Nancy Lusignan Schultz / Photo Credit: Kim Mimnaugh
Posted on 05/12/2011 2:26:21 PM PDT by NYer
.- Rhode Island lawmakers voted last week to pardon an Irish Catholic man they say was wrongfully executed in 1845. The decision closes an ugly chapter in the long history of discrimination against Catholics in the U.S.
“Anti-Catholicism was certainly one of the first religious prejudices brought to the new world, and it became widespread” in the 19th century, according to Nancy Schultz, Ph.D of Salem State University in Massachusetts.
Schultz was commenting on the May 4 decision by the Rhode Island legislature to pardon John Gordon – a 29 year-old Irish immigrant who was hanged for a murder many say he didn't commit.
Gordon was convicted in 1843 and executed two years later for allegedly killing a wealthy Rhode Island mill owner who had political connections.
Historians now believe that the evidence against Gordon was tainted and indicative of widespread discrimination against Irish Catholics. During trial, witnesses failed to positively identify Gordon and a judge instructed jurors to take “Yankee” witnesses more seriously than Irish ones.
“Catholics had difficulty getting a fair trial in New England during the nineteenth century,” said Schultz in a May 10 interview.
Schultz is an authority in English and American Literature and is author of several books on historical religious discrimination in America.
Her new book, “Mrs. Mattingly's Miracle,” (Yale, $30) traces how the more tolerant Maryland tradition in the nation’s capital of accepting Catholicism during the 1820s began to decline into “full-fledged, New England-style anti-Catholicism.”
She told CNA that from 1830 to 1860 in particular, movements such as the “Protestant Crusade” attempted to stop the spread of Catholicism in the United States.
Schultz pointed to examples of public discrimination against Catholics such as the case involving arsonists who burned down a Massachusetts convent in 1834. The trials, she said, “were an occasion for anti-Catholic mockery.”
When the mob leaders who destroyed the Charlestown convent were acquitted, there was “great rejoicing in the streets of Boston.”
Schultz also noted that Gordon’s hanging in 1845 came just nine years before a gift of a block of marble from Pope Pius IX for the construction of the Washington Monument “was thrown into the Potomac River” by members of the anti-Catholic “Know-Nothing” party.
She explained that “large numbers of Irish fleeing economic turmoil in nineteenth-century Ireland and immigrating to America” helped give rise to the nativist, or “Know-Nothing” party, which rose to national prominence in the mid 19th century.
“The name came from the response of members of this anti-Catholic secret society. When asked about their activities, they would say, 'I know nothing.'”
Schultz said that the Ku Klux Klan and the American Protective Association were 20th century remnants of the Know Nothing Party.
“Today, fear of immigrants and the attempts to legislate restriction of languages other than English have their origins in this history,” she said.
Schultz explained that the roots of anti-Catholicism in the U.S. can be traced back to the Puritans, who came to New England several centuries ago.
The Puritans would burn effigies of the Pope in the streets on Guy Fawke’s Day, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, “when the Catholic Fawkes was arrested for placing explosives under the House of Lords in England,” she said.
In 1775, George Washington ordered the practice to be stopped.
Rhode Island has been majority Catholic for over a century. Hasn't stopped them from electing cretins election cycle after election cycle.
However, the English were NOT in Carolana (what it was called at the time), nor in Virginia, nor in New England and yet the Spanish persisted in this idea that one of their missions in life was to simply exterminate any Huguenot (Protestant) settlers who showed upon the East coast.
I gather the Spanish were not particularly influenced by local signs of anti-Catholicism (way back then).
Actually, there was a Protestant movement or two that took place in Spain. Most such folks ESCAPED to nearby France, or to England, or even to the Americas.
Pizzaro and his crowd were MOSTLY (not totally) Protestant in inclination. They were eventually suppressed by the Spanish Crown ~ many of them were subjected to torture, then were sliced up and their body parts tossed to the dogs which is almost certainly a sign Mother Church didn't consider them to be good Catholics eh!
A later expedition into "La Florida" appears to have had both Protestant and Catholic members ~ DeSoto's group had folks handpicked by his champions in Madrid ~ who can only be described as having Huguenot interests at heart (rather than Catholic interests), although that would be better described as French vs Spanish interests.
Part of the problem in digging up information on the Protestant cause in Spain is the Spanish crown was fairly successful in killing them, or driving them away.
At the same time the Spanish empire suddenly became so enormous Protestants, and Moors, and even Jews could escape into that frontier and simply disappear.
