First Chaplain of the Confederacy: Father Darius Hubert, S.J. by Katherine Bentley Jeffrey

Abstract

Reviewed by: First Chaplain of the Confederacy: Father Darius Hubert, S.J. by Katherine Bentley Jeffrey Gracjan Kraszewski First Chaplain of the Confederacy: Father Darius Hubert, S.J. By Katherine Bentley Jeffrey. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. 200 pp. $45.00. The first question that should be posed to author Katherine Bentley Jeffrey is why? Why write this book? Surrounding her work's central character—the Jesuit priest Darius Hubert, Civil War chaplain for the Confederacy—there exists an admitted paucity of primary sources. Why tell his story? Three pages into this excellent biography the answer is clear: because other scholars have become discouraged by problems of extant material, or intimidated by a subject's lack of star power, the vicious cycle of historiographical Catholic absence in the antebellum South has been perpetuated. From this, false assumptions emerge that Catholics were not present in the nineteenth-century South. If nothing else, Jeffrey has successfully joined the fight to remedy this problem. Fortunately for us readers, there is so much more here. Told chronologically following an opening vignette from February 1880, where Hubert, who was noted for his oratorical ability, commemorated George Washington's birthday with a speech, the story begins in France, where a procession honoring a relic of St. Augustine of Hippo inspired a priestly vocation. Young Darius joined the Jesuits and volunteered for the North American mission. Ordained in 1850, he spent much of that tumultuous decade as an educator in Louisiana Catholic schools where his polyglot abilities and affable character won him wide respect and admiration. Civil War scholars will find chapter four most interesting. It details Hubert's war years as a chaplain in the Army of Northern Virginia. It is here we find the strongest evidence for Jeffrey's claim that some considered Hubert to be "a perfect man" (xii, 77). Hubert did not shirk from the dangers of battle, bore the war's hardships and privations next to his men, was indefatigable in his care for the sick and wounded placing a man's spiritual considerations first, and was indiscriminately gracious to men Protestant, Catholic, and other. Hubert's postbellum record was marked by service rather than Lost Cause fanaticism. In [End Page 86] 1876, he travelled to Savannah to help with a yellow fever outbreak. A medallion he received afterwards from the Savannah Benevolent Association, with Matthew 25:36 inscribed thereon, remained one of his few cherished possessions. Father Hubert died in 1893, convinced, according to Jeffrey, of "the obligation to move forward as one people in a reunited nation" (139). This is a good book with much in it, biography done right, best suited for the graduate school seminar. It sheds light on Catholics in the Civil War, race relations in the Reconstruction South, and offers many an interesting anecdote, Margaret Gaffney Haughery's "Steam and Mechanical Bakery" but one example, illuminating the richness and variety of Southern Catholic life. But if there is a singular thesis here, an overarching theme and contribution, it is the brilliant way in which Jeffrey demonstrates Catholic acceptance and importance in nineteenth-century Southern culture. Catholics were not marginal members of Southern society but active, respected, and even admired citizens, Hubert but one such person. The best example of Hubert's seamless assimilation into Southern life comes from an article in the Baton Rouge Gazette in December 1858. Despite opining that "we are the antagonists of all his religious views," the paper was forced to admit that Hubert had "won golden opinions from all sorts of people," citing "his gentlemanly deportment as a citizen" and "kind ministrations to the sick and the afflicted during the late epidemic " and that "the most eloquent, impressive, and logical discourse we have ever listened to under the roof of St. Joseph's came from his lips" (35). While one can find themes of Catholic integration in Southern society in works such as Michael Pasquier's Fathers on the Frontier or Jon Wakelyn and Randall Miller's classic Catholics in the Old South, Jeffrey's book is a natural companion to Andrew Stern's Southern Crucifix, Southern Cross. What Stern shows concerning Catholic-Protestant cooperation in the antebellum era...