Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South by Gracjan Kraszewski (review)

Catholic Confederates, by college instructor and novelist Gracian Kraszewski, is the second entry in Kent State University's The Civil War in the South series. It has a select bibliography, extensive endnotes, index, and an appendix of biographical sketches. It also includes a centerpiece of contemporary illustrations, mostly portrait photographs, of notable Catholics from the short-lived Confederacy. Kraszewski's examination of the Catholic commitment to the Confederacy is based upon his thesis of 'Confederatization.' This was a process of replacing old ethnic identities with a new Confederate one while not negating Catholic faith. This conflicts with the widely held concept of Americanization within Catholic historiography, which states that Catholics could not assimilate into the broader American society until after both world wars in the twentieth century and the election of Catholic John F. Kennedy as president in 1960.

Kraszewski argues that even though they constituted only ten percent of the Confederate population the importance of the Civil War South is underestimated and gets lost within the larger story of Catholics in America. This was due to the blending of Southern conservatism with Catholic traditionalism, as both opposed progressive causes and touted bygone ages. Southerners viewed their nascent nation as the true heir to the Constitutional principles of 1776 while Southern Catholics saw the South as the most Catholic part of America, as opposed to the godless materialism in the North. The first and fourth chapters investigate Southern bishops, primarily William Elder of Natchez, Patrick Lynch of Charleston, and Augustin Verot of Savannah. The second and third chapters focus on chaplains John Bannon, James Sheerin, and Lewis Hopolyt-Gache, as well as laymen, John Dooley, Felix Poche, and Henri Garidel. The final chapter on Confederate diplomacy features the aforementioned Lynch and Bannon, two of the Catholic diplomats who dealt with Pope Pius IX at the Vatican. The more apolitical sister-nurses, mostly from the Daughters of Charity, are studied in the fifth chapter.

The Confederatization thesis is the most provocative element of the book. It challenges common misconceptions that the Civil War was largely a domestic event only and that women such as the sister-nurses were absent from battlefields. Catholic loyalty to the Confederacy was often impressively demonstrated, most notably by Bishop Elder as he refused Union military commands to perform a pro-Lincoln prayer from the altar. As a result, he suffered imprisonment and became a political martyr (p. 72). Kraszewski argues that such dedication should prompt reconsideration about nineteenth-century Catholicism and the place of Southern Catholics within the respective fields of Civil War religion and American Catholicism.

Beyond the men mentioned above, Catholic Confederates unfortunately overlooks too many other notable figures, such as Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory, General P.G.T. Beauregard, Admiral Ralph Semmes, and Father Abram J. Ryan, renowned as the "Poet of the Confederacy." The chapter on sister nurses is too brief. Individual sister biographies are lacking, nor is there any mention of Southern Catholic laywomen, Additionally, the Catholicity of the Lincoln Conspirators, especially Mary Surrat, is completely ignored. Despite these limitations, I recommend Catholic Confederates as a worthy addition to the growing body of scholarly studies on the role of Catholics in this critical period of American history. I would also suggest Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America (2016) by William Kurtz and Solders of the Cross, the Authoritative Text: The Heroism of Catholic Chaplains and Sisters in the American Civil War. (2019) by David P. Conyngham, and edited by David Endres and William Kurtz.