So, let's go all the way to the top to the Spanish court itself. Half those people were blood relatives of Rene d'Anjou ~ his great grandsons had actually founded what turned out to be the two major political factions in the French Religious Wars ~ the de Guise (Rene was, of course the Duc du Guise himself, but from an earlier time), and the political arm of the Huguenot (Protestant) movement.
Although those wars were yet to come (1514) the political divisions in the Spanish court closely reflected the political divisions in the very related French court.
The Protestants in France put off their Doomesday until the 1600s. Those in Spain were not so lucky.
In the end an exceedingly large percentage of the French Protestant families moved to America and became remarkably important to the development of our system of government ~ several Huguenots were very instrumental in writing the Bill of Rights for example.
We need not go into all the personalities of course, but the Religious Wars of the 1500s were more political than religious in nature, and by the 1600s, the French, very much dominated by Catholic interests, was allied to the Swedish Empire, then the epitome of Protestant belief.
Together those two powerful states CARVED UP EUROPE and pretty much killed most of the people in the German speaking areas.
Ever wonder why Italy didn't manage to follow up on its early discoveries in the New World? Check Religious Wars and 30 Years War. They turned into a backwater in that period.
Bringing up the notion that America was somehow peculiar, or mean, because there was some anti-Catholicism lurking around in the 1800s does nothing but draw upon a set of emotions and a body of politics that was supposedly put at rest through the mechanism of the Peace of Westphalia ~ which established the concept of the modern nation-state.
It was Jefferson himself, hardly pro-Catholic, who set in motion the very idea that Catholics should be free to immigrate into America.
Frankly, I'm still waiting on my reparations check from the Spanish ~ that'd better come quick before I run out of money.
We still have troubles with the Puritans.
There were NO Huguenots in the South after their one-month residence in what is now Jacksonville, where they were sent by the French king (a Catholic but considered to be a crypto-Protestant) as a combined militar and settlement expedition to set up a base from which the French could attack the Spanish treasure fleets and hopefully seize the land claimed and explored by the Spanish 50 years earlier.
The Huguenots at that time were mostly Normans, a seafaring people, and this was one of the reasons that most of the original “Pirates of the Caribbean” were actually Protestants. They roamed the area attacking the Spanish and Catholic communities in general, and in fact one of the reasons that Haiti is French is that a group of French Protestant pirates had settled there. The Spanish were never able to drive them off Hispaniola, because it was a remote location and the Spanish king would never cut loose with enough money to fund a serious attack. Eventually the pirate town became simply another French town, and that was the birth of Haiti. But look at Haiti, a basket case, and the now prosperous Dominican Republic (with virtually the same heavily African ethnic component) and you’ll see what lousy settlers the French were!
Huguenots came back into the South from the north many, many decades if not centuries later.
BTW, the Catholic Carroll set up the first truly free, non-confessional community in the US in what is now Maryland. His grandson converted to Anglicanism after marrying an Anglican and immediately started to attack Catholics and in fact revoked the tolerance acts put in place under Carroll.
And the poor UU’s are nuts. I know some very nice elderly UU’s, but they’re all living in Cloud Cuckoo Land.
The Huguenot settlers were mostly women and children.
The top end leadership were all noblemen or related to noblemen, and initially during the very beginning of The Religious wars, they were all members of the royal family itself ~ in France, change always starts at the top.
I think you are confounding the Castle at Saumur with something that never existed ~ to wit, a Norman kingdom that extended down into Anjou ~ which, for a number of centuries, ruled Great Britain like it was a banana republic colony!
Now, about the Maryland Catholics, if you are a decendant of the Maryland Murphy family, or McConnell family, or Smallwood family, or Dorsey/Darsey family, or several others ~ you have both Roman Catholic and Protestant antecedents.
The loss of Official Toleration in Maryland also meant Catholic land titles were no good ~ numerous Protestants in the region immediately MARRIED INTO those families to protect the property from division by evil doers from England.
In the old families that tradition has continued down to today. Even St. Mary's City folks have happily moved off to distant colonies with Catholic and Protestant cousins in tow.
The urge from England was probably anti-Catholic, but the response in America was to protect friends, family and neighbors ~ which is pretty much a "nationalist" impulse.
**Rhode Island lawmakers voted last week to pardon an Irish Catholic man they say was wrongfully executed in 1845. The decision closes an ugly chapter in the long history of discrimination against Catholics in the U.S.**
Makes one wonder how many other Catholics were wrongfully executed during this era?????
