In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Catholics' Lost Cause: South Carolina Catholics and the American South, 1820–1861 by Adam L. Tate
  • Andrew Stern
Catholics' Lost Cause: South Carolina Catholics and the American South, 1820–1861. By Adam L. Tate. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. 296 pp. $45.00.

Adam Tate's work is a valuable addition to the growing body of literature on Catholicism in the American South. Although southern Catholics were small in number, particularly during the antebellum period, their status as a minority community provides a fascinating case study of how such groups attempt simultaneously to engage with the larger society and maintain their distinctiveness. In the case of Catholics in the Carolinas and Georgia (contrary to the work's subtitle, its subject matter includes Catholicism throughout the original Diocese of Charleston), Tate argues that this task fell primarily to church leaders, most notably Bishops England, Reynolds, and Lynch. These were men of extraordinary energy and determination, and contemporary readers can easily be forgiven for longing for the day when the church was led by such as them. Overcoming incredible difficulties—the sheer size of the diocese, suspicion from some non-Catholics, and above all a paucity of resources—they built institutions through which Catholics could claim a voice in southern society, not simply as citizens, but as Catholic citizens. The key to this strategy was a Jeffersonian form of nationalism that identified not cultural homogeneity but rather loyalty to republicanism and shared sentiments and experiences as the prerequisites for citizenship. The prevalence of this ideology created a space where Catholics could build their institutions and engage in society without having to sacrifice their identities.

Tate's study moves clearly and systematically through the dominant forms of Catholic institution building and civic engagement in the antebellum period. Some of these forms are not surprising—Catholics built schools and churches to attract Protestants and to demonstrate their value to society, and they supported slavery, albeit with reservations (which, admittedly, diminished as the sectional crisis reached its climax)—but Tate uncovers others that will be less familiar [End Page 85] to readers. For example, he discusses St. Patrick's Day festivities in Charleston. During the banquets that invariably formed part of the celebrations, members of Catholic voluntary societies used toasts—often published in the secular press where the non-Catholic majority could read them—to assert ethnic and religious pride as well as fealty to the United States and, more importantly, to South Carolina. Similarly, when confronted with nativism or bigotry, Catholics fought back vigorously, arguing not only that they posed no threat to the Republic, but also that they were in fact the Republic's greatest allies.

In each of these chapters, Tate deftly draws on a wide range of primary sources and previous scholarship to fashion a clear, compelling narrative. His chapter on Catholics' public debates with Protestants, which he marvelously reconstructs by tracing various exchanges through the Catholic, Protestant, and secular presses, in particular is a model of careful reading of primary sources. The clarity of Tate's style renders even such complex subjects easily accessible to readers without a background in the field, while his work doubtlessly will be of great interest to specialists.

Tate concludes that Catholics' attempts to find a home in the South through institution building were ultimately a "lost cause," as the Civil War and the Union Army's depredations lay waste to decades of toil. But perhaps the cause was not lost, only delayed. As Tate notes, Catholics had to start over after the war, but the story of whether or not they succeeded awaits a historian of Catholicism in the Reconstruction South and beyond. One can only hope that such a historian's work will be as insightful and informative as Tate's.

Andrew Stern
North Carolina Wesleyan College
...

pdf

Share