Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America

By William B. Kurtz

“Concise, engaging . . . [A] superb study of the US Catholic community in the Civil War era.” —Civil War Book Review

Anti-Catholicism has had a long presence in American history. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, many Catholic Americans considered it a chance to prove their patriotism once and for all.

Exploring how Catholics sought to use their participation in the war to counteract religious and political nativism in the United States, Excommunicated from the Union reveals that while the war was an alienating experience for many of the 200,000 Catholics who served, they still strove to construct a positive memory of their experiences—in order to show that their religion was no barrier to their being loyal American citizens.

“[A] masterful interrogation of the fusion of faith, national crisis, and ethnic identity at a critical moment in American history. This is a notable and welcome contribution to Catholic, Civil War, and immigrant history.”? Journal of Southern History

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780823267545

William B. Kurtz

William B. Kurtz is managing director of the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia and author of Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America (Fordham University Press, 2015).

Book preview

EXCOMMUNICATED FROM THE UNION

THE NORTH’S CIVIL WAR

Andrew L. Slap, series editor

Excommunicated from the Union

How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America

William B. Kurtz

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

2016

Copyright © 2016 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Portions of Chapters 1, 2, 5, 6, and 7 were published originally as Let us Hear No More ‘Nativism’: The Catholic Press in the Mexican and Civil Wars, in the journal Civil War History 60(1), March 2014. Copyright © 2014 by The Kent State University Press. Reprinted with permission.

The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint, in revised form, previously published material from the U.S. Catholic Historian: ‘The Perfect Model of a Christian Hero’: The Faith, Anti-Slaveryism, and Post-War Legacy of William S. Rosecrans, 31, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 73–96, which is partially reprinted in Chapter 8.

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Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kurtz, William B. (William Burton)

Title: Excommunicated from the Union : how the Civil War created a separate Catholic America / William B. Kurtz.

Description: First edition. | New York : Fordham University Press, 2016. | Series: The North’s Civil War | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015014577 | ISBN 9780823267538 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780823268863 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Participation, Catholic. | United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Religious aspects. | Slavery and the church—Catholic Church. | Catholic Church—United States—History—19th century.

Classification: LCC E540.C3 K87 2016 | DDC 973.7/1—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015014577

Printed in the United States of America

18 17 16   5 4 3 2 1

First edition

to my wife, Erin

Contents

Introduction

1. The Mexican War and Nativism

2. Catholics Rally to the Flag

3. Catholic Soldiers in the Union Army

4. Priests and Nuns in the Army

5. Slavery Divides the Church

6. Catholics’ Opposition to the War

7. Post-war Anti-Catholicism

8. Catholics Remember the Civil War

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Appendices

Notes

Bibliography

Index

EXCOMMUNICATED FROM THE UNION

Introduction

The Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861, unleashed a patriotic fury across the northern United States. American-born men, immigrants, and later African Americans rallied to support the Stars and Stripes and save the Union. Men of all faiths answered the call enthusiastically, among both the Protestant majority and the growing but significant minority of Roman Catholics. Orestes A. Brownson, the leading Catholic intellectual of his day, was an outspoken critic of southern secession. The American citizen who seeks to overthrow the American government is not only a traitor, but . . . a dis-humanized monster not fit to live or to inhabit any part of this globe: he has no suitable place this side of hell. Brownson believed that his fellow Catholic northerners were overrepresented in the army and that their service would promote their integration into American society. Their loyalty, he argued, was a natural corollary of their religion, which obliged Catholics to do their duty in defense of the nation.¹

Other pro-war Catholic leaders across the North similarly spoke out to both support the war and celebrate Catholic men who volunteered for military service on behalf of the Union cause. Patrick Donahoe, the Irish American proprietor and editor of the most important and widely circulated Irish Catholic newspaper in the United States, the Boston Pilot, argued the bloodshed of Catholic soldiers during the war was irrefutable proof of their patriotism and valor. "Let us hear no more ‘nativism,’ he declared, for it is now dead, disgraced, and offensive, while Irish Catholic patriotism and bravery are true to the nation and indispensable to it in every point of consideration." By nativism, Donahoe meant the widespread prejudice against immigrants in American society, culture, and politics. Catholic Americans like Donahoe believed that nativism was not only anti-immigrant but also inherently anti-Catholic.² Catholic elites were intent on proving their community’s patriotism because, at that time, many American Protestant leaders openly feared that Catholicism was incompatible with the nation’s republican government.³ In response to such apparent hostility and in order to preserve their ethnic traditions and faith, Catholics had often segregated themselves from the rest of American society. Perhaps the war, however, would be a chance for them to assimilate on their own terms while maintaining their religious and ethnic identities.⁴

Anti-Catholicism had had a long presence in American history, religion, and thought, dating back to the earliest foundations of the original colonies by Great Britain. The colonies were overwhelmingly Protestant and seen as a means to counter Catholic French and Spanish economic and religious influence in the Western Hemisphere. In the eighteenth century, American Catholics faced wide-ranging discrimination in nearly all of the colonies in British North America. Even in Maryland, a colony originally founded to ensure religious freedom for Catholics, Anglicanism became the official religion by 1702 and Catholics were kept from voting and holding office and were forced to attend Anglican services.⁵

The Revolutionary War, however, convinced many state governments and many Americans that Catholics could be trusted and should enjoy more of the freedoms open to Protestants. Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Maryland, served in the Continental Congress and became the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. Prominent among Catholic patriots were Washington’s cavalry chief, General Stephan Moylan, and Captain John Barry, who gained fame for his exploits in the fledgling American navy. In 1790 President George Washington addressed a letter To Roman Catholics in America praising their patriotic spirit during the war and affirming his belief that all those Catholics who were worthy members of the Community [were] equally entitled to the protection of civil Government. The contributions of Catholic Americans to independence during the Revolutionary War thus helped foster a remarkable period of tolerance during the early years of the new American republic.⁶

During the antebellum period, however, many native-born Americans, especially those who had taken part in the recent evangelical religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening, became increasingly alarmed by the rapid growth of the Catholic Church in the United States. Many Americans believed that the assimilation of Catholic foreigners would be difficult, and they feared that unchecked immigration threatened to replace familiar customs and religious practice with foreign and Catholic ones. Many anti-Catholic Americans also distrusted the Catholic Church because it was both hierarchical and led by a foreign ruler, the bishop of Rome, known as the pope. Some Protestants denounced the pope as the anti-Christ and the Catholic faith as popery, a common derogatory term at the time for Roman Catholicism. They frequently denounced the Catholic Church in general as the whore of Babylon. For many Protestant Americans, freedom of conscience was essential for the proper worship of God, and Catholic insistence on obedience and dogma was seen as inherently antidemocratic and un-American. For them, it seemed impossible to reconcile American liberty with Roman despotism.⁷

Anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic Americans formed the Native American⁸ Party in the 1840s to preserve the republic from being corrupted by foreigners and popery. Later this party was succeeded by the even larger and better organized Know-Nothing Party, which also sought to pass anti-Catholic or anti-immigrant legislation at the local, state, and even national levels. Despite Catholic immigrants’ antebellum protestations that the conservative nature of their religion, their respect for law and order, and their rejection of radical abolitionism made them just as loyal and democratic as their non-Catholic neighbors, some Americans insisted on depicting them and their faith as a threat to American republicanism.⁹

The Catholic population probably numbered about 3.1 million in 1860, representing about 10 percent of the nation’s total population. Most of them, perhaps around 90 percent, lived in the states that remained within the Union in 1861. The church’s incredible growth, particularly in the North, was made possible only by the increasingly large number of immigrants, overwhelmingly Irish and then German, who immigrated to antebellum America. Some of these immigrants were well-off or settled successfully in rural areas because they were skilled in a trade or profession, were well educated, or had brought property with them to the United States. Yet most, especially the Irish who were the predominant ethnic group in the church, were unskilled, ill educated by American standards, and poor. They congregated in urban areas where they put a strain on local institutions and what passed for social services in the nineteenth century. They refused to give up their ethnic customs upon arrival and often tended to cluster into separate ethnic communities. This reinforced the entrenched belief that Catholicism was a religion only fit for foreigners, something that made even native-born Catholics very uneasy. Catholic immigrants and their clergy insisted that their religious rights be respected in the public sphere, most noticeably in public education, where their criticism of explicitly Protestant teachings made them anathema to many educational reformers. In short, Catholics were already creating a separate subculture in the United States in the decades before the Civil War.¹⁰

