"Our Prospects Are Mighty Dark … Still I Confide in God": The Ordeal of the Sisters of the Visitation in Antebellum Wheeling

Abstract

The antebellum era witnessed an unprecedented expansion of orders of women religious that ushered in a "convent revolution" in America. At the local level, however, this revolution was often a complicated, contested, and contingent process. The early years of the Sisters of the Visitation in Wheeling offers an illustrative example of how uncertain and difficult that process could be, especially for the vowed women who were its chief agents. In the first decade of their foundation, the Visitandines experienced a series of external and internal challenges—impending epidemics, debilitating illnesses and premature deaths of key members, shortages of qualified teachers, competition from an educational rival, violence from an anti-Catholic mob, and inspection by wary local officials—each of which imperiled the existence of the Wheeling convent and academy. This overlooked episode in nineteenth-century Catholic-Protestant relations shows how Catholics in general, and nuns in particular, asserted themselves in the face of adversity and resisted becoming the victims of the natural and human forces that assailed them. It also demonstrates how nascent Catholic leadership—women religious and clergy—joined by local non-Catholic allies, successfully exploited political divisions within the Protestant majority, allowing the Visitation nuns to endure and ultimately prevail over the trials they faced in Virginia's "Nail City."