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\"[This book] looks at efforts of America's Democratic Party and Catholic leadership to use the service of immigrant volunteers in the U.S.-Mexican War as a weapon against nativism and anti-Catholicism\"--Jacket.

In Devotion to the Adopted Country, Tyler V. Johnson looks at the efforts of America's Democratic Party and Catholic leadership to use the service of immigrant volunteers in the U.S.–Mexican War as a weapon against nativism and anti-Catholicism. Each chapter focuses on one of the five major events or issues that arose during the war, finishing with how the Catholic and immigrant community remembered the war during the nativist resurgence of the 1850s and in the outbreak of the Civil War. Johnson's book uncovers a new social aspect to military history by connecting the war to the larger social, political, and religious threads of antebellum history. Having grown used to the repeated attacks of nativists upon the fidelity and competency of the German and Irish immigrants flooding into the United States, Democratic and Catholic newspapers vigorously defended the adopted citizens they valued as constituents and congregants. These efforts frequently consisted of arguments extolling the American virtues of the recent arrivals, pointing to their hard work, love of liberty, and willingness to sacrifice for their adopted country. However, immigrants sometimes undermined this portrayal by prioritizing their ethnic and/or religious identities over their identities as new U.S. citizens. Even opportunities seemingly tailor-made for the defenders of Catholicism and the nation's adopted citizens could go awry. When the supposedly well-disciplined Irish volunteers from Savannah brawled with soldiers from another Georgia company on a Rio Grande steamboat, the fight threatened to confirm the worst stereotypes of the nation's new Irish citizens. In addition, although the Jesuits John McElroy and Anthony Rey gained admirers in the army and in the rest of the country for their untiring care for wounded and sick soldiers in northern Mexico, anti-Catholic activists denounced them for taking advantage of vulnerable young men to win converts for the Church. Using the letters and personal papers of soldiers, the diaries and correspondence of Fathers McElroy and Rey, Catholic and Democratic newspapers, and military records, Johnson illuminates the lives and actions of Catholic and immigrant volunteers and the debates over their participation in the war. Shedding light on this understudied and misