In the 19th century you find America receiving huge numbers of immigrants from the European famines. To the degree Nativist sentiments suggested a higher level of risk than ordinarily believed from allowing Catholics into the country, I suppose there was some degree of anti-Catholicism already present.
The history books were clear, though, NO FORCED CONVERSIONS were required of the immigrants. Kind of a new sort of approach to penniless refugees. Latin countries were far less receptive to these folks ~ even the Catholics.
There's a strong tendency on the part of academics with less than sterling credentials to impute anti-Catholicism to nationalist impulses ~ ain't nothin' new in that.
Sometimes they impute racism to the situation.
Finally, the Puritans were a small minority in a great sea of all sorts of folks from all over the place ~ many of them still pagan!
Their early and frequent use of the printing press gives them an apparent strength the reality would not support.
The Spanish printed and distributed catechisms much earlier, and were also more “inculturated” - that is, they accepted some harmless customs but not others (such as polygamy, or a particularly violent game that Florida natives played and which resulted in numerous deaths every time they played it). They were doing quite well among the Indians until the British from SC and Georgia attacked them (for harboring escaped African slaves) and destroyed St Augustine and the entire mission chain, killing the Indians and mission priests in the course of this. The British also enslaved between 10,000 and 13,000 Indians, sending most of them off to work in British Caribbean sugar plantations and mills.
When it was clear that Florida was going to become part of the US, and then when it became a territory, one of the first stated objectives of Andrew Jackson (who had already attacked it several times) was to de-Hispanicize and de-Catholicize it.
The Indians left for Cuba with the Spanish when the Florida was handed over to the US, because they would have been enslaved otherwise. Blacks also left, although Thomas Jefferson around 1811-1812 had forced the Spanish to stop accepting and freeing runaway slaves. Spanish Florida had a large black Catholic population which, like its Catholic Indian population, was a target for British-descended Southerners.
The Irish, of course, married anybody who was Catholic, so they could be Irish-Spanish, Irish-Indian, or Irish-African. But whatever they were, the British-descended Protestants hated them and tried to wipe them out.
This happened in both Florida and California. There was definitely racism involved, and there is no way of denying the anti-Catholicism.
As for the Puritans, they came here to set up a Utopian community that for most of us would have been like living with Jim Jones or some flake waiting on a hilltop for the Rapture. But in virtually no time at all, they had their first rebellions (by people in the group, such as Roger Williams) and were forced to abandon some of their exclusivity and cultishness. It’s a pity that the descendants of the Puritans ended up being....ta da...UU’s (Unitarian-Universalists), and that’s only on a good day. The rest of the time they are flat out Marxist secularists.
I know many UU’s and they’re very sweet and clueless. But it’s odd that such a rigorist cult should have ended up with such descendants, ranging from the spineless to people who would gladly clap you into a “reschooling” program at the local concentration camp.
muawiyah,
I was not trying to be arch or smarmy. I can, however, say that I understand what you’re saying. History does record, elsewhere, the comings and goings of various anti-this and anti-that groups. My family, on one side, is Melungeon and Cherokee. To further confuse things, on the other side, Scottish and Swedish. Racism and religious persecution happened, even here. The more important fact, is that we, as a country, largely got over all of that garbage. And really, without any desire to sound snide or silly, all of us, you, me, and others, could stand to get over it. You are here. As am I. We live in the greatest country the world has ever known. The fact that the past has blemishes does not remove the beauty of the land we live in.