Review
Manifest Bigotry
Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War
by John C. Pinheiro
Oxford University Press, 2014
(252 pages, $45.00, hardcover)
reviewed by James A. Altena
The subtitle of John C. Pinheiro's Missionaries of Republicanism is slightly misleading. The book is not a "religious history" of the Mexican-American War, but rather a study of a religious-cultural dimension underlying one side of that conflict: the strong anti-Catholic attitudes and beliefs of the vast majority of white male Americans, the rationales this outlook created for both proponents and opponents of the conflict, and how U.S. military and political policies were shaped as a result. By examining "how anti-Catholicism emerged as integral to nineteenth-century American identity as a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant republic," Pinheiro seeks to show that "a peculiarly American anti-Catholicism that heretofore most Americans had unreflectively relegated to an evangelical Protestant subculture . . . proved to be the most important means of extracting transcendent meaning from the experience of war" (p. 1).
Stirring the Pot
In the early decades of the American republic, Pinheiro argues, anti-Catholicism remained a largely latent background feature of American politics and culture. This changed significantly beginning about 1830, as the alliance with France during the Revolution receded from living memory, to be replaced by confrontation with the first wave of Catholic immigrants from Germany and Ireland and by conflict with Mexico over Texas on the Western frontier. Anti-Catholic newssheets and political parties emerged, and riots occurred, such as the notorious burnings of the Ursuline convent in Charleston, Massachusetts, in 1834, and of St. Augustine's Church in Philadelphia ten years later.
Pinheiro holds that this bigotry was fomented and shaped by what he terms the "Beecherite Synthesis," a combination of Western expansionism, Anglo-Saxon nativism, evangelical Protestant biblicism, and anti-Catholicism propounded by famed "new school Presbyterian" preacher Lyman Beecher (1775–1863). Holding that the ideals and institutions of the republic ultimately were derived from the Scriptures and not from the heritage of ancient Greece and Rome, and that the nation was ordained by God to spread across the entire continent, Beecher asserted that Catholicism was an authoritarian system irreducibly contrary and hostile to both principles of republican government and biblical truths. Polemicists such as the famed inventor of the telegraph and painter, Samuel F. B. Morse (1791–1872), propagated and elaborated Beecher's arguments into the position that journalist John L. O'Sullivan memorably denoted as "Manifest Destiny."
The burgeoning conflict with Mexico over the borders of the Republic of Texas and the latter's prospective admission as a state to the Union, which erupted into war in 1846, intertwined the strands of "religion, race, and republicanism" (p. 38) into a single strong cord. Ironically, partisans on both sides of the issue drew upon common factors in formulating their opposing positions. Proponents argued that the divinely ordained expansion of the United States was part of a larger providential design to promote the supremacy of the white Anglo-Saxon race as a chosen people destined to rule over others, and to trample down diabolical Catholicism under godly Protestant feet. Opponents (many of whom had no similar qualms about a potential war with England over claims to the northern Oregon Territory) argued that such southern expansion would only benefit an evil "slave power" and advance a benighted institution that was already sapping the moral fabric of the nation, and furthermore that incorporation by territorial annexation into the republic of large numbers of Mexicans—not only Catholics, but also non-Anglo-Saxons in racial heritage, language, and culture—would further dilute and pollute national purity. Once military victory was achieved, similar arguments dominated debates over negotiation of the peace treaty and administration of newly annexed territories.
Powers & Tensions
Pinheiro expounds his thesis in his first two chapters; the remaining six illustrate various facets of it, such as the politics of the 1844 and 1848 elections, the effects of religious issues on military recruitment and government wartime policies, and the experiences of American soldiers in Mexico. Notably, neither President James Polk nor Secretary of State James Buchanan harbored anti-Catholic sentiments (Polk was even guardian for a nephew who was studying at the Jesuit Georgetown College with his full approval). Both were keenly concerned to tamp down and exclude such prejudice as a complicating factor in government foreign policy—and also in domestic politics, since Catholic immigrants who gained citizenship were overwhelmingly Democrats rather than Whigs.
Polk conferred with Catholic bishops (he offered to appoint Bishop John Hughes of New York as a special envoy to Mexico; Hughes declined) and had two priests sent with troops to Mexico as chaplains for American soldiers who were Catholics. American generals issued strict orders (not always obeyed) that troops should treat all religious sites and Catholic clergy in Mexico with respect. (A major ruckus arose when a Catholic U.S. officer, Colonel Thomas Childs, ordered his troops to kneel before a procession of the Blessed Sacrament in the streets of the occupied town of Jalapa.) Accusations of an agenda for surreptitious advancement of "popery" by the Polk administration became part of the rhetorical arsenal of its political opponents.
For their part, American soldiers, most facing their first exposure to a vastly different foreign culture—one with a very different ethnic and religious constitution and marked by deep poverty—largely had existing prejudices even more deeply entrenched. American Catholics in turn found themselves caught in the middle. Most were patriotic and (contra Beecher) saw no conflict between their faith and republican values; most shared the common prejudices against blacks and Indians, and hence against Mexicans as being degenerate racial half-breeds; many endorsed expansionism; a fair number volunteered for military service, despite facing suspicion of themselves as fifth columnists (worsened by the defection of a small group of Irish-American soldiers to the Mexican side to form the Saint Patrick Battalion).
James A. Altena is the associate editor of Fanfare magazine, a comprehensive bimonthly periodical for reviews of classical music recordings. He is a member of All Saints Episcopal Church in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, and is pursuing a Ph.D. in church history at Westminster Theological Seminary in Glenside, Pennsylvania.
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