"Are Catholics Pro-Slavery and Disloyal," Brownson's Quarterly Review for July 1863

In its connection with the work of suppressing the Rebellion, both the negro question and the slavery question lose much of their practical importance, for slavery will go out with the Rebellion, and the disposition to be finally made of the negro population cannot be settled till the return of peace and nationality. Yet they are both great questions, and questions that must be met and solved sooner or later – the slavery question on moral and religious, and the negro question on political and economical grounds. Our views and wishes on both questions are known to our readers, and hardly need to be repeated. We are hostile to slavery, and not a believer in negro equality. The future controversy will turn principally on this latter question, which the present is no time to discuss.

Mr. Tilton is an abolitionist, and like all the extreme abolitionists, an advocate for negro equality. He wants black and white placed on the same footing, and treated, politically and socially, as one people. We are not prepared to go with him in this. We know, indeed, many negroes who are superior to some white men, but, as a rule, we have found the negro inferior to the white, and we cannot rate his capacity so high as does Mr. Tilton, perhaps because we accept neither his doctrine of progress, nor his estimate of what constitutes true manhood. We do not regard the peculiar virtues of the negro as the more manly virtues, and we do not believe that man began his career on this globe as a low, untutored savage, hardly a degree above the brute creation, and has become what he now is, by development. The savage is not the type of the primitive man, but of the fallen or degenerate man. He is the excommunicated man, cut off from communion with civilized humanity. He is unprogressive, and no savage tribe by its indigenous and spontaneous development ever becomes a civilized people. Civilization is always from above, and the savage tribe is never civilized, but by a people already civilized, by civilized missionaries, colonists, or conquerors. Development takes place by virtue of an internal law as its principle, but it is effected only by assimilation from abroad. We cannot, therefore, conclude what the negro may become from what the highly civilized white man now is, or once was.

But, though we do not accept Mr. Tilton’s theory of progress, or his estimate of the negro’s capacity for improvement, and are not prepared to place the negro on a footing of perfect equality with the white man, we agree with him that we have no right to make him a slave, and are bound to do all we can to make and keep him a free man. The negro is a man, and if a man he is sprung from the same original stock as ourselves, and has the same natural and indefeasible rights. In his most degraded state he almost touches the purely animal world, but even in that state he is a man, a human soul, created by God in his own image, and redeemed by his Word, who assumed the nature of the black man as well as of the white man, for both are of one and the same species, and have one and the same nature. He cannot be reduced to an hereditary bondman without sin against God and crime against humanity, whatever slaveholders and their apologists may allege to the contrary. The negro is a man, and all men are born free, and slavery is the natural and normal condition of no man, race, or class of men. The slave is always the man wrested by violence from his natural condition; slavery is a violent state, and has no justification but on the principle that might makes right. A man may, without sin, where slavery exists and has been established without any agency of his, hold as slaves persons by the constitution of society born in servitude, providing he treats them well, leaves their souls free, instructs them in the true religion, respects all their moral rights, especially the rights of Christian marriage, and providing also that he exerts all his influence in a legal way as a man and a citizen to change that social constitution and extinguish slavery at the earliest practicable moment; but the man who undertakes to justify slavery, to defend it on principle, to maintain that it is an institution in accordance with the Christian religion, or he who holds that it is a good institution, and seeks to defend and perpetuate it, is a man who understands neither the law of humanity nor the simplest elements of the Christian religion. Christianity reintegrates the human race, restores the original communion of man with man, and reestablishes man in all his natural rights.

They in our Catholic community, whether priests or laymen, journalists or public speakers, who take the ground actually that slavery is an institution approved, or at least not opposed by the Catholic Church, give only scandal to intelligent non-Catholics, and shock every well-instructed and conscientious Catholic. We have been deeply pained and mortified at the position we have found the great body of American Catholics, with a large portion of the venerable clergy themselves, occupying in regard to the question of negro slavery. Not a single Catholic journal, except one, ventures to assert openly and decidedly the true Catholic doctrine in regard to slavery, and the Catholic who does not throw all his influence on the side of the pro-slavery party is read out of the pale of Catholic society, especially in this City of New York, where there are more Catholics than all the seceded States put together. The Catholic who ventures to arraign the institution of slavery on even moral and religious grounds, though backed by the spirit, teaching, and action of the Church in all ages, and in all countries but this, is at once suspected of being shaky in his faith, and is denounced as a “Puritan,” or as a “Yankee,” the two most opprobrious epithets that can be, in the estimate of our New York Catholics, be applied to any man; and the promptness and zeal with which they rally to the disloyal peace party, and swell it ranks, proves that their sympathies are pro-slavery. We can scarcely find a Catholic descended from an old American family, or even of American birth, that is not practically a pro-slavery man in his talk and in his influence. Why is it we find the mass of our Catholics following Fernando Wood, James Brooks, and the Abbe McMaster? Whence the intense hatred of the new England,- whose Catholicity is really more flourishing than anywhere else on this continent,- which is the most salient feature of our Catholic population? Whence, indeed, but from the conviction that New England is anti-slavery, and in favor of negro emancipation? Go where we will in the loyal States, and we find nearly every Catholic we meet a Southern sympathizer, an intense hater of the abolitionist, and more ready to see the Union divided, or reconstructed, under Jeff Davis, on slavery, as its corner-stone, than to see it restored by the extinction of slavery.

