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Conclusion: ‘‘A Most Democratic and Republican Class’’
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Conclusion ‘‘A Most Democratic and Republican Class’’ A decade after the New York Constitutional Convention of 1821, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville began his tour of the United States. His itinerary in New York State included New York City and Albany, where Catholics had established their first churches during the late eighteenth century. Tocqueville, who was born and raised a Catholic, remarked on the state of his religion in the United States in Democracy in America as he sought to persuade his French readers that religion and democracy were not incompatible. Tocqueville believed that religion encouraged morality and virtue and also acted as a bulwark against two of democracy’s vices, namely materialism and individualism.1 Tocqueville boldly declared, just as another period of nativism against American Catholics was commencing, that Catholics ‘‘constitute the most republican and the most democratic class in the United States.’’ His argument was that Catholic lay people were essentially equal in that they were all, each one of them, subject to the authority of the clergy. Tocqueville contended that while Protestantism encouraged independence, it also fostered inequality. Catholicism, conversely , left its lay adherents on one plane within their Church. The defeat of the affluent and socially prestigious Federalist trustees at 189 190 Citizens or Papists? St. Peter’s in 1819 had helped to insure that equality among the Catholic laity in New York City.2 The ‘‘social position’’ of American Catholics, as Tocqueville described it, also explained much about their politics: ‘‘Most of the Catholics are poor, and they have no chance of taking a part in the government unless it is open to all the citizens.’’ The government in New York was by no means a model of representative democracy after 1821, but after the reforms that the state constitutional convention made, most male Catholics of European origin were able to exercise their right to vote. That the majority of Catholics were laborers of modest economic status shaped their political outlook as well. Tocqueville perceived that Catholics, as a religious minority, understood that ‘‘all rights must be respected in order to ensure to them the free exercise of their own privileges.’’ Catholics were opposed to the slightest hint of a religious establishment or religious discrimination, something which radical Republicans in New York had understood a quarter of a century earlier. The desire of Catholics for political and religious equality, Tocqueville argued, ‘‘induce them, even unconsciously , to adopt political doctrines which they would perhaps support with less zeal if they were rich and preponderant.’’3 Tocqueville did not emphasize ethnicity as a factor in shaping the politics of Catholics in the United States. In New York, however, it was important. Irish Catholic immigrants had left their native land, in part, because of religious and political discrimination; they were resolved to resist any efforts to relegate them to second-class citizenship in their adopted country. That so many Catholics in New York during the early republic were Irish had a significant influence on how both Federalists and Republicans related to Catholics. The other conditions that Tocqueville believed influenced the politics of American Catholics were especially true in New York. Fear of Catholicism had been a central feature of colonial New York’s political culture, as members of New York’s various denominations and ethnicities forged a pluralistic society that was at the same time es- [44.195.47.227] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:48 GMT) ‘‘A Most Democratic and Republican Class’’ 191 sentially Protestant. They systematically defined Catholics and Catholicism as outside of the province’s legitimate religious and political life. Although its own brand of anti-Catholicism could be dormant at times, colonial New York remained singularly inhospitable to Catholics . Hostility toward Catholics did erupt periodically, most vividly during the slave conspiracy of the 1740s. At that time, traditional fear of Catholicism, combined with racism and the English imperial rivalry with France and Spain to produce a bizarre and ghastly episode , one that was every bit as disturbing as that of the infamous Salem witchcraft trials a half century earlier. This legacy made anti-Catholicism a more dominant political issue in post-revolutionary New York than it was elsewhere. At the outset of the American Revolution, the Patriots used anti-Catholic rhetoric to denounce the English king and his supporters in New York as crypto-papists bent on destroying the liberty of the colonists. By the end of the Revolutionary War, however, their alliance with France and...