Immigration (thread 12), Episode 6: Lyman Beecher vs. the Pope: Panic in the 1830s West

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Welcome back to another episode on immigration. Let's move a little bit forward
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from John Jay into the 19th century, say to 1835.
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In 1835, the Reverend Lyman Beecher surveyed the American West and saw the future of human liberty.
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Fantastic. He also saw Catholics. It's not so fantastic. This complicated things.
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Beecher was one of the most prominent Protestant ministers in the United States.
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He was a formidable preacher, theological combatant. He was a moral reformer.
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He was a patriarch of an extraordinary family.
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His children included Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin,
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and Henry Ward Beecher, who became one of the most celebrated ministers of the 19th century.
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Lyman Beecher specialized in detecting threats to the Republic.
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Alcohol threatened it. Atheism threatened it.
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Religious indifference threatened it. The weakening of Calvinism threatened it.
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And now, immigrants were pouring into the expanding West, carrying a religion
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Beecher associated with monarchy and ignorance and clerical domination, and the Pope.
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The danger was not that Catholic immigrants would reject American democracy.
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The danger was that they would try to participate in it.
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So Lyman Beecher had moved from New England to Cincinnati in 1832 to become
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president of Lane Theological Seminary.
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Cincinnati was exploding in population and importance.
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Migrants streamed westward. Commerce moved along the Ohio River.
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New towns and farms and churches, newspapers, political institutions just popped
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right up with astonishing speed.
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Beecher called the West a young empire of mind, power, and wealth,
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and free institutions, rushing up to a giant manhood with a rapidity and power
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never witnessed below the sun.
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Gee, subtlety had not been invited West.
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To Beecher, the region would dominate the future of the entire region.
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The religious and political destiny of our nation, he wrote,
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is to be decided in the West.
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There lay the territory, population, wealth, and political power of the future.
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Whoever shaped Western institutions would shape America.
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And because America would lead the world toward liberty and Christianity,
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whoever shaped Ohio might, through a perfectly reasonable sequence of assumptions,
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determine the destiny of humanity.
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When's the last time you ever heard someone talk about Ohio like that?
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By the way, in the early 19th century, Ohio was the West to clear up any confusion there.
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Anyway, Beecher believed America had received a providential assignment.
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The nation was destined to lead the way in the moral and political emancipation
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of the world. Yeah, by the way, Ohio, right?
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It was therefore essential that Americans remain humble while executing God's
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apparent decision to place them in charge of history.
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The West needed schools and colleges, seminaries, ministers, churches.
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It required universal education and moral culture, in Beecher's words,
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delivered by institutions powerful enough to establish Republican habits.
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But the population was dangerously heterogeneous, as we've already seen.
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It had been assembled from all the states of the Union, he wrote,
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and from all the nations of Europe, and was rushing in like the waters of the Great Flood.
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Immigrants weren't just simply
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arriving. They were a hydrological event taken straight from Genesis.
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Because Western settlers possessed different opinions and customs and religions,
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Beecher feared that no homogenous public sentiment could emerge quickly enough
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to secure Republican government.
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Protestant institutions, naturally, needed to intervene.
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The people could freely determine their own beliefs after Protestant ministers
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had prepared them to make the correct decision.
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Beecher's primary concern, of course, was Catholic immigration.
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Growing numbers of Irish and German Catholics were entering the United States
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and settling in eastern cities and western communities.
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They built churches. They established schools.
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They formed mutual aid societies. They increasingly participated in political and electoral life.
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To many native-born Protestants, however, Catholicism seemed inseparable from Europe's monarchies.
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Catholics followed bishops. Bishops recognized the Pope. The Pope was a foreign ruler.
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Therefore, an Irish laborer casting a ballot in Cincinnati might therefore be
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the final component of an elaborate Roman assault on American liberty.
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Beecher, by the way, insisted that these thoughts did not constitute religious bigotry.
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This was merely a campaign to prevent the wrong religion from becoming politically influential.
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Critics accused Protestant alarmists of manufacturing a controversy about religion, as they put it.
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Beecher considered that objection absurd.
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Saying religion had nothing to do with politics made as much sense in the 19th
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century as saying the sun has no influence on the solar system or the moon has
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no influence on the tides.
