The Crisis of American Authority: The Antebellum Conversion of Levi Silliman Ives

Abstract:In December 1852, Levi Silliman Ives, bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in North Carolina, having caused tremendous controversy in his diocese because of his attachment to the Oxford Movement, converted to Catholicism in Rome. His conversion unleashed a vicious rhetorical war in the newspapers, evidencing the depths of anti-Catholicism in the American South. Upon his return to the United States, Ives framed his decision as a search for religious authority, highlighting his discontent with the religious individualism of nineteenth-century America. Ives's conversion demonstrated how American Catholics struggled to understand themselves and their religion in a region increasingly characterized by Protestant understandings of Christianity.