The Catholic strategy of building an institutional presence in the South as a means to spread Catholicism brought challenges and costs. The commitment to institution-building required significant funds, which forced Catholic leaders in a region with few Catholics and much anti-Catholic bias to spend significant time raising money. But the Catholic plan demonstrated a devotion to place. Catholic leaders desired to expand their church and to convert others to Catholicism. In conjunction with these aims, Catholic churches, schools, and other charitable institutions made the Church a significant property holder, rooting it firmly in the community and furthering its claim to be part of people of the state. Above all, the Catholic commitment to place necessitated friendly relations with non-Catholics and an immersion in southern culture.
Traditional anti-Catholic prejudice complicated the Catholic strategy. American Catholics labored under deep suspicions, a legacy of the religious violence and controversies of the English Reformation. In particular, many Protestants charged that Catholics could not be good citizens because their ultimate loyalty lay with the papacy. With the founding of the US Catholic Miscellany in the 1820s, South Carolina Catholic leaders responded vigorously to such charges. The Jeffersonian understanding of the union did not demand cultural homogeneity but did expect dedication to republicanism. Good will among citizens also fostered common sentiments. Public denials of Catholic acceptance of republican government mixed with base caricatures of Catholic belief, therefore, negated Catholic claims of affinity with their neighbors and implicitly threatened nascent Catholic institutions. Virtually every extant issue of the Miscellany contains some notice of religious controversy, revealing accommodation to be far from easy. Catholic leaders took seriously charges of an innate Catholic attraction to political authoritarianism and expended tremendous effort in refuting them. The debates, while tedious for the modern reader to follow, serve as important windows to the Catholic strategy of accommodation in the diocese of Charleston.
Two debates, in which South Carolina Catholics battled John Bachman, the pastor of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Charleston, illustrate these tensions. Bachman, a significant intellectual and well-respected scientist, had moved to Charleston from New York in his twenties. Like the Catholics of the city, Bachman was an outsider and leader of immigrants, many in his congregation being German. In 1838 Bishop England responded with twenty-one public letters to an anti-Catholic sermon that Bachman had delivered. Again, in 1852-1853 several Catholics tangled with Bachman again over nativism and the Protestant Reformation. This time Bachman first tried to force Charleston Catholics into an unwinnable contest by compelling them to choose between faith and country and then denounced them as beyond the pale of the community. Catholics, in turn, attempted both to portray Protestantism as an unstable foundation for American liberty and to depict themselves, because of their Faith, as the most devoted republican citizens.
Like many of antebellum South Carolina’s Catholic leaders, John Bachman was not native to the state. Born near Rhinebeck, New York, to an ethnically Swiss family, Bachman grew up a devout Lutheran. He studied for the ministry in Philadelphia, but bouts with tuberculosis weakened him. In 1815, believing that a warmer climate would better suit his condition, Bachman accepted the pastorship of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Charleston, South Carolina. An energetic pastor and preacher, Bachman built Lutheran institutions in the city and state. He brought numerous free blacks into the church, founded a “Tract and Book Society” for Lutherans in the state, and helped to found the Synod of the Lutheran Church in South Carolina in 1824. He also served as president of the synod for the next ten years. Southern Lutherans, like southern Catholics, suffered from a dearth of clergy, so, in 1831, Bachman helped to found a Lutheran seminary in Lexington, South Carolina. In fact, Bachman’s dynamic plan of institution building closely resembled that of Bishop England and his successors.
Like many of the Catholic clergy in South Carolina, Bachman immersed himself in the life of his adopted city and state. In 1816 he married Harriet Martin of Charleston, who was related to St. John’s former pastor, and became a fixture in the community. As did ministers of other churches, he founded Lutheran charitable societies to work with Charleston’s poor. Having grown up in a slaveholding family in New York, Bachman showed no animosity to the peculiar institution and held slaves in Charleston. He also involved himself in the city’s intellectual life. He joined Charleston’s prestigious Literary and Philosophical Society, even serving as president. In 1853 Bachman helped to establish the Elliott Natural History Society to discuss and encourage science. He also published on natural history and, in 1831, met the celebrated artist and ornithologist John James Audubon, who became a close friend.
Bachman’s first controversy with Charleston Catholics took place in the context of what James D. Bratt has termed the “reorientation of American Protestantism.” Bratt argued that revivalism, which had defined American Protestantism since the 1740s, began to be replaced by new issues during the tumultuous decade of the 1830s. At this time, immigration, urbanization, the solidification of the second party system, and the rise of abolitionism reshaped American culture and elicited new responses from American Protestants. In particular, Bratt identified the Protestant-Catholic divide as a primary issue during and after the 1830s. He also noted that Protestants began to worry about the question of unity in the increasingly fractured religious climate. A vigorous print culture, sparked by technological advances that reduced the cost of printing, allowed for an information explosion. Protestants vigorously appropriated the new print culture to mark cultural boundaries and define themselves with greater doctrinal precision, highlighting their divisions.
(excerpted from chapter 3)