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He wrote that religion, he wrote, had always been the great agitator or tranquilizer
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of nations, the orb of darkness or of light to the world, the fountain of purity or pollution.
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The identity of the light and the pollution could be determined by consulting
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Lyman Beecher, of course.
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And Catholicism, in Beecher's telling, was not simply a competing denomination.
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It was an authoritarian system fundamentally hostile to self-government.
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It trained believers to submit rather than to think, to obey rather than to
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inquire, to accept clerical direction rather than exercise independent judgment.
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Beecher feared a union of church and state, as he put it, which had never existed,
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he said, without corrupting the church and enslaving the people.
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This concern was not inherently irrational, especially for the time.
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European states had long used established churches to enforce political authority.
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Catholic institutions had persecuted dissenters. Protestant institutions had
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done the same, sometimes with impressive enthusiasm.
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Beecher's solution to religious domination was a national network of evangelical
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Protestant schools, colleges, seminaries, churches,
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and ministers shaping public morality and securing Republican government.
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The church must never control the state. That was why Protestants needed to
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control the culture surrounding it.
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So Beecher worried that Catholic clergy might direct how immigrants voted.
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In close elections, he argued, the leaders of a large denomination could become kingmakers.
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Politicians would court them, grant favors, and allow ecclesiastical influence
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to override independent public judgments.
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If Catholic clergy could, quote, give a direction to the suffrage of their whole
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people, they might become the most favored denomination.
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And in a balanced election, well, they could become the dominant sect.
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Beecher was horrified by the prospect of ministers exercising organized political influence.
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He expressed this concern while asking Protestant ministers and churches and donors and schools,
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newspapers, voluntary associations to organize nationally and determine the
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political character of the entire West.
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Notice the irony there. Catholic organization was clerical domination.
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Protestant organization was civic virtue.
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Beecher knew his campaign looked intolerant, so he made tolerance itself part of the prosecution.
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Why so much excitement about the Catholic religion, he imagined, critics asking.
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Is not one religion just as good as another?
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No, Beecher replied, at considerable length.
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Americans had scrutinized Calvinism, he noted.
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Critics had called it a severe, unsocial, self-righteous, uncharitable,
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exclusive, persecuting system.
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Accused it of dealing damnation round the land. And charged Calvinists with
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forming conspiracies against liberty.
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Beecher did not object, even though he was a Calvinist.
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We do not ask to be let alone, he declared, nor cry persecution when our creed or conduct is analyzed.
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All of this was admirably confident. Calvinists welcomed investigation because
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history, properly understood anyway, demonstrated that Calvinists had nurtured
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liberty. They had fought tyranny.
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They did settle New England. They defeated Catholic enemies.
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They won the revolution.
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And presumably, they performed several other tasks before breakfast.
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Catholics were equally free to submit themselves to Protestant examination.
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Religious liberty, Beecher explained, cannot exist without free inquiry.
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An anti-Republican charity that protected Catholics from criticism would only
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help preserve its errors.
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Catholicism would have to be liberalized and assimilated to our institutions, he wrote.
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This would occur by subjecting it to the tug of controversy,
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turning upon it the searching inspection of the public eye, and compelling it
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to survive the ordeal of an enlightened public sentiment.
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Everyone enjoyed religious freedom. Catholics would enjoy the additional freedom
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of being publicly investigated until they became more Protestant.
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Beecher's language grew particularly heated around education.
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Catholic schools threatened to form children under priestly authority.
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He warned that Catholic powers were thrusting in professional instructors and
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underbidding us in the cheapness of education.
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The scheme was diabolical. Catholics were opening schools and charging too little.
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For a morsel of meat, Beecher asked, Would Americans sell our birthright?
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The revolutionary inheritance, apparently, might be lost through competitively priced tuition.
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At any rate, Beecher saw Catholic education as foreign infiltration,
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but Protestant education as neutral preparation for citizenship.
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Protestant schools cultivated independent thought. Catholic schools only imposed sectarian doctrine.
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The fact that Protestant schools taught Protestant assumptions,
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used Protestant Bibles, and operated through Protestant institutions didn't
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make them sectarian. It made them American.
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This distinction would become central to 19th century battles over public education in general.
