Catholic Paternalism and Slavery’s Capitalism: Bishop John England’s Defense of Domestic Slavery and the Interstate Slave Trade

Abstract

Catholic Paternalism and Slavery’s Capitalism: Bishop John England’s Defense of Domestic Slavery and the Interstate Slave Trade David Roach (bio) The 1840 presidential campaign between Democratic president Martin Van Buren and Whig challenger William Henry Harrison set the stage for the most sustained and most important American Catholic defense of slavery, Charleston bishop John England’s letters to Georgia politician and U.S. secretary of state John Forsyth.1 By then, the prelate had lived in South Carolina for the better part of two decades and overseen the gradual growth of his fledgling diocese. In 1820, the thirty-four-year-old Irish priest had been installed as the first Bishop of Charleston, a newly created diocese spanning all of Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina but counting perhaps four churches and three other priests to minister to the small number of communicants scattered across the region.2 But when England died in 1842, the diocese boasted [End Page 205] fourteen churches, twenty priests, two female religious institutions, and some seven thousand members.3 (So small a community, it turned out, could not fund all these projects, and England left a much-indebted diocese to his successor, Ignatius A. Reynolds.4) While pastoral, administrative, and ecclesiastical duties occupied much of England’s time, he also dedicated himself to literary endeavors, most often by writing editorials in the United States Catholic Miscellany, the diocesan publication he had founded in 1822 and the country’s first Catholic newspaper. By dint of his brilliant and often acerbic pen, the bishop won a national reputation as the most articulate champion of the compatibility of American republicanism and Roman Catholicism.5 (His erudition won for the bishop some respect from the local literati, too, as was evident from his occasional participation in Charleston intellectual circles.6) Though ever eager to praise his country’s political institutions, he was more reluctant to defend slavery. He had imbibed his political ideology back in Europe and, as historians have demonstrated, never fully embraced the South’s synthesis of republican values and human bondage.7 Nevertheless, circumstances compelled him to defend the institution at length in 1840. That fall, John Forsyth had planned on stumping for Van Buren throughout Georgia, but illness forced him to stop in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he jotted off an article for his constituents that the Augusta, Georgia, Constitutionalist published on September 12, 1840. Eschewing more substantive matters of policy, Forsyth played upon [End Page 206] white southerners’ fears of English abolitionists, hoping to connect those much-reviled reformers to his American political opponents, the Whigs.8 The address may also have tapped into his readers’ nativism, for Forsyth suggested that “influences proceeding from the British isles” had set in motion the promulgation of In Supremo Apostolatus, Pope Gregory XVI’s 1839 apostolic letter condemning the international slave trade. Southern Catholics, most notably Bishop England but also others, interpreted Forsyth to be implying that the Vatican was plotting with the British Parliament against slavery, and they feared such accusations impugned American Catholics’ loyalties to southern institutions.9 And so, as he had done on so many other occasions, John England took up the pen to demonstrate Catholics’ loyalty to their country’s political institutions, this time defending slavery, over the course of eighteen letters published between October 1840 and April 1841 in the United States Catholic Miscellany.10 Throughout this correspondence, England sought to place an ecclesiastical imprimatur on the specific customs and laws at the core of antebellum southern slavery, including, in his first missive, a roundabout defense of the domestic slave trade. The bishop began his argument by distinguishing the domestic slavery practiced in the American South from the transatlantic slave trade sustained by Spanish and Portuguese merchants, and most often, historians have understood the bishop’s rhetorical thrust as follows: the pope censured only avaricious Iberians and so neither endorsed immediatism nor criticized southern slaveholders.11 But England made another, more precise, distinction [End Page 207] between the international slave trade and the internal slave trade.12 His decision to do so was quite understandable, for the pontiff’s condemnation of “that inhuman trade by which negroes, as if...