The Catholic organs have, it seems to us, been very unwise and impolitic, and our Catholic leaders have placed us in a very unpleasant position. The Know-Nothings, a few years ago, demanded the exclusion of every Catholic who would not renounce his religion, from every office of trust or emolument, civil or military, under the State or the nation, on the ground that Catholics are not, and cannot be loyal to the Republic, and in case of war are more likely to side with its enemies than with its friends. If it had been the settled purpose of Catholics to confirm this charge, they could hardly have taken a different course from the present civil war. They have showed that their sympathies were with slavery, in which the Rebellion originated, and with the rebels themselves. Though they constitute, by no means, the whole of the disloyal peace party, there are comparatively few of them who are not attached to that party. When the Archbishop of New York, attacked us for proposing the emancipation as a war measure, denounced or ridiculed the Abolitionists, and made the best possible defense of the slave-trade, he was applauded to the echo; but when on his return from Europe, he took a decidedly national ground, and defended the draft, as a just, wise, and patriotic measure, he was everywhere murmured against, and even a brother Archbishop, without naming him, read him lectures through a Catholic journal, on his unepiscopal conduct, and censured him for meddling with politics, approving the war for the national life and integrity, and endeavored to make it appear that he had departed from the line of his duty as a Catholic bishop, in supporting the flag that had protected him at home and abroad, and in standing by the Government to which he had sworn allegiance. No act of the Venerable Archbishop’s life ever cost him so much popularity with his own people as that one act of decided loyalty. Of all the Catholic publicists in the country, the editor of this Review has been the only one to applaud or even to approve his truly patriotic and loyal act. That sermon more than atoned to us for all that we had personally suffered from him, for it was a loyal service to our country. Had he been backed up by the Bishops and clergy of the loyal States, the Northern people would have been united in prosecuting the war, and the peace party would never have been organized; for the leaders of that execrable party, know perfectly well that, though the foreign born population and their children, the majority of whom are Catholics, are not all who are ready to follow them, yet, that without the assurance of their adherence they could hardly rally a corporal’s guard. Individual Catholics have been loyal, but they have been so in spite of reproach and obloquy from their Catholic brethren, and the bitter invectives of the Catholic organs. What more could the Know-Nothings have asked of us in their justification?

To deter Catholics from engaging with patriotic ardor in the war for the suppression of the rebellion, the so-called Catholic press circulated the mischievous fiction that it was the determination of the Republicans, when they had put down the Southern slaveholders, to turn round and put down the Catholic religion in this country, as if there was, or could be, any natural relation between professing the Catholic religion and the holding of slaves. But suppose such a thought had been entertained, what was the proper course for Catholics to take? To unite with the slaveholders, identify our Church with slavery and rebellion, and clearly prove ourselves disloyal? Unhappily, we Catholics seems to imagine that we have power only to obstruct, and that our influence will be null, unless exerted in some work of destruction, or to defeat some national purpose. To express our sympathy with the Rebellion and making common cause with it in its efforts to overthrow the Government of the United States, and destroy the country, or even to withhold all active support of the national cause, would seem to most people the way to bring about the very result apprehended, and which it was our interest and our duty to guard against. The Government will succeed; the Rebellion will be suppressed, and the Union will be restored, without slavery, and be firmer and stronger than ever. When that is done what will be our position, if we have succeeded in identifying our Church with the cause of slavery and rebellion, and demonstrated to the world that American Catholics love not liberty, and hold that they have the right to resist the legal government, and the legitimate authority of the nation to which we have sworn allegiance? In vain should we appeal to instances of individual loyalty among Catholics, for it would be shown that they were the exception, not the rule. In vain would Catholics cite our Review, for though that has been uniformly loyal and true to the Government, the enemies of Catholics could easily prove that in being so it lost the confidence of the Catholic community, and was interdicted by the Bishop of Richmond, denounced by the Bishop of Wheeling, and officially declared by the Bishop of Philadelphia and the Archbishop of Cincinnati to be no longer a Catholic Review. In vain should we appeal to the Telegraph and Advocate, the New York Tablet, and the Pittsburgh Catholic, for these journals have not been uniformly anti-slavery or decidedly loyal, and at best are only exceptions, and by no means fair exponents of the sentiments and opinions of the Catholic body of the United States. In vain should we appeal to the large number of Catholic volunteers in the Army, for that number, as large as it has been or even is, we are told be Archbishop Hughes, is not relatively so large as is the proportion of Catholics to the whole population of the loyal States; and besides, it may be said that the mass of them volunteered not from loyalty, but for the sake of the high bounties and liberal pay offered, and in the case of the Irish, for the purpose of acquiring military experience and distinction, to be turned to account in a war against Great Britain for the liberation and independence of Ireland. Should it be so said, we should find it difficult to prove the contrary. It is undeniable that no religious body in the country stands to generally committed to slavery and the Rebellion, or as a body have shown so little sympathy with the effort of the Government to save the unity and life of the nation as the Catholic. This fact is known, and we need not be surprised to find it some day made use of to our prejudice, besides it is not a legacy we would like to bequeath to our posterity.

