American Catholics, the Revolutions of 1848, and the Politics of the early 1850s

Abstract

American Catholics during the 1850s expressed deep concerns about the legacy of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, fearing that radicalism was spreading to the United States and would harm both the Church and the state. This paper explores the reception of Fr. Antonio Bresciani’s novel The Jew of Verona (translated and published in 1853) in the diocesan newspapers of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Charleston, South Carolina. Both papers reacted to the book in a similar fashion and used it as a lens to understand domestic politics. Bresciani’s themes of international conspiracy and the dangers of secret societies resonated with Catholics in both dioceses and led some to propose a Catholic conservative alliance to prevent the spread of radical revolution. Fears of revolution, then, drove the American Catholic responses in these dioceses even as sectional concerns ripped the nation apart.