Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South by Gracjan Kraszewski

Abstract

Reviewed by: Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South by Gracjan Kraszewski Adam L. Tate (bio) Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South. By Gracjan Kraszewski. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2020. Pp. 216. Cloth, $45.00.) During the past fifteen years, scholars have rediscovered the history of Catholicism in the antebellum South and reexamined Catholic religious practice in the armies during the Civil War. For example, books by James Woods, Andrew Stern, Michael Pasquier, William Kurtz,1 and others have scrutinized Catholic engagement with mid-nineteenth-century culture. Interest in Civil War–era religion also drove the 2016 publication of the massive Civil War diary of Confederate chaplain James Sheeran and the 2019 edition of David Conyngham’s unfinished nineteenth-century manuscript, Soldiers of the Cross, which details the efforts of Catholic chaplains and religious sisters during the war.2 Recently, Benjamin Miller’s In God’s Presence: Chaplains, Missionaries, and Religious Space during the American Civil War (2019) incorporated the experiences of Catholic chaplains into a broader study of religion in Civil War armies. The new scholarship reveals that Catholicism, which by 1860 was the largest Christian denomination in the United States, needs broader incorporation into the general narratives of both southern religion and the Civil War. As part of this emerging literature, Gracjan Kraszewski’s Catholic Confederates demonstrates that southern Catholics strongly supported the Confederacy while considering themselves devoutly religious. Kraszewski, surprised by Catholic allegiance to the South, creates a term, “Confederatization,” to describe Catholics’ acceptance of their new nation. Confederatization, he notes, “propelled Southern Catholics toward prioritizing [End Page 127] a new national identity above older ethnic ones” (xviii–xix). Kraszewski uses letters, diaries, and newspaper sources to explain this process among a handful of Confederates. While the volume contributes to knowledge about religion during the Civil War and American Catholic history, his argument suffers at times from the inconsistent use of his model of Confederatization. Catholic bishops in the South, Kraszewski shows, varied in the enthusiasm they demonstrated toward the Confederacy, but all tried to separate their spiritual duties from their personal political beliefs. Patrick Lynch, the bishop of the Diocese of Charleston, was the “most Confederatized of bishops” (121). He publicly celebrated secession and the fall of Fort Sumter and, in 1864, served on a failed diplomatic mission to the Vatican to obtain formal recognition for the Confederacy from Pope Pius IX. Despite his political zeal, as Kraszewski notes, Lynch “encouraged Catholics to tend to their faith first, regardless of external pressures, for neither war nor circumstances of time could change the Church’s mission” (75). When the archbishop of Baltimore suddenly died in 1863, Lynch even recommended a northern bishop to fill the see, a sign of the episcopacy’s “cross-sectional spiritual unity,” Kraszewski contends (77). Kraszewski also discusses William Henry Elder, bishop of Natchez, Mississippi, who gained notoriety in June 1864 by refusing Union orders to read a prayer for President Abraham Lincoln during mass. At that time, Elder claimed that interfering with divine worship was not the business of the United States government. Refusing to bend, Elder suffered arrest and was imprisoned in Louisiana. Previous scholars have seen Elder’s actions as either genuine spiritual concern or “southern partisanship” (91). Kraszewski, however, depicts Elder’s stand as a perfect example of Confederatization. Elder could appear to be a good Catholic and good Confederate simultaneously with no cognitive dissonance. Elder had told his priests “not to make any pulpit statements about secession” so as not to “scandalize” Catholics who had already taken loyalty oaths to the occupying Union forces (87), but his arrest in 1864 brought him wide acclaim from Protestant southerners and made for newspaper fodder throughout the land. Unlike most of their bishops, however, Catholic Confederate chaplains and soldiers, Kraszewski asserts, “were highly politicized” (xvii). He relies on the diaries of three chaplains—James Sheeran, John Bannon, and Louis-Hippolyte Gache—and three Catholic soldiers—John Dooley, a Virginian, and two Louisiana men, Henri Garidel and Felix Pierre Poche. In particular, Kraszewski finds that the chaplains intensely focused on their spiritual mission to help the troops while frequently referencing their [End Page...