So stand the facts simply stated, and yet in their very face, we venture to believe that very few Catholics, except old American Catholics, in the slaveholding States, and not all even of them, are deliberately and intentionally disloyal, or on moral and religious grounds in favor of slavery, when brought forward as a distinct and separate question. Catholics have generally, in late years at least, been associated with the Democratic party, and that party, since 1850, has been politically a pro-slavery party, and from its ranks have issued the Chiefs of the Rebellion. Secession was the work of the Democratic party in the Southern States, aided and encouraged, up to a certain point, by the Democratic leaders at the North, for reasons not difficult to divine. Catholics have become pro-slavery through party associations, and party attachments. They have confounded opposition to political abolitionism with the defense of slavery itself, and mistaken fidelity to their party for loyalty to the nation. Not a few of them cannot conceive it possible for a man to be a good Catholic and not support the Democratic party, and to a large number of them, leaving their political party is next neighbor to renouncing their Church. The leaders of the Rebellion at the South were, also, among the first, in 1855, to meet and roll back the Know-Nothing movement, and the mass of our Catholics have a much more ready sympathy with Southern slaveholders, than they have with the more prosaic population of the North. The slaveholder seems to them nearer akin than the Northern freeman to the gentleman or nobleman of the old World. Here is, we apprehend, the real secret of the pro-slaveryism and disloyal proclivities which we notice in a large portion of our Catholic population, or if not disloyal proclivities, at least lack a hearty sympathy with the Government to which they owe allegiance. It is probable that the majority of our co-religionists consider the fearful struggle for life in which the nation is now engaged, is only an ordinary struggle for place and power between two political parties, in which a man may take either side or no side at all, without disloyalty. They seem not to understand that the struggle is between the Government representing the nation, and rebels seeking its overthrow, and that between the legitimate government and rebels there is but one side which a loyal citizen can take. If loyal he can neither side with the rebels nor stand neutral. When the nation is engaged in a struggle for its existence against an armed rebellion, neutrality itself is treason, and made so by laws of Solon,- and taking sides in any respect with the rebels is high treason, and punishable as such. Yet our Catholics have only followed their Democratic leaders, who are, for the most part, non-Catholics, and more censurable than they.

We maintain that Catholics are only accidentally pro-slavery and disloyal in their action. If the case were reversed, and the Northern, especially the New-England States, were the seceding States, and to put down their rebellion it were necessary to emancipate the slaves, we think there would be no more earnest emancipationists, and no more loyal men in the Republic. The public opinion of the Catholic body is formed mainly by the Catholics in the Border Slave States, and the Catholics in these states, including the District of Colombia, are intensely Southern in their land, or to the “Yankees.” Their Southern sympathies, and hatred of Yankees or New Englanders are diffused through the entire Catholic body even in the New-England States themselves. Catholics have been made to believe that but for New-England, nay, but for Massachusetts, there would have been no Rebellion, no civil war. It is, they generally believe, the intermeddling policy of Yankee abolitionists, of such men as Garrison and Phillips, that has caused all the trouble,- a ridiculous belief, no doubt, but still seriously held by a large majority both of our clergy and laity. Hence their extreme reluctance to be found on the side of the hated New England against the darling South. It goes decidedly against the grain. If the Editor of this Review had not been a New Englander by birth and descent, or if he had been willing to have denounced his Puritan ancestors as a set of psalm-singing hypocrites without a single virtue, he would have been a great favorite with American Catholics, and if he had been willing to make his Review a tender to the New York Freeman’s Journal, the redoubtable graduate of Fort Lafayette, the Abbe McMaster, as the Herald calls him, would, we doubt not, have been a staunch Union man, and foremost and loudest among the opponents of the Rebellion, and advocates of the vigorous prosecution of the war against it. He is now one of the leaders of the Copperheads, and a most belligerent peace man; and yet if, per impossibile, we were to side with the Rebellion, he would renounce his Copperheadism and become loyal. He is a man incapable of acting from other than personal or sectional prejudices, and we have sometimes fancied he would rather go below, than enter heaven with a Yankee, or as other than the chief of his clan. All prejudices of this sort are silly, and yet they have too much influence with us Catholics.

