"You can be a Catholic if you want": Protestant Social Capital and Catholic Education in the Antebellum Era

Contrary to the hostile receptions that greeted elite Catholic schools in the Northeast, Catholic institutions of higher education in Missouri, Kentucky, and Arkansas were often welcomed enthusiastically by their respective communities. Situated in an area of the country where access to higher education was limited, schools like St. Mary of the Barrens Seminary in Perryville, Missouri provided valuable access to social capital in the form of a classical education. Furthermore, letters from students and parents to these schools demonstrate that a Protestant child converting to Catholicism while away at school was sometimes met with acceptance by parents rather than the outrage one might expect. At a time of social transformation in American society, "credentials" in the form of a college or academy education increasingly became necessary to enter the ranks of the rising middle class. Yet even during the high water mark of anti-Catholicism in the antebellum North, frontier families became increasingly attracted to the elite cache a convent school education could provide for their children. Convent schools and seminaries, in turn, took pains to market themselves in a Protestant republic.