Sacred Heart Academy on 1 7th Street in Manhattanville, where they met the thirty-two-year-old chaplain, Father John Lancaster Spalding, who in July of 1872 had moved from Kentucky to New York in order to write the life of his recently deceased uncle, the archbishop. In the biography, Spalding referred to the type of wealthy children like the Caldwell girls whom he encountered at the academy. "The daughters of the rich," he wrote, are brought up like exotics, in a way which develops to the highest degree a finely-wrought and most sensitive nervous system. To this are added all the accomplishments which constitute a merely ornamental education; and the young lady, beautiful, intelligent, refined, so delicate that the winds of heaven may not visit her too roughly, is fit only to sit in the parlor.4 versity of America under the direction ofJohn Tracy Ellis. The minor revision did not change any related Caldwell material. In regard to Spalding scholarship since Sweeney, David Killen refuted Caldwell's insinuation that...