**Rhode Island lawmakers voted last week to pardon an Irish Catholic man they say was wrongfully executed in 1845. The decision closes an ugly chapter in the long history of discrimination against Catholics in the U.S.**
Makes one wonder how many other Catholics were wrongfully executed during this era?????
Of interest, Rhode Island is overwhelmingly Catholic, and when you add in the Episcopals, there's almost nobody else there!
It hasn't had any executions since the 1840s so this guy was among the last.
I'm not convinced he's innocent though.
Rhode Island abolished the death penalty a century and a half ago. Yet, she tries to protray that state as being particularly bloodthirsty.
Just doesn't compute.
Her statement on the Ku Klux Klan is equally irresponsible. She claims the modern KKK, found all over New England in every village and town (/s) (wink, wink), is a carry over from New York's "Know Nothing" movement.
How about this, the KKK, which is not now part of New England history, nor was it ever part of that history, has its origins in "THE SOUF'" long after the Know Nothings were out of business.
In fact, it is generally conceded that the KKK is a POST CIVIL WAR deal.
To leap from that woman's very confused view of American history to the question of how many Catholics might have been wrongfully executed is not a good idea.
It's probable that any Catholics who were wrongfully executed were, in fact, wrongfully executed. On the other hand, after 1845 or thereabouts, NO Catholics were executed in Rhode Island except by the MOB, and it was big time. The bay out there is a veritable rogues gallery of Mafioso encased in concrete suits!
What the Rhode Islanders did was to PRIVATIZE EXECUTIONS ~ and maybe some of the bad guys killed by other bad guys were actually good guys ~ but probably not.
Sad, the institutionalized anti-Catholic hatred still lasts today among some..
That's pretty well known, I thought.
let's trace the Huguenots, shall we. In france, under Francis I, France was tolerant of all religious views
however, what did the Huguenots do? In the affair of the placards they posted placards all over Paris and even on the bedchamber door of the king (a security breach that angered him and made him change his tolerance position) -- these placards were attacks on Catholics.
So, instead of discussing, the Huguenots went to attack the Catholic majority who until then were content to let them live and debate and discuss and debate. Incidently, until this time the Huguenots were increasing, like the Moslems in Bradford, but then they started to get shrill and wake people up with their attacks
This polemic was an attack and the Huguenots started this retaliation.This was in 1534
Next, came the French wars of religion in which the Huguenots conspired against the King. This, added to the previous attack meant that they now publically came to attack the conservative forces. The progressives of the Huguenots were the precursors of the Revolutionaires
The people who became Huguenots were primarily the urban elite, like our present-day New Yorkers who take a fad and they saw that this was a means to oppose the King, so Huguenotism became a political tool
A group of Huguenots tried to kidnap the Prince Francis II when his father died -- causing more antagonism.
Huguenots in 1560 attacked Catholic Churchs and destroyed properties in Rouen and La Rochelle -- thus the FIRST salvo was lobbed by the Huguenots. -- the Catholics retailiated with mobs at seeing their places of worship attacked and defiled by Huguenots
Next, in 1562-70, we have the wars -- now political-religious, so no, it was not a simple case of "persecution" --> The Huguenots were one side of a civil war, which they lost
Now, let's come to the juicy part, the St. Bart's day massacre -- this occured in 1572, 40 years after the first provocations by the Huguenots and 12 years after they started destroying Catholic Churchs (just like the Moslems in America they were quiet until their numbers grew)
now, King Charles XI was openly in favor of the Huguenots -- so a political moment. Hence the attacks on the opposing side
So, let's see in conclusion -- Huguenots first start their provocations in 1534, then in 1560 start attacking Catholic Churchs (with no provocation), then start their political support against the conservatives and start a civil war. After 12 years their side loses the civil war and yet they are still allowed to live and practise their faith (note this is the 1500s, not a nice time, yet they get this tolerance) -- but they still play political intrigues. So, one faction starts to attack and massacre the other faction
so, stop the entire "poor persecuted Huguenots" -- they brought it on themselves. the Huguenots after doing their persecuting of Catholics, got retaliation, then they went to England and many to South Africa where they were among the racists enforcing Apartheid.
Many came to the US and Germany as well.
In England and Germany they were Calvinists in non-Calvinist lands, but no "persecution". In the US they were one of many and no, no "persecutions". In South Africa they were one of the folks doing the persecutions and in Northern Germany they enthusiastically participated in the Kulturkampf.
what persecution did they face once they left France?
As shown above (and you can check the facts for yourself), the Huguenots were the one who bit the hand that fed them, then launched the first attacks, started a civil war and then lost
They were like the Moslems in present day France -- slowly starting, making nice noises, but then attacking Christian churchs and finally starting a civil war.