When the Civil War began, Catholic Americans had a remarkable chance to prove their loyalty to the nation and perhaps foster a new period of tolerance for their religion and community in the post-war nation. Approximately two hundred thousand Catholics served in the Union Army, at least fifty-three priests worked as army chaplains in regiments or hospitals, and hundreds of nuns worked in wartime hospitals. Though bishops and lay leaders did not coordinate their efforts on a national scale, pro-war Catholics hoped that their community’s wartime patriotism would end anti-Catholicism and nativism in American politics and society. After the war, they wrote histories and built monuments meant to preserve the memory of Catholic Americans’ bravery and bloodshed on behalf of saving the Union. The most important of these efforts was the erection of a monument to Father William Corby, a Holy Cross priest from South Bend, Indiana, who served with the Irish Brigade at the Battle of Gettysburg. Dedicated in 1910, this monument was meant to symbolize the church’s patriotism once and for all on what the nation remembered as the most important battlefield in the struggle to defeat the Confederacy.¹¹

During the conflict, however, Catholic Americans did not react to the conflict or the government’s wartime policies with a single pro-war voice. For most Catholic northerners the Civil War and its aftermath were ultimately alienating experiences that further isolated them from the rest of American society. These Catholics supported the Union as it was, but disagreed with what they saw as their political and religious enemies’ attempts to use the war as an excuse to remake society in a radical way. In resisting emancipation, denouncing the abridgment of civil liberties, and attacking the draft, anti-war Catholics joined other Democratic northerners in asserting that their defense of the Constitution made them, not the Republicans, the true patriots in the conflict. By the middle of the war, horrific casualties suffered in battles such as Antietam and Fredericksburg caused many of these Catholics to reconsider their support for the war. Most northern Catholics were Democrats, and a majority of their leaders came to sympathize with the Democrats’ anti-war faction. In addition, Catholics from the slaveholding Border States—Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland—were early opponents of Republican President Abraham Lincoln and the war from the very beginning. Catholics’ unwavering support for the Democrats in the 1864 presidential election left them open to the invective of their enemies in the Protestant and Republican press. Their efforts on behalf of the Union seemingly paled in comparison to the enthusiastic support of many northern Protestants for the war, emancipation, and Abraham Lincoln’s Republican government.¹²

These internal divisions among Catholics demonstrated the lack of unity within the Catholic Church over the Civil War and had a major impact on the future development of a separate American Catholic subculture in the United States. Opposition to the war hindered efforts by pro-war Catholic apologists to forge an unassailable narrative of patriotism and sacrifice to counter nativism and anti-Catholic prejudice. Many Catholic leaders responded to criticism of their community during the war with an instinctive defensiveness born out of their encounter with antebellum nativism. Their anger over the public’s apparent lack of appreciation for their wartime sacrifices and the resurgence of anti-Catholic nativism after 1865 accelerated the development of a separate Catholic subculture in the North. In the late nineteenth century, Catholic apologists still tried to use their wartime patriotism to counteract religious bigotry. However, their efforts were directed at a narrow audience and were only successful in reassuring the Catholic community that it had done its part to save the Union. The heroic stories they wrote in books and the heroes they commemorated in bronze statues had little effect on American society in general. By contrast, southern Irish Catholics, whose war record was similarly mixed, partially redeemed themselves after the war by opposing Reconstruction, aiding in efforts to erect monuments to the Confederate past, and embracing the Lost Cause version of the war and its meaning.¹³

Until recently, religion was relatively neglected by Civil War historians, who, when they have examined the subject, have focused on the Protestant majority in the North and South. Difficulty in finding letters and manuscripts from Catholics seems to be largely to blame for their exclusion from histories of the Civil War. As one recent scholar explained, a dearth of primary sources forced him to consign Catholics to the periphery of his study along with the much smaller Unitarian and Swedenborgian denominations.¹⁴ While some notable studies have begun to include Catholics, there is still very little known about how the war affected Catholic northerners and their place in American society in the second half of the nineteenth century.¹⁵ Benjamin Blied’s Catholics and the Civil War is the only book-length treatment of the subject, but it does not deal with the post-war period.¹⁶ Studies of northern Catholic immigrants such as the Irish also tend to focus on ethnicity and class issues more than religion. Prominent among these studies are Susannah Ural’s The Harp and the Eagle and Christian Samito’s Becoming American under Fire. Samito emphasizes the ways in which the conflict secured Irish Americans’ citizenship rights and helped to assimilate them into the American mainstream. By contrast, Ural argues that the war was primarily an alienating experience for Irish Catholic northerners. While the question of the war’s assimilating effect on foreigners is certainly not an either/or proposition, it is clear that the trend in current scholarship is to argue that the war was not a melting-pot experience for the Irish, Germans, or other immigrant groups.¹⁷