Regarding the question of slavery as solely a political question, our Catholic community have done themselves and their religion great injustice by their public attitude in regard to it. No Catholic would ever dream of removing slavery by illegal or revolutionary means, and no Catholic, who has the slightest knowledge of his religion, could for a moment entertain the notion that he could be a true Catholic and not be heartily opposed to slavery. On this subject the clergy must permit us to say that they have been too reticent, too timid, too cautious, and have pushed human prudence beyond its legitimate limits. They have failed to bear that testimony against slavery which the Catholic Church always bears against it. They know, far better than we do, the absolute incompatibility of American slavery with Christian morality. They know that, save in very rare instances, it is impossible foe the slave to observe the laws of Christian marriage, or fulfill the imperative duties of a Christian parent. Christian marriage is almost universally substituted by concubinage, and the masters seldom respect the sanctity of the marriage relation among their slaves, and they hold it neither adultery nor fornication to satisfy their own brutal lusts with any of their female slaves they choose. It is little, either for master or slave, that the priest can do, even in the Confessional, and in most parts of the South the priest is regarded only as a better sort of servant, and is very indifferently supported. We have never conversed with a priest in a slaveholding State, who, when he dared speak his mind, did not deplore on moral and religious grounds, the existence of slavery, and feelingly express his earnest wish for its extinction. How many enlightened, devout, and truly Catholic ladies, have we met in our visits to the Slave States, who could not without a visible shudder, refer to the moral enormities of negro slavery! We have found Catholic ladies in the Slave States who were opposed to the intermeddling of the Abolitionists, but none who would express themselves in favor of slavery. We have found many who expressed themselves unable to see any practicable was of getting rid of slavery, but none who expressed a wish to have it perpetuated. No Catholic, indeed, can uphold slavery as a good institution, or be otherwise than opposed to it, and prepared to abolish it in the best way, and at the earliest moment possible, without doing a greater wrong and creating a greater evil. Those nominal Catholic publicists at the North, who take slavery under their protection and call upon Catholics to sustain it as an institution in accordance with Christianity, are not Catholics, except in name and by baptism, but are really pagans, and pagans of the lowest type, lower even than they themselves represent the negro.

Our readers know well, that, without ever having been or being an Abolitionist in the party sense, we have ever been opposed to slavery, and have done our best to resist the effort to commit our Church to the rebellion in its favor. But our efforts, though not wholly fruitless, have to a great extent been neutralized by the fact of our being a convert and a Yankee, and by the ridiculous suspicion industriously circulated that we are shaky in our faith, and on the point of lapsing again into Protestantism or infidelity. We, therefore, welcome as an able coadjutor in our opposition to slavery the Cincinnati Telegraph and Advocate,- a paper published under the auspices of the Archbishop of Cincinnati, and which has from the first held us in a sort of holy horror. Its editor is Vicar-General of the Diocese, and a native of Ireland, and his Catholicity cannot be suspected. His voice can penetrate where ours cannot, and will be listened to with respect, where ours will be unheeded. We forgive him and the Archbishop himself, for having publicly and officially declared our Review to be no longer a Catholic Review, and sincerely thank them for doing on the Slavery question the work which we were the first Catholic publicist in the United States to attempt. We can cheerfully cooperate with our most bitter enemies in the battle for truth, freedom, and justice. The Telegraph and Advocate starts with the assumption that negro slavery has been virtually abolished in this country, and it vigorously opposes, on moral and religious grounds, all efforts to restore or reestablish it. It has opened the question, and it has shown that the Church has always been opposed to slavery, and has never got along well with it. It calls upon all Catholics to look the subject squarely in the face, and to be true to the spirit of their holy religion. This opens a new era in American Catholic journalism, and for the first time introduces into it true manliness and moral independence. If we were the first Catholic publicist in the United States, to open the discussion, in it has been found the first priest to bear a clear, distinct, and unmistakable testimony in public against slavery, and to condemn it on moral and religious grounds. This honor belongs to the Very Reverend Edward Purcell, brother of the Archbishop of Cincinnati. May God bless him, and give him courage and strength to persevere to the end in the good, the noble, the truly Christian work he has so bravely commenced. His name will never be forgotten in the Church in America, but will be repeated with gratitude and honor by millions and millions of emancipated souls.