They lost, tough luck --- the losers in the 1500s were not given much graces, yet they were allowed to stay with the same acts of tolerance AFTER losing politically. Yet they continued supporting political intrigues and there was a political massacre.
The Huguenots were on the losing side, so they got killed like the Catholics in England or in Scandanavia.
It was the 1500s, a pretty barbaric time
The mass killings of the Huguenots were done at the hands of rioters in a pogrom after it was learned that the Huguenots were conspiring with the English to stage a coup and facilitate an invasion. It is never healthy to conspire against a sitting king. After this, one branch became the persecutors in South Africa, another branch, many would have joined the KKK (I'm not implying all by any means, but many)
Do read the history, thanks
Let’s talk about the past 150 years — modern times, the Industrial age, age of enlightenment —> Catholics were targetted in the Prussian KulturKampf, but more to the point, persecution IN the USA. This was not govt sanctioned in any way of course, but the Know-Nothings are a blot on the history of our nation, as are their descendents the KKK
Italy didn't because it's ports are in the Mediterranean and Italy didn't discover the new world -- Italians did but flying under the flag of Spain or Portugal -- both Atlantic facing powers
In the entire thrust of History you see different forces that move nations
In Sumeria and Harappa and the Nile what was important was to be on a river, not near the sea
At the time of Sargon II to Alexander the important thing was to control the land passages.
Then the Eastern Mediterranean opened up (or rather it always was, but now it became strategically important) and Italia was a back-water
But then, as the Western Mediterranean and British tin trade grew, Italy with it's ports on both the east and west was now strategically important, hence the importance of Rome AND Carthage
But this lasted until Columbus discovered America -- remember that in 1400, the population of England+Wales was 2.5 million, Scotland was 0.5 million and Ireland the same, all of Germania + the Netherlands was 12 million and France was 12 million too --> but much of France's population was near the south as it had always been. Ditto for Spain and Italy's population was comparatively huge - 11 to 12 million and with massive trading powers in Pisa, Genoa, Naples and Venice.
Italia (I use that as Italy was not a united country then until the 1800s) declined for the same reason that other Mediterranean powers declined -- the world passed by them.
Italy was not involved in the 30 years or religious wars and was hardly affected by the Reformation, so their decline, was, as I stated, purely because the trading region passed them by
the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth was still in control of her territory that includes most of what is now Poland, Lithuania, Kaliningrad, Belarus, Western Ukraine, Bessarabia etc.
The only "carving up" was the Germanic lands and the real victors were the Swedes. The French just got a divided Germany (which was a big win for them).
Finally, these two states didn't "pretty much killed most of the people in the German speaking areas." -->Neither France nor Sweden can be blamed for what the Germanics did to themselves
Again, the population loss, while huge was not "most of the people" -- the reduction in population is estimated at 15% to 30% including deaths due to disease and of course the scorched Earth policies etc. The Peace of Westphalia did not give the concept of the nation-state. That was more formed due to the French Revolution and in the middle 1800s.
until the middle 1800s, you could be "French" or "Russian" or "British" and speak "Breton" or "Polish" or "Welsh", but by the mid to late 1800s there was a drive to stamp out this and make the states one in language, etc. etc.
True, and the Dominicans have a strong, proud culture, a positive one, not the Haitian one...
That quickly gets you into the sort of math that shows a loss of MORE THAN HALF the population.
If you rely only on the infrequent censuses taken in the region you'll get different numbers. The ratio tells the story.
When the American colonies were liberated in the 1770/80 period the standards set in that corpus guided the minds of the writers of the Treaty of Paris.
By the mid 1800s (long after the French Revolution) I doubt they even thought all that much about Westphalia anymore. Nations were nations!
You really have to go back to the 1600s for the full sovereignty idea ~ 200 years later it was certainly in full flower ~ even Latin American "nations" had arisen out of the wreckage of the Spanish Empire (and that, itself, was a guide to the 1960s when the Brits and French Empires were disposed of like rubbish).
I think what's happening here is you slipped a cog and missed that ever critical "8" when you meant "6".
I'm still trying to figure out when the Kalmar Union reasserted itself in a "weak" Norwegian-Danish whatever ~ at any time AFTER Agustus Adulphus ~ just not in there guy!
Once DeLaGardie reorganized the Swedish Army there was no turning back ~ the Swedes kicked butt everywhere they went and there was ONLY the Swedish Empire in the North, with vassal states in the South.
Too bad they wasted it in the late 1700s, but there you have it.
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