A History of the American People

building' and the parents, at home, topped it up with whichever sectarian trimmings they thought
fit (or none).
Naturally there were objections from some religious leaders. On behalf of the Episcopalians,
the Rev. F. A. Newton argued that a book upon politics, morals or religion, containing no party or sectarian views, will be apt to contain no distinctive views of any kind, and will be likely to leave the mind in a state of doubt and skepticism, much more to be deplored than any party of sectarian bias.' That might apply to dogmatic theology but in terms of moral theology the Mann system worked perfectly well, so long as it was conscientiously applied. Most Episcopalians, or any other Protestants, would now happily settle for the Mann system of moral character-building if they could. So Newton's objections, which were not widely shared, were brushed aside. A more serious question was: how were Roman Catholics, or non-Christians like the Jews, to fit in? There had been Catholics in America since the foundation of Maryland (1632), and in 1790 Father John Carroll (1735-1815) had been consecrated Bishop of Baltimore with authority over the 40,000 Catholics then in the United States. The following year he founded Georgetown College, America's first Catholic university. But it was only with the arrival of the southern Irish, and Continental Catholics in large numbers, that Catholicism began to constitute a challenge to Protestant paramountcy. New dioceses testified to its expansion even in the South-Charleston 1820, Mobile 1829, Natchez 1837, Little Rock 1843, Galveston 1847-and in Boston and New York City Irish-dominated communities became enormous and potent. The new Catholics brought with them certain institutions which infringed the American moral consensus in the spirit, if not exactly in the letter, almost as much as Mormon polygamy. One was the convent, which provoked a species of Protestant horror-literature infused almost with the venom of the Salem witch-trials. A journal called the Protestant Vindicator was founded in 1834 with the specific object of exposing Catholicabuses,' the convent being a particular target. The next year
saw the publication in Boston of Six Months in a Convent and, in 1836, of the notorious Maria
Monk's Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu in Montreal. It was written and published by a group
of New York anti-Catholics who followed it up with Further Disclosures and The Escape of
Sister Frances Patrick, Another nun from the Hotel Dieu nunnery in Montreal. Unlike
Continental anticlerical literature about monks and nuns, a genre going back to Rabelais in the
16th century, the Maria Monk saga was not directly pornographic but it had something of the
same scurrilous appeal. Maria Monk herself was no fiction-she was arrested for picking pockets
in a brothel and died in prison in 1849-but her book had sold 300,000 copies by 1860 and it is
still in print today, not only in the United States but in many other countries. Nor was Protestant
hostility confined to paperbacks. In 1834, even before Maria made her appearance, a convent of
Ursuline nuns was burned down by a Boston mob and those responsible were acquitted-
Protestant juries believed Catholic convents had subterranean dungeons for the murder and burial
of illegitimate children.
There were also widespread fears of a Catholic political and military conspiracy, fears which
had existed in one form or another since the 1630s, when they were associated with the designs
of Charles I, and which had been resurrected in the 1770s and foisted on George III. In the
1830s, Lyman Beecher, so sensible and rational in many ways, included in his Plea for the West
details of a Catholic plot to take over the entire Mississippi Valley, the chief conspirators being
the pope and the Emperor of Austria. Samuel Morse, who was not particularly proProtestant but
had been outraged when, during a visit to Rome, his hat had been knocked off by a papal guard
when he failed to doff it as the pope passed, added plausibility to Beecher's theory by asserting
that the reactionary kings and emperors of Europe were deliberately driving their Catholic