Southern Crucifix, Southern Cross: Catholic-Protestant Relations in the Old South by Andrew H. M. Stern (review)

84 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Southern Crucifix, Southern Cross: Catholic-Protestant Relations in the Old South Andrew H. M. Stern Southern Crucifix, Southern Cross challenges a commonnarrativeinearlyAmericanreligious histories that emphasizes Catholic-Protestant antagonism and violence. Andrew Stern argues instead that Catholic-Protestant relations featured more cooperation than hostility, at least in the antebellum South. Indeed, Stern suggests that southerners welcomed religious pluralism more than their northern counterparts, enthusiastically and proactively supporting the growth of Catholic institutions. Stern reconstructs an impressive array of interfaith private and public correspondence from the diocesan records of three very different urban areas: the planterdominated city of Charleston, South Carolina; the cotton trade depot of Mobile, Alabama; and the Ohio River boomtown of Louisville, Kentucky. He argues that the day-to-day interactions between Catholic and Protestant in these archdioceses—rather than those in the Catholic havens of Baltimore and New Orleans—best represented the cooperative nature of interfaith encounters throughout the antebellum South. During the mass immigration of the 1840s and 1850s, most immigrants—many of them Catholic—settled in the North. But Catholics also had deep and expanding roots in the South and before 1840 the South harbored as many Catholics as the North. The first Catholic leaders, newspapers, religious orders, and schools originated in the South. Charles Carroll of Maryland, for example, was the only Roman Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence, and his cousin, John CarrollofBaltimore,becamethefirstbishop of the first archdiocese established in the United States. Moreover, Stern is the first historian to detail southern Protestant support of and mutual cooperationwithCatholicsintheearlynineteenth century. Catholic Americans received courtesy and respect from their Protestant counterparts. Both Catholic and Protestant clergymen accommodated mixed marriages. Protestants donated generously to Catholic domestic and international charities and Catholic priests worked with Protestant leaders to build benevolent institutions and end southerners’ vices. Catholic and Protestant soldiers served alongside one another in various military campaigns. During cholera and yellow fever epidemics, Catholic healers gained the admiration of Protestants for rushing to the aid of the dying, even sacrificing their lives, while Protestants donated generously to Catholic hospitals and orphanages. In addition, Protestants helped Catholics build their own schools and Protestant pupils attended Catholic schools, including Jefferson Davis who famously attended the Dominican college of St. Thomas in Kentucky.InmanyareasintheantebellumSouth, Catholic could not construct and maintain their schools without Protestant support. Protestants also contributed money to the construction of Catholic churches. Protestant-dominated courts, juries, and legislators upheld the authority of the Catholic clergy over church property. Protestants Book Reviews BOOK REVIEWS SUMMER 2013 85 even attended Catholic worship, particularly during dedication ceremonies, funerals, holy days, and special events, even though Catholic leaders refused to dilute their theology to accommodate the tastes of Protestant listeners. Stern argues that shared views on race and slavery formed profound bonds between Catholic and Protestant southerners. Although the Catholic position on slavery varied a great deal, especially in the border states, many Catholics became complicit in the slave system and joined hands with southern Protestants against northern abolitionists. Stern makes a timely but overstated corrective . His most convincing conclusion is the notion that shared racial views motivated the mutual accord between Catholic and Protestant southerners. The relatively low numbers of Catholic immigrants in the South, however, also probably accounted for Protestant tolerance. Stern acknowledges this point in several places throughout the book, raising the question of whether Catholic-Protestant cooperation in the South formed part of a culture of religious toleration or a pragmatic necessity. Louisville, for example, seemed closer to Cincinnati in its religious tolerance than Mobile or Charleston. Indeed, in 1855 one of the nation’s bloodiest anti-Catholic riots before the Civil War broke out in Louisville, leaving twenty-two dead. And despite episodes of interfaith cooperation, antiCatholicism persisted in the South. In looking for mutual accord, Stern leaves unexplained the profound religious tensions evident in the sources presented in the book. Moreover, contemporaries did not perceive and practice toleration merely to effect Catholic and Protestant accommodation, but rather as a means to conversion . Bloody episodes of religious violence and the meteoric rise of the anti-Catholic Know Nothing Party in the mid-1850s also developed alongside the expansion of religious tolerance. Know...