To the extent that historians have addressed how the war affected Catholics, they are also divided over whether the Civil War should be seen as a turning point in American Catholic history. Did the Civil War help promote Catholics’ acceptance into the broader American society and culture, or did it merely reinforce existing prejudice? While scholars have made some notable strides in understanding various aspects of the Irish Catholic experience of the war, little is known about other ethnic groups or the ways in which the war shaped perceptions of the Catholic Church in America. The Civil War’s effect on Catholics of American, Irish, and German ethnicity in the United States (the North and the slaveholding Border States that remained within the Union) demands further investigation and a new analysis.¹⁸

In an effort to represent as broad a range of views as possible from across the North and Border States, I rely heavily on the opinions expressed in Catholic newspapers. Though a historian must always be careful not to consider such opinions as equal to that of the public in general, the wide range of views expressed by Catholic editors does accurately portray the spectrum of Catholic opinion on the conflict. Patriotic editors spoke to and were patronized by pro-war Catholics, while anti-war editors, who appealed to anti-draft and poorer Catholics, expressed sentiments that were certainly held by many of their readers. As Orestes Brownson, himself the most prominent Catholic editor of the time, noted in the run-up to the 1860 presidential election, No periodical with us can live except on condition of pleasing the special public it addresses. American journalists were not just expected to tell what is true, right and just, but to defend [their community’s] opinions, prejudices, sympathies and antipathies. Even the Catholic public, he declared, would soon drop a journal that constantly contradicted its political convictions and sentiments. Brownson spoke from experience, having lost many of his readers for being too outspoken on immigrants and Catholic theology. The truth of his statement explains why prior to the war other Catholic leaders generally avoided controversial domestic political issues such as slavery.¹⁹

I also rely heavily on the views of elite Catholic laypeople and clergy. Exploring the Civil War–era lives of nonelite Catholics, both native- and foreign-born, is a difficult task made more so by the paucity of extant wartime letters and diaries they left behind. Many Catholics, like other Americans who were poor or illiterate, left behind few personal records that survive to the present.²⁰ Even from the archives of religious sisters, who all cherish the memory of their communities during the war, the amount of letters, account books, religious diaries, and other manuscripts that have been lost far outweigh the number that remain. Major American Catholic repositories such as the archives of the University of Notre Dame contain sources that focus on elite and especially clerical voices to the exclusion of lay, poor, female, and non-Irish ones. Thus it is easy to understand why James McPherson’s study of Civil War soldiers’ motivation, For Cause and Comrades, quotes from only a handful of Catholics, all of them Irish. Because the Irish left behind relatively more Civil War sources than did German or native-born Catholics, the Irish experience of the war has been conflated into the experience of all Catholics during the war.²¹

Ultimately, the war alienated most northern Catholics and their leaders, causing them to seek refuge in a separate Catholic subculture after the war. My first chapter examines antebellum anti-Catholicism during the 1840s while arguing that the question of Catholic patriotism during the Mexican War and Know-Nothing crisis was a dress rehearsal for a similar debate during the Civil War. The second chapter explores Catholic responses to the election of 1860, the secession crisis, and the attack on Fort Sumter while arguing that initial Catholic unity in favor of the war helped lessen prejudice against them in 1861. The third argues that the service of so many prominent and rank-and-file Catholic Union soldiers was a source of pride for members of the community, who were shocked to find how little their sacrifices were appreciated. The fourth argues that the church’s hierarchy failed to provide enough spiritual support for its men, particularly so because priests were essential to the religious lives of Catholic soldiers. It also asserts that more so than the bravery of Catholic soldiers or priests, sister nurses by far had the largest impact on dispelling prejudices against their faith through their devotion to the health and recovery of thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers in all theaters of the war.

