American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era by Robert Emmett Curran (review)

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• American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era by Robert Emmett Curran
• Adam L. Tate

American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era. By Robert Emmett Curran. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2023. Pp. xii, 458. $60.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7930-7.)

Robert Emmett Curran’s American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era is a spirited work that examines Catholics’ participation in American life, “in pursuit of a promised equality that had never fully included” them, between 1846 and 1877 (p. 2). One might expect, Curran intimates, that Catholics, who had suffered for years at the hands of political nativists, would have embraced the end of slavery, national citizenship, and equal rights for all. Instead, Curran gripes that white Catholics were committed “to slavery and the racial order it guaranteed” and thus helped “[turn] backward” Abraham Lincoln’s “revolution” before they retreated into their self-imposed postwar ghettos (pp. 4, 6). The book offers a useful perspective on Catholicism in mid-nineteenth-century America, but its polemical tone distorts its historical narrative.

Curran’s book provides a wealth of interesting information. In the past, Curran has written on numerous topics—Catholic higher education and anti-Catholicism in North America, in particular—and edited diaries and letters of both prominent and obscure nineteenth-century American Catholics. He expertly weaves in his previous research throughout the book, producing a volume that includes the perspectives of both clergy and laity, men and women. Curran laments the Catholic majority opinion during the 1850s and 1860s, but his volume actually shows Catholics on all sides of the issues of the day. During the Civil War, Catholics supported both abolition (such as Orestes Brownson and General William Rosecrans) and slavery (Bishop Patrick Lynch of Charleston). Catholics could be found among the enlisted men in both armies as well as in the officer corps. Curran points out that three generals, William Tecumseh Sherman, Philip Sheridan, and Thomas Ewing Jr., saved the Union war effort in 1864. All had attended the same Catholic church, St. Joseph’s in Somerset, Ohio, as boys. Additionally, Catholics were involved in diplomacy on both sides (Archbishop John Hughes of New York and Lynch). Tragically, Catholics were involved in Lincoln’s assassination, too. Mary Surratt, a Catholic, was the first woman executed by the United States government. [End Page 438] Ewing was one of the lawyers involved in the trials of the conspirators. In fact, Curran demonstrates that Catholics were prominent throughout the whole history of the war. That white Catholics took varied positions and were divided, usually on sectional lines, in their loyalties made them little different from their fellow white Americans. In other words, despite Curran’s wishes, there was no essentialist Catholic response to the tumultuous events of the period.

Due to a variety of factors, most of which go unexplored, most nineteenth-century American Catholics identified with the Democratic Party, a loyalty that continued after the war and placed white Catholics against the Radicals during Reconstruction. Curran initially reduces that opposition to racism. But, later, he admits that white Catholics, like many white Americans, disliked a “concentration of power in the national government” because they perceived it to be “antithetical to the republican ideology that diffused sovereignty” (p. 235). He also admits, “For labor, within which category most Catholics fell, the war was no bonanza” (p. 332). Thus, Catholics’ political identities, like those of other white Americans, were tied both to political ideology and to economic interests.

Curran’s frustration with nineteenth-century Catholics seems to mirror his contemporary political disappointments. In the volume’s conclusion, Curran laments that many American Catholics voted for Donald Trump instead of Joe Biden, “a practicing Catholic” (p. 383). Curran then encourages American Catholics to read Pope Francis’s encyclical Fratelli tutti (2020) so that they can embrace Lincoln’s promise of equality. Of course, Curran is aware that during the nineteenth century, nativists argued that Catholics could not be trusted because they voted tribally as a bloc and took their politics from the pope. Nevertheless, with no sense of irony, he recommends these two...