Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America by William B. Kurtz (review)

William Kurtz's Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America is a carefully researched and thorough examination of American Catholic identity through the ordeal of the Civil War. His argument is refreshingly lucid. As a largely immigrant religious group in an overwhelmingly Protestant country, antebellum Catholics saw a brief opportunity to prove their American bona fides by serving the Union cause. This bloody trial of assimilation, however, revealed that Catholic culture was far from monolithic. American Catholics were not only divided by regional politics; they were also conflicted as to the purpose of the war itself. In the aftermath of the war, the patriotic service believed by many Catholics to be irrefutable proof of their loyal citizenship was largely ignored by the dominate Protestant Republicanism of the post-bellum North. Still viewed as suspect outsiders with foreign loyalties, Catholics, like so many other Americans North and South, found in the war a touchstone of historical memory that shaped their identity both as American citizens and a religious minority.

Kurtz carefully demonstrates that following the anti-Catholic outbursts of the Know-Nothing years, the Civil War presented northern Catholics the possibility of acceptance as trustworthy American citizens. The courage of Irish and German brigades on the battlefield, the able leadership of key Catholic officers, the service of Catholic chaplains, and the sacrifice and care of northern nuns who nursed casualties regardless of religion or even region, impressed northern Protestants. As the war dragged on and denied the Union a quick resolution, however, initial positive reactions to Catholic "Americanism" faded. The Church in the North, as other factions in the North, divided over the place of slavery and abolition in prosecuting the war. Some independent Catholic journals aggressively attacked abolitionism as recrudescence of anti-Catholic Puritanism. Other journals, mostly in the minority, embraced emancipation as the moral purpose of the war. Disputes over slavery and abolition were further complicated for Catholics by the war effort itself, especially the Lincoln administration's decisions to abrogate certain freedoms of the press, suspend habeas corpus, and—most abhorred—to conscript from the Irish urban poor.

While northern Catholics were far from the only sub-culture struggling to make sense of the purpose of the war and the meaning of emancipation, that some prominent Catholic leaders made cause of these issues brought them back under the ire of nativist Protestants. Moreover, coinciding with these ambiguities at home were the antiliberal politics of the papacy in Europe, as well as the Vatican's brief and neutral diplomatic correspondence with the Confederacy. Taken together, foreign intrigue and domestic instabilities, especially in urban areas with large concentrations of Irish, kept northern Protestant suspicion of Catholicism alive in the waning years of combat. By war's end, northern Catholics found themselves facing familiar critiques such as had been levelled by nativist detractors before the war began. Namely, Catholics, especially Irish and German Catholics, are religious outsiders whose innate conservatism and loyalty to a foreign prelate prevented them from attaining to trustworthy and responsible citizenship. Though the world had changed for both Catholics and Protestants after the war, and though heroic Catholic service to the union was not left unacknowledged, northern Protestant Republicans were not above exploiting xenophobic fears. The trial of the Union failed to secure American Catholics a lasting respect in the North and consequently accelerated the creation of a Catholic sub-culture whose legacy remained well into the twentieth century.

William Kurtz's study is a valuable contribution to the field of U.S. religious history. The book reveals how a native Catholic identity emerged from a plethora of competing loyalties in nineteenth-century America. It also preserves important stories and anecdotes that should be integral to any future work on religion and the American Civil War. Perhaps most significantly it explores...