The Case for Christian Nationalism
10. The Foundation of American Freedom | III. Religious Liberty in the Founding Era (Part 2)
Previously:
As with most larger, Northern cities, the Industrial Revolution had brought an influx of immigrant labor to Philadelphia, mostly Irish, who settled into culturally homogeneous suburbs. By 1844, tensions between the Irish and “natives” had reached a boiling point, at one point breaking out into an open-air mob brawl during the spring elections.1 At this time, American “No-Popery” was at its height; the bestselling book, The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, published in 1835, told an entirely fabricated tale of concubine nuns, locked away in convents and forced to watch as the offspring of their forced liaisons with priests were baptized, murdered and thrown into a pit in the basement, immediately after birth.2 After the book’s release, Monk’s claims were disproved; multiple men, including one of her staunchest supporters, Colonel W.L. Stone, toured the convent in Montreal at the center of her stories, and all returned reporting that the building and its occupants were wholly different than her descriptions.3 By 1838, she had moved to Philadelphia with a male travelling companion and gave birth to her second child out of wedlock (the first she claimed to have been fathered by a priest), and most of her supporters abandoned her. Despite this, her book continued to be exceedingly popular among anti-Catholic nativists, including Philadelphia’s American Protestant Association. The book retained its popularity and was regularly cited as factual by influential anti-Catholic lecturers in the South, as late as the 1910s.4
Until quite recently, American Protestants were overwhelmingly in favor of public education. A key factor in this stance was that the Bible was taught and prayer practiced in most public schools well into the 20th century. Many, if not most, American Catholics did not share that sentiment, because the Bible used was the King James Version and, through it, Protestant theology was both implicitly and explicitly taught. This was the case in Philadelphia, causing the city’s bishop, Francis Kenrick, to petition to the Board of Controllers of the public schools, in 1842, to have Catholic children be taught with a version of the Bible selected by their parents and to allow them to be excused from other religious instruction. The board assented to the request, to the great consternation of the American Protestant Association and other nativists. Billington writes of their response:
Pamphleteers and the local religious press were unrestrained in their condemnation of the Controllers’ action and demanded that Protestants throw every obstacle in the path of Catholics who sought to introduce un-Christian education. “The interference of foreign prelates,” wrote one author, “and of a foreign ecclesiastical power, should perish at our threshold. Let a grave be sunk, then, over which even the great Papal hierarch himself cannot step.” This challenge was accepted without question by a large part of the population. When a school board member of the [Irish Catholic] suburb of Kensington tried to stop Bible reading in a local school, a mass meeting was held to demand his resignation. A similar public gathering was staged in Independence Square, Philadelphia, on March 11, 1844, where a large audience heard speeches against Catholicism and resolved:
That the present crisis demands that without distinction of party, sect, or profession, every man who loves his country, his Bible, and his God, is bound by all lawful and honorable means to resist every attempt to banish the Bible from our public institutions.5
Though Bishop Kenrick attempted to cool the situation by writing a second letter to the Controllers confirming that he did not wish to banish the Bible, but only allow Catholic children to use their own version, tensions continued to mount. It is not surprising that the nativists would not take the bishop at his word, for national news was made, two years prior, when a priest in New York burned King James Bibles handed to Catholics by Protestant Bible societies, which were often fronts for nativist organizations.6
On the morning of May 6, the local nativist paper, the Native American, printed that a meeting of “American Republicans” would be held in the heart of Kensington that afternoon. Billington notes that this “would naturally attract rowdies from the lower classes”. Several thousand nativists showed up to the corner of Master and Second streets and marched towards their meeting place of the Market House. As they were beginning to enter, shots rang out and one of the marchers, George Shiffler, was mortally wounded. As they carried the dying man into the building, a mob of Irish broke through and forced the nativists to retreat.7 The next day, the Native American compared the violence to the 1572 massacre of Huguenot Protestants in Paris:
Another St. Barthomomew’s day is begun on the streets of Philadelphia. The bloody hand of the Pope has stretched itself forth to our destruction. We now call on our fellow-citizens, who regard free institutions, whether they be native or adopted, to arm. Our liberties are now to be fought for;- let us not be slack in our preparations.8
That afternoon, a nativist mob marched on Kensington, was met by the Irish, and the most destructive and murderous riot the city had ever seen broke out.
Next:
Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade,1800-1860, First Paperback (Chicago, Illinois: Quadrangle Books, 1964), 220.
Maria Monk, Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk and the Startling Mysteries of a Convent Exposed! (Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson, 1850), 129–30, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.68174.
Ray Allen Billington, 221; Michael Williams, Shadow of the Pope (New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1932), 71.
Kenneth C. Barnes, Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas: How Politicians, the Press, the Klan, and Religious Leaders Imagined an Enemy, 1910-1960 (Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2016), 21, 27.
Ray Allen Billington, 221-222.
Amanda Beyer-Purvis, “The Philadelphia Bible Riots of 1844: Contest Over the Rights of Citizens,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 83, no. 3 (2016): 367–68, https://doi.org/10.5325/pennhistory.83.3.0366.
Ray Allen Billington, 223-224.
Ibid., 225.