Happy New Year all!
Hope you all had a lovely holiday break. We will be presenting at the American History Association Annual Meeting in Boston this weekend so let us know if you are attending or just drop by. Thought some of you might find the topic of interest.
If you have any news to share, please do so.
Entering by the Narrow Gate: Catholicism and American Identity in the Early Republic
Session Abstract: This session draws on several strands of the conference theme, "History, Society, and the Sacred," and, consequently, will appeal to a broad audience. Its title is taken from Matthew 7:13, "Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it," points to the contested nature of Catholicism in the early republic, both within Catholicism at home and between Catholics and Protestants abroad. Kimberly Alexander offers the uncommon perspective of a young American woman who spent over three years in Macao; Harriett Low's unvarnished representations of Portuguese Catholicism in China suggest how conflicts within her Unitarian community at home influenced her representations of Catholics overseas. Using Phillip Morgan's American paradox as a jumping off point, Maura Jane Farrelly explores the complicated interstices of religion and nationality in her study of slavery. Farrelly demonstrates how slavery played a role in the formation of a distinctly “American” form of Catholic identity. Examining the influence of the China Trade in the formation of national character , Dane Morrison analyzes the literature of Eastern travel that filled the public sphere of the early republic. He demonstrates that a strain of Manifest Destiny appeared in this genre a generation before the conventional periodization, revealing two complementary currents of thought hat contested Protestant republicanism the Catholicism of the Iberian Pacific.
Chair
Lisa MacFarland
Senior Vice Provost for Student Affairs
University of New Hampshire, Durham
Organizer
Dane A. Morrison
Professor of Early American History, Salem State University
Presentations
“This wretched set of people, the Catholics:” Harriett Low's Unitarian Bookshelf, China, 1829-1834
Dr. Kimberly Alexander
Chief Curator, Strawbery Banke Museum
Presentation Abstract:
How is it that a young, unmarried antebellum Salemite, Harriett Low (1809-1877) came to make such unfiltered, vitriolic comments? Prior to her trip to China, where she served as a companion to her delicate aunt, Harriet's life centered on her large family, her Howard Street Church and her schoolgirl friends. Staunch New England Unitarians, the family's emphasis on reading, particularly religious tracts, harkened back to Puritan ancestors who made communal literacy and the Word centerpieces of their simple practices. The New England expatriates bridled at what they described as the superstitious and ignorant qualities of the Roman Catholic rites they found in the Portuguese outposts, such as Macao, which they considered their temporary home. This paper will examine the contributions to Harriett's burgeoning religious ideology—the course of readings encouraged by her father, Seth Low, the sensibility of her time and natural temperament—resulting in the manner in which she framed her interactions with “the other,” in this case, the Portuguese and Spanish Catholics in Macao. Of particular interest for this study is an analysis of Harriett's readings: her description of her room and its contents (and the way she connects her own identity to the books on her table), reveals a strong leaning toward the conservative branch of Unitarianism in the years leading up to the “Unitarian Controversy” of the early 1830s. These volumes and others provide the backdrop against which Harriett and dozens of expatriates define their American identity through a comparison with “those wretched people”.
American Slavery, American Freedom, American Catholicism
Maura Jane Farrelly
Professor of American Studies, Brandeis University
Presentation Abstract:
Scholars who focus on American Catholic history have been reluctant to examine the relationship between slavery and Catholic identity in the United States. That the Church supported the institution of slavery has been acknowledged by nearly everyone writing about colonial and early American Catholicism. The Church's active opposition to the forces of abolitionism has also been explored, with the common conclusion being that this opposition was fueled primarily by the anti-Catholic leanings of abolitionists. That slavery might actually have played a role in the shaping of a distinctly “American” form of Catholic identity, however, has not yet been fully confronted by scholars. The paper I am proposing will do just that. Historians have long understood that from the 1780s until the 1830s, Catholics in the United States were comfortable with the individualism, republicanism, and religious pluralism that defined American identity, even though Catholic leaders in Continental Europe shunned these products of the Enlightenment as heresies that were dangerous to the integrity of the Church. Historians have also understood that after the Catholic landscape in America came to be dominated by ultramontane, Irish immigrants, American Catholicism's relationship with the core principles of American identity became more complicated. The Catholic debates that characterized the second half of the nineteenth-century came to be known as the “Americanist Crisis.” Few scholars have sought to understand why Catholics in the United States were comfortable with the liberal core of American identity at the start of the early national period. None has considered the possibility that the answer could lie with the reality that until the 1830s, most American Catholics lived in slaveholding states, where republicanism was based not on individualism, but on the order and mutual obligation that were defined by race-based slavery. I will argue that slavery made freedom “safe” for Catholics.
Manifest Destinations: Contesting Catholicism in Early American Travelogues
Dane A. Morrison
Salem State University
Presentation Abstract:
Historians have long recognized the construction of American national identity in the years following the Revolution as problematic. Unappreciated, however, has been the influence of the China Trade in the formation of national character. During the era of the early Republic, Americans who sailed beyond the Atlantic were in a unique position to contribute to the project. Their travels to the “exotic” East brought them into contact with a broad palette of peoples and gave them the clearest appreciation of the elements that distinguished other cultures, as well as their own. From their recollections emerged a genre of China Trade literature that filled the public sphere and, coming at the moment of the nation's emergence, influenced the development of Americans' earliest ideas of who they were as a people and of the values they saw in their new country. Surprisingly, American travelers who sailed to the East directed their harshest criticisms at European institutions rather than those of Asia. An especially useful foil for constructing republican values was the Catholic Church that dominated the Iberian Pacific. Well before the conventional periodization of Manifest Destiny, two complementary currents of thought contested Protestant republicanism against a popular view of “popish cruelty” “universally established in all its Terrors.” One drew on the mythology of the Inquisition and la leyenda negra—the Black Legend—to continue the colonial tradition of anti-Papist thought against “the designing and interested priests,” now bringing “fanaticism, and cocoanut wine” to “a barbarous people.” Another strain complicated this conventional view, representing the American as a tolerant, cosmopolitan citizen of the world who found Catholic priests “very good companions,” who heard rumors of the Inquisition but “never heard of their punishing any person” and recognized “that the people of all countries are governed more or less by some species of priestcraft.”
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