The fifth and sixth chapters argue that battlefield casualties, conscription, and emancipation combined to turn many northern Catholics against the war effort. This story is much more complex than it is often depicted, as one of Irish Catholic racism toward African Americans.²² By the end of the war, Catholics had become disenchanted with the Republicans and vice versa, leading to attacks on Catholic loyalty and talk of a religious civil war. Chapter 7 argues that continued Republican attacks on Catholics as a threat to national well-being underscored how little the war changed attitudes about the compatibility of their faith with being an American. Finally, Chapter 8 asserts that Catholic veterans and apologists attempted to create a positive memory of their church’s role in the Union war effort, but that their efforts were primarily directed at their own community and had no great success in lessening anti-Catholicism in post-war American society or culture.

In the end, pro-war Catholic leaders and soldiers were unable to convince other Americans that their religion posed no threat to America’s republican government and institutions. Major internal divisions among Catholics themselves ultimately undermined all efforts to promote tolerance of their religion through their participation in the war. No amount of belated post-war unity between Catholic veterans, leaders, and apologists proved able to defeat new forms of nativism in the late nineteenth or first half of the twentieth century. Thus the American Civil War played a pivotal role in accelerating the antebellum trend in American Catholicism toward isolation and separatism. Alienated by a hostile society that showed no appreciation for their wartime sacrifices, that continued to attack them and their faith as not fully American, Catholics sought refuge for themselves and their faith in a subculture of their own making.

1

The Mexican War and Nativism

The Mexican War (1846–48) set important precedents for the Catholic experience of the Civil War. Some Catholic leaders hoped that by fighting in the Mexican War, American Catholics would prove their loyalty and promote tolerance for themselves as they had done during the American Revolution. Many of the arguments developed during the Mexican War to counteract nativism and anti-Catholicism were later refined and put into service again in the Civil War. Catholics’ efforts to portray themselves as loyal, however, were complicated by the alleged corruption and immorality of the Mexican Catholic clergy, Protestant anger over the appointment of Catholic chaplains to the army, and most importantly the presence of Irish Catholic deserters in the Mexican Army. By 1848 the Catholic community was distracted by famines and revolutions in Europe and grew weary of anti-Catholic coverage of the conflict. In the end, most hoped that the war would end quickly in order to save the Mexican church from further destruction at the hands of the invading U.S. Army.

Because few of the poor Catholic volunteers who belonged to the U.S. Army before the war left behind personal records, and because most bishops ignored the war as a peripheral matter not related to the running of their dioceses, Catholic newspapermen and the stories and editorials they wrote about the war form the best body of evidence for opinions within the Catholic community about the conflict with Mexico. In 1822 the first Catholic diocesan paper in the United States was published, and by 1845 there were fifteen Catholic periodicals. This number continued to grow steadily, with forty-one serials published in 1850. While exact circulation figures for the years of the Mexican War are hard to find, it seems that many newspapers had a circulation of only a few thousand local subscribers, with only a few papers—like The Pilot and Brownson’s Quarterly Review, both published in Boston—enjoying a truly national audience. Laymen published and edited most of these papers. However, some of these newspapers were the official organs of their dioceses, and their local bishops had varying degrees of censor ship over them. Many Catholic newspapers experienced frequent changes in ownership during the mid-nineteenth century. Prior to and during the Mexican War, the New York Freeman’s Journal saw several different editors before James A. McMaster took over in 1848 and held his editorship well beyond the Civil War.¹

Almost every editor, of whom Irish Catholics composed the majority, expressed orthodox religious views, and, in actual practice, both priests and laymen often had a wide degree of editorial freedom to publish on religious, ethnic, and political issues. While editors who did discuss the Mexican War generally supported it patriotically, others ignored the conflict, commented on it only rarely, or merely reprinted military reports from secular journals. Still, in both advocating the war as a chance to prove Catholic loyalty and in criticizing it for its excesses, the Catholic press foreshadowed how it would later cover the American Civil War.²

The failure to defeat anti-Catholic nativism during the Mexican War left room for the resurgence of an even greater political threat, the Know-Nothing or American Party. The party grew in popularity across the North and South primarily due to unprecedented levels of immigration from Ireland and Germany. Know-Nothings feared the corrupting influence of uneducated immigrants on politics and the growing power of a religion that they saw as fundamentally antidemocratic and un-American. Although other issues such as slavery and reforming state constitutions motivated the party, Catholics saw it as being fundamentally animated by religious prejudice. Taken together, the experience of the Mexican War and 1850s nativism encouraged Catholics to seek protection for their community and religious beliefs by increasingly walling themselves off from the seemingly hostile forces surrounding them in secular and Protestant American society.

