“Their clergy [Catholic] blessed the flags of Confederate regiments, and their opposition to the federal regime in New Orleans was more uncompromising than that of any other group… A Richmond editor wrote, “Catholic Hierarchy of the South… were warm supporters of the Southern cause, and zealous advocates of the justice upon which this war of defense….was conducted” (E Merton Coulter, The Confederate States of America 1861-1865).
Historian Phillip Tucker wrote, “The South in general was actually far more multicultural and more multiethnic than the North in 1860…the South was in general less racist towards ethnic groups, including the Irish and Jews, than the North.” Minorities received better treatment in the South than in the North.
Catholicism played a more significant role in the South and was more accepted by the population. Like the old South, traditional Catholicism honored hierarchy, aristocracy, chivalry, a Christian society, and other traditional values. Also, like the South, pre-Vatican II Catholics were traditionalists and rejected modernity. Traditional Catholics had more in common culturally and politically with the South than with the progressive North.
Historian James McPherson shows that Catholics under Pope Pius the IX (Pope from 1846-1878) still maintained much of their older traditional identity. Pius was described as a “violent enemy of liberalism and social reform.” In his 1864 Syllabus of Errors, he wrote that it was an error to think the Pope should agree with “progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.” Pope Pius X commanded “all clergy, pastors, confessors, preachers, religious superiors, and professors in philosophical-theological seminaries” to take an “oath against modernism.” In The Story of Christianity, Volume II. Historian Justo Gonzalez observed “a growing gulf between mainstream modern thought and society on the one hand and Catholicism on the other.” Further, nothing brings groups together like similar enemies. Robert Fogel shows that Republicans viewed “Catholicism and slavery as twin despotisms.” They hated Catholics because “The Catholic church was in league with the pro-slavery democratic party to destroy the principles of free government,” wrote an 1858 organ of the Republican party in Illinois. James McPherson wrote, “The Puritan war against popery had gone on for two and a half centuries and was not over yet… hostility to Romanism (as well as rum) remained a subterranean current within Republicanism.”
Like the Virginian theologian R.L Dabney, Archbishop John Hughes of N.Y. referred to abolitionists as “Red-republicans.” Hughes condemned public schools as godless promoters of “Socialism, Red Republicanism, Universalism, Infidelity, Deism, Atheism, and Pantheism.” And while Dabney was no friend of Catholic theology, they were kin in mind when it came to modernity. In Catholics’ Lost Cause, Adam Tate writes, “Catholics and southern conservatives viewed the North as the locus of American radicalism and took refuge in Jeffersonian conceptions of both the Union and the Constitution.”
“Protestants funded Catholic churches, schools, and hospitals, while Catholics also contributed to Protestant causes. Beyond financial support, each group participated in the institutions created by the other. Catholics and Protestants worshipped in each other’s churches, studied in each other’s schools, and recovered or died in each other’s hospitals… Catholic-Protestant cooperation complicates the dominant historiographical view of interreligious animosity and offers a model of religious pluralism in an unexpected place and time” (Andrew Stern, “Southern Harmony, Catholic-Protestant Relations in the Antebellum South”).
Southerners felt a kinship with Catholics that was absent in the North. According to southern writer Daniel Hundley, “In Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and other portions of the far South, the progenitors of the Southern Gentleman were chiefly Spanish Dons and French Catholics.” Compared to the North, Catholics had a much more significant influence on southern society. The Cavalier South was more tolerant and did not seek to conform others to their image as the Puritan North did. As a result, the South was admired by old-time Catholic conservatives like Lord Acton, Hilaire Belloc, and G.K Chesterton, who said: “Old England can still be faintly traced in Old Dixie.”
In Catholic Confederates, Gracjan Kraszewski notes that “Catholics made themselves virtually indistinguishable from their Protestant neighbors.” He refers to the “Confederatization” of Catholics that occurred to a greater extent in the South than in the North. The South accepted Catholics, and Catholics accepted the South. They became one with each other. Kraszewski writes, “More than one hundred years before Vatican II and JFK, Catholics in the South were fully integrated members of society who, save for their religion, believed the same things and acted similarly to their well-known Protestant neighbors.”
When the separation came, southern Bishops almost universally sided with the South. After the fall of Fort Sumter, the local bishop, a rabid secessionist, led Catholics in the celebration by singing a Latin hymn. A number of Confederate generals were Catholics, including James Longstreet and the Confederacy’s first general, Pierre Toutant Gustave Beauregard. The secretary of the Navy, Stephen Mallory, was also a Catholic and a member of Jefferson Davis’s cabinet.
When federals occupied Natchez, Mississippi, they ordered all pastors and priests to pray for Abraham Lincoln, but Catholic Bishop William Henry Elder refused. He was briefly imprisoned for his non-conformity and was heralded as a legend across the South. The most popular post-war poem among former Confederates was “The Conquered Banner.” This poem—recited in southern schools for generations—was composed by Catholic priest and Confederate army chaplain, Abram Joseph Ryan.