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Protestant practices were treated as the cultural baseline.
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Catholic objections were presented as demands for special treatment.
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When Catholic immigrants resisted Protestant Bible readings in public schools,
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they appeared hostile to education itself.
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Religious neutrality apparently meant Protestantism, with the label just removed a little bit.
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So, Peacher did occasionally soften his indictment of Catholic immigrants.
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They are not to be regarded as conspirators against our liberties, he once wrote.
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It's a nice, very generous clarification. They're not conspirators against our liberty.
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The immigrants themselves were not knowingly conspiring, anyway.
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Their system placed control in a few governing minds, he wrote,
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while ordinary Catholics might participate in its designs, unconscious of their evil tendency.
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So in other words, they weren't traitors. They were just ignorant instruments
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of an international authoritarian regime.
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Beecher recommended kindness, education, evangelical light, and perseverance.
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Catholics needed to learn to read and think and act for themselves.
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Irish and German Catholics could become worthy Republican citizens once Protestant
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Americans taught them how independent people should think.
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There is one more dark edge to this atmosphere of alarm.
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In August of 1834, Beecher returned to the Boston area and delivered several
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anti-Catholic sermons.
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On the night of August 11th, a Protestant mob attacked the Ursuline convent
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and school in nearby Charleston.
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The institution had become the subject of lurid rumors about women held against their will.
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Although local officials investigated and found no captive, public suspicion continued.
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The mob broke into the convent, drove out the nuns and pupils,
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looted the building, desecrated graves, and then burned the whole place.
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The school's enrollment made the symbolism particularly grotesque.
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Most of its students were Protestant girls.
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Beecher obviously did not order the attack. he denied responsibility and argued
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that few, if any, rioters had heard his sermon that evening.
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There is no reason to convert inflammatory rhetoric into a direct command that he didn't give.
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But the convent burned within a world his rhetoric helped describe,
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helped create a world in which Catholic institutions were not merely different,
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but foreign fortifications in a struggle for national survival.
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When citizens are repeatedly told that a mysterious authoritarian power is capturing
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their children and corrupting their elections and invading their territory and
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plotting to enslave them, well, who knows?
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Someone may eventually conclude that, you know, setting the building on fire
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is just preventive patriotism.
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Beecher wanted controversy and scrutiny and Protestant mobilization.
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He didn't want arson, but, you know, the mob supplied its own footnotes.
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The aftermath revealed still more about the boundaries of religious liberty.
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Massachusetts officials condemned the violence, but the legislature refused
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to compensate the Catholic Church for the destroyed property.
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The state could deplore mob rule without becoming financially reckless about
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repairing what the mob had burned.
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Beecher continued to insist in the meantime that the proper response to Catholic
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immigration was organized evangelical action.
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He closed his plea for the West optimistically. Americans were finally awakening.
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A blind and indiscriminate charity was giving way to sober observation, he wrote.
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Protestants were adapting more Christian feeling and language towards Catholics,
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he explained, even as a just estimate of danger spread across the country.
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I guess you could say the language was becoming kinder. The accusation definitely
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still remained, though, that Catholicism still endangered Republican civilization.
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The combination would outlive Beecher, describe an entire population as a mortal
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threat, but do so regretfully, soberly, and, you know, obviously,
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in the spirit of Christian love.
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Catholic immigrants, in the meantime, did transform the West.
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They continued to build churches, schools, hospitals, neighborhoods,
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unions, charities, political organizations.
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They did vote. They did hold office.
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They did argue among themselves. Their children did learn English.
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They did quarrel with priests and marry Protestants and just do all that stuff.
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In the end, the Pope did not capture Cincinnati.
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The public survived affordable Catholic education. The greater historical irony
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is that Beecher feared immigrants could not become Americans because Catholicism demanded
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obedience to inherited ecclesiastical authority.
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Yet those immigrants used the American freedoms of association and worship,
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speech, education, and voting to build institutions of their own.
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In other words, they behaved like citizens, which I guess for Lyman Beecher
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was exactly what made them so dangerous.
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Lyman Beecher did not oppose religious liberty. He simply believed liberty required
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the correct institutions, the correct education, the correct moral formation, the correct religion.
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Everyone was free to enter the American future, but Protestants were holding the map.