The Mexican War began in May 1846 after Mexican soldiers attacked American troops stationed just north of the Rio Grande River. The effect the Mexican War had on the American Catholic Church is a subject that has received only intermittent attention from historians. Historian Robert Johansen famously called the Mexican War an exercise in self-identity in the young life of the United States, in that Americans were able to define themselves against an alien culture. However, this depiction of the war does not adequately describe the American Catholic experience of the war. After all, Catholics in the United States shared a common faith with Mexicans, who lived in an overwhelmingly Catholic nation. Manifest Destiny, the then common belief that the United States should stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific, was influenced by anti-Catholicism and the desire to make the West safe for Protestantism. American Catholics could patriotically have supported westward expansion sought by the nation’s Democratic administration, but they could not have fully supported the religious goals of many of those calling for territorial enlargement. Though military historians have analyzed the experience of the U.S. Army and its officers in both the Civil and Mexican Wars, by trying to show how lessons learned in Mexico influenced the generalship of Civil War leaders such as Ulysses S. Grant or Robert E. Lee, they have generally not linked the two conflicts in terms or ethnic or religious history.³

Many American Catholics took an active role in supporting the U.S. war effort against Mexico. From 1840 to 1850, the nation’s Catholic population increased from approximately 663,000 to an estimated 1.6 million. Some estimates reported that a significant portion of the pre-war U.S. Army was composed of foreign-born Catholics. One historian records that 2,135 Irishmen were in the army in 1845, 2,644 more became regulars during the conflict, and slightly more than 1,000 served in short-term enlistments. Though it is not clear how many of these Irishmen were Catholic, there were probably at least few thousand Catholics of Irish, German, or American ancestry in the army.⁴

From the beginning of the conflict, some Protestant and secular editors questioned American Catholics’ loyalty to the United States. One paper reported that few Catholics had volunteered to fight for the United States because priests were telling their parishioners that they must not fight against their church. Protestant ministers and editors also blasted Polk’s appointment of unnaturalized foreigners as Catholic chaplains to the U.S. Army: two Jesuit priests from Georgetown, Fathers Anthony Rey and John McElroy. One minister argued that the Catholic chaplains and soldiers were a liability to American success in the war, stating, They cannot fight against their religion. A Presbyterian publication saw the Catholic chaplain appointments as proof of a jesuitical influence about the President and his Cabinet. Some, like the Christian Advocate and Journal, hoped that the war would provide an opportunity to redeem Mexicans from the degrading superstition of Catholicism. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, a Democratic paper, predicted that greed as well as patriotism would motivate volunteering: "There is wealth and treasures enough hoarded in vaults and used in the service of their Churches to defray the expences [sic] of subjugating that whole nation." Even the Washington Daily Union, a secular paper with close ties to Democratic President James K. Polk, dared to suggest that the wealth of the Mexican Catholic Church should perhaps be sequestered by U.S. forces because the Mexican government allegedly used it to fund the war effort.⁵

Many evangelicals in both the North and South saw the war as an opportunity to strike a blow at Catholicism by converting Mexico. At the front, some Protestant American soldiers shared or developed the anti-Catholicism expressed back home in Protestant newspapers. Protestant soldiers were also more likely to blame Mexico’s problems on its clergy than were Catholic soldiers. American volunteers singled out Catholicism to justify their belief that Mexico was a barbaric and backward nation. Major Henry Lane of Indiana called Mexican Catholicism a monster which is miscalled religion and predicted that ignorant and bigotted Catholics of Mexico would inevitably fall before the all conquering genius of genuine Americanism. Some were also enticed into service by the idea of being enriched by plunder from Mexican churches. A popular song set to the tune of Yankee Doodle promised volunteers their pick of gold and silver images, plentiful and handy. Churches grand, with altars rich. One Protestant soldier, Frank Edwards, dismissed the lavish feast day ceremonies of Mexican Catholicism as ridiculous mummeries.