Catholic priests made devotionals for the soldiers used by all denominations, and nuns served in confederate hospitals. Some Catholic Confederate chaplains could not stay out of the war; despite it being against canon law, John Bannon fired a cannon at the Yankee hordes. The similarities between traditional Catholicism and the South provided an “easy symbiosis” for the thousands of southern Catholic soldiers, writes Kraszewski. When the Confederacy sent Father John Bannon to Ireland, it was his view that devout Catholics of Europe could find in the Confederacy the remnant of Christendom. In the North, Bannon stated, one could only find puritans and anti-Catholic prejudice.
“Roman Catholics and Jews found an accepted place, sometimes a very successful place, in the South when such was unknown in the North….at the time of the war, a high proportion of American Catholics and Jews were found in the South and were loyal confederates. Nearly all Catholics and Jews elected to public office in the U.S. were in the South. The two most famous anti-Catholic incidents in the pre-war period took place in Boston and Philadelphia…no such incidents occurred in the South. The letters of Lincoln supporters are full of anti-Semitic comments, and , notoriously, General Grant was to banish Jews from the Union army lines” (Clyde Wilson, The Yankee Problem An American Dilemma).
Give me that Old Time Religion
Historian Samuel Smith believes the southern “old-time religion” played a significant role in the South’s rejection of modernity. He said the “southern religion was anti-modern… it was and is antithetical to so-called progress.” He said the South was orthodox, God-focused, creedal, decentralized, and while Protestant, it was a kind of religion that in many ways “preceded the Protestant Reformation.” He said Southern “religious makeup, in many respects, was decentralist, medieval, and, in the earth.” Professor Richard Weaver wrote that southerners wanted “something akin to the rituals of the Medieval Church.”
The Southern religion was an “old-time religion” in that it was orthodox and did not give way to progressive ideas. It was also a “high church” similar to Catholicism. In Why the South Will Survive, the authors write, “The South basically Protestant thought it was still part of Europe.” The South’s preservation of the old-time religion against northern puritanism and modernity could be viewed as akin to the Protestant and Catholic wars centuries before. Writing about Catholic author Hilaire Belloc’s book on Cromwell, Southern political commentator Matthew Anger said, “The Civil War of 1861-65 was in many ways a replay of events two centuries before, even down to the level of the material and doctrinal motivations. Permitting some degree of generalization, more traditional and agrarian interests were pitted against radical and moneyed urban interests. Both contests, while not overt struggles between Catholicism and its opponents, nevertheless ended in a decided victory for the anti-Catholic tendency. It was a further stage in the ongoing revolt against Christendom, which began with Luther and Calvin.”
Northerner Joseph Ingraham viewed a sabbath in New Orleans, and watched as Catholics received the Eucharist. At the same time, many Protestants stood by, heads bowed in respect. In Catholics’ Lost Cause, Adam Tate writes, “Catholicism was a part of the southern religious experience, not an exception to it.” In The Older Religiosity of the South, Richard Weaver writes,”There was much in the economic and social structure of the Old South to suggest Europe before the great plague and the peasant rebellions, so there was much in its religious attitude to recall the period before the Reformation.” Weaver also wrote “For although the South was heavily Protestant, its attitude toward religion was essentially the attitude of orthodoxy” going on to refer to the South’s “persistent medieval heritages.” Interestingly, it was not uncommon for some Protestant ministers of the antebellum period to have a copy of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae in their library, or for a Protestant family to have a copy of Thomas à Kempis’s, The Imitation of Christ or some other Catholic devotional or two on the library shelf.”
“The Catholic influence in American society was much stronger in the less populous South than in the North…In a region where family mattered, numerous leading families were Catholic…Many leading Southern families that were not Catholic had members who were…they tended to have a high regard and deep respect for the Church and her institutions, especially her schools… An example in this regard is Jefferson Davis himself, the eventual President of the C.S.A. His father sent him as a boy to Kentucky to be schooled by Dominicans. Davis embraced a form of Episcopalianism adhered to by many leading Southerners that was very “High Church,” very “Catholic” in its externals The Old South…had the only truly European civilization ever known in America. That is in the sense that it was a civilization rooted in its own soil. It was one that produced men who measured their success in life according to non-material standards, perhaps the chief of them being honor. It was an agricultural civilization, and a hierarchical one.That by itself was enough to make Pius [IX] or even most ordinary Catholics of the day sympathetic to the South. Certainly, the Catholic Bishops of the South were sympathetic. There is no record of any failing to support the Confederacy” (Gary Potter, “Catholicism and the old South”).
Stonewall Jackson is an excellent example of a typical Southern antebellum American attitude towards Catholicism. During the Mexican-American war, Jackson almost joined the Catholic Church. The people’s devotion, along with their traditions, fascinated Jackson. He highly respected the Church’s symbolism, artwork, and history. But he found certain theological aspects not in accord with the Bible, so he could not join. Many Southern Protestants would fall in this category, with great respect and admiration for the Catholic Church but an unwillingness to join due to certain theological positions it maintained.
As I have described in length in my book, Defending Dixie’s Land: What Every American Should Know About The South And The Civil War, the South maintained much of medieval society mixed with Victorian England. The South is best understood as the Protestant version of medieval society. It was notable in its devout Christian faith and feudalistic political aristocracy, with planters replacing Lords they sought to replicate and much more.
Featured: St. Finebar’s Church, Charleston, by William Aiken Walker; painted in 1868.