The Very Reverend Editor has thrown a bomb-shell into the camp of pro-slavery and disloyal Catholics, and startled not a few of his clerical brethren; he has to undergo much obloquy and abuse, but he will outlive opposition; he will bring Catholics to their senses, and soon have them all or nearly all with him. He will soon see our reproach wiped out, our Church rescued from the false position in which her heedless children have placed her, and Catholics the leading champions of humanity. Too much importance cannot be attached to his movement, for henceforth a man will be able to oppose slavery and sustain the government without having his Catholicity suspected or denied, by the public opinion of his brethren and the leading organs of the Church. How far in moral grandeur and true Christian independence does the Very Reverend Edward Purcell tower above those timid and truckling Religious, who informed us that they did not dare invite us to dine at their house, because we had given a lecture before the Emancipation League.

Our Catholic brethren erred in supposing that opposition to political anti-slavery agitation before the Rebellion necessarily implied any sympathy with slavery itself. We opposed that agitation from love for the Union, not from love of slavery, which we never defended, but always detested. Even in the Oration, some years since, before the literary societies connected with Mount St. Mary’s College, in which it was said, by a writer in the Catholic Mirror, that we defended slavery, we asserted a principle that strikes at the very root of slavery. We denied that man has or can have dominion or property in man, and maintained that the only title of the master to the bodily services of the slave is in consideration of benefits conferred. On this principle the slave ceases to be a slave, and is simply a debtor, and the service he owes is limited by the debt he has incurred, or benefit he has received. We asserted the same principle in a public lecture in Charlestown, S.C., in May, 1856, and it requires no remarkable sagacity to perceive that its general adoption and operation would soon put an end to slavery. Before the Rebellion, while we were in a state of peace, and things could take their normal course, we were not in favor of immediate emancipation, and it is only as a measure necessitated by the Rebellion that we now advocate it. Looking alike to the interests of the master and the slave, and not forgetting social order, we believed that the work of emancipation might best begin by converting the slaves into serfs, with a full recognition of their moral rights and spiritual freedom. From serfs they could, in due time, become free peasants, without any social shock or convulsion.

But when the Rebellion broke out, and the life of the nation was threatened, all the aspects of the question were changed, and we could no longer deal with it as in times of peace. The danger apprehended had come, and the agitation of the slavery question could no longer endanger the Union, for the Union was de facto dissolved. The slavery question could then be practically important only in its bearing on the means of suppressing the Rebellion, and of obtaining security for the future. The nation had then but one work before it, that of putting down the Rebellion and guarding against its recurrence. The emancipation of the slaves, if necessary to both ends, or to either of them, could be lawfully resorted to, under the war powers of the Government, just as constitutional as its peace powers. But it was evident that to avail us in the struggle, emancipation must be immediate and complete. The error in the Administration has been in delaying too long the adoption of the emancipation policy, and adopting it only partially in some of the States and parts of States, instead of adopting it for all the States, and making emancipation immediate and universal. Half-and-half measures are the worst of all possible measures in revolutionary times. They make as many enemies as the most thorough-going measures, and gain no friends. They alienate a portion, and gain no supporters, for they carry out no consistent and commanding principle.

The change which the Rebellion made in the bearing of the Slavery question our Catholic publicists have failed to notice, and our organs seemed to have imagined that they should treat it precisely as they had done before the Rebellion broke out. Hence they have, as far as in their power, placed our Church and the Catholic people on the side of slavery and disloyalty. Here has been the error, an error which has had a grave effect on the future of this nation, and has done, and is doing incalculable injury to the Catholic cause. The Archbishop of New York saw that it was madness for Catholics in the loyal States to take the side of disloyalty, and the Very Reverend Edward Parcell has seen that it was equal madness for them to take the side of slavery. The Church never dies, so it is not absolutely too late. Let Catholics understand the question, and they may yet repair much of the harm they have done, and prove themselves alike true friends of their country, and champions of freedom.