Catholics' Lost Cause: South Carolina Catholics and the American South, 1820–1861 by Adam L. Tate (review)

By the end of the American Civil War, the Catholic Church's progress in Charleston and South Carolina since the diocese's formation in 1820 was all but destroyed. Thus concludes Adam L. Tate's Lost Cause: South Carolina Catholics and the American South, a work that traces the development, debates, and dense theological discussions the Irish Catholic Church engaged in until the eve of secession. Tate's engaging look at South Carolina Catholics and their antebellum expansions provides an insight into how a minority religious entity integrated into Southern institutions. Within the microcosm of the Diocese of Charleston, every facet of South Carolina's history from the 1820s to 1860s is explored, showing how the Catholic Church assimilated into the region's sectional and spiritual politics, society and culture.

Tate's work is divided into six separate chapters that provide detailed discussions by themselves, with a few overarching connecting links. Starting with a wider contextualization of Irish Catholicism in antebellum South Carolina, the study details two particular areas of attention. One is perhaps this book's central theme: the men who formed and shaped the diocese, "three energetic leaders during the antebellum period"—Bishops John England, Ignatius Reynolds, and Patrick Lynch (21). As Tate admits, the bishops' "stature and ambition made them hard to ignore"; certainly this work reads at many times like a biography (21). They helped establish the diocese, engaged in political and social discussions, defended against anti-Catholic and anti-Irish nativist criticism, and entered into debates about South Carolina's position over the Nullification Crisis and defense of institutional slavery. The bishops come to the fore in chapters on spreading the Catholic word through the diocese (including North Carolina and Georgia), on cultivation of print culture to promote Irish Catholic liberal nationalism and American republicanism, and on assessments of involvement in regional political and slavery debates.

On the former point, the book's other focus is newspaper, pamphlet, and letter publications the bishops utilized to explain Catholic doctrine, defend Catholicism and its supporters, present an intellectual discourse on contemporary politics and theological issues, and further cement the religion's regional establishment. Tate makes great use of the US Catholic Miscellany, "the first national Catholic newspaper in the United States," founded in 1822 by Bishop England (5). Its publication covered the whole period of this study's focus, and Tate heavily employs it in this study alongside other examples of the bishops' viewpoints. His reliance on these sources can lead to impenetrable theological and theoretical assessment of Catholicism's establishment in South Carolina. However, broader issues of Irish Catholic nationalism, community building, and integration into Southern politics all appear. They offer a localized history on the way wider antebellum topics affected this particular group. This work sits well alongside historical scholarship of the Irish in the nineteenth-century American South, particularly by David T. Gleeson, and methodology laid out in Benedict Anderson's influential imagined communities thesis.

From the start, the study is clear that this is an exploration of "revealing episodes in which Catholic leaders engaged in" South Carolina culture, not a chronological assessment (9). That presents areas where analysis could go further. For instance, when assessing representations and public displays of Irish American Catholic nationalism in Charleston on St. Patrick's Day, examples range from the 1840s to 1860s, missing the decade of the 1850s and comparison with Irish American histories that refer to this celebration over the same period. Tate also leaves the discussion of slavery until the very last chapter, yet the institution is an unavoidable central issue. While it is original not to see this interwoven throughout the study, its lack also weakens a wider central narrative. This feeling is enhanced by the fact the final chapter is mostly about Bishop England's nuanced pro-slavery stance, which Tate appears to defend...