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  • The Nativist Movement in America: Religious Conflict in the Nineteenth Century by Katie Oxx
  • Jason K. Duncan
The Nativist Movement in America: Religious Conflict in the Nineteenth Century. By Katie Oxx. New York: Routledge, 2013. 200pp. $29.95.

In the middle third of the nineteenth century, the United States wrestled with increasing immigration by European Catholics and the occasionally intense backlash it created. Katie Oxx identifies three distinct episodes over a twenty year period that, when seen in their totality, add up to a nativist, anti-immigrant, and above all anti-Catholic period in American history that has not been fully appreciated or understood.

Oxx provides an introductory chapter in which she explains the deep roots of anti-Catholicism in American history, which arrived with the first English settlers in the early seventeenth century. This allows undergraduate students to see that the nativist outbursts she is concerned with were part of a longer pattern. She is right to emphasize the importance of the Great Awakenings, a series of religious revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth century that established for many the belief that America, and later the United States, was a fundamentally Protestant land, set out by God for his own purposes.

She turns first to the 1834 destruction of the Ursuline convent near Boston, home to a school run by an order of Catholic nuns. Fueled in part by the sermons of charismatic preacher Lyman [End Page 64] Beecher, and rumors of sexual misconduct and criminality within its walls, a crowd burned the convent to the ground. Although there was no loss of life, the Puritan roots of Massachusetts, newly energized, were on vivid display.

Oxx next focuses on Philadelphia, where nativist mobs enraged at Catholic opposition to reading the Protestant King James Bible in public schools attacked and burned two Catholic churches in 1844. Catholics answered in return, and ultimately at least twenty-four people were killed, scarring the City of Brotherly Love. As vivid as are Oxx’s description of this violence and disorder, she might have briefly considered how this sad state of affairs came to pass in Philadelphia. The city had been founded by Quakers who protected religious liberty for all, even Catholics, which put Pennsylvania in rare company in the colonial era.

Washington, DC is the site for the third moment of anti-Catholicism, as a group of nativist men seized a stone sent for the Washington Momument by Pope Pius IX in 1854 and dumped it in the Potomac River. This came, not surprisingly, in the aftermath of the massive immigration of Irish Catholics to the United States in the late 1840s in the wake of the potato famine. Anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant passions reached their political peak in the American or “Know-Nothing” Party of the early 1850s.

Accompanying the text are nine primary documents, a timeline, extensive endnotes, and a useful bibliography. The book is well designed to facilitate undergraduate learning, with references to contemporary issues, useful asides, and illustrations. Oxx might have also offered a short concluding chapter, tying together these three episodes more tightly and explaining how the politics of nativism and anti-Catholicism by the middle of the 1850s were supplanted by emerging struggles over slavery and its expansion. There are a couple of needless mistakes, as she twice places the burning of the Ursuline convent in 1836 instead of 1834. Even so, Oxx succeeds in carefully demonstrating how religious tensions in American life have a long [End Page 65] history, and that the United States has struggled to live up to its promise of equal rights and liberty for all.

Jason K. Duncan
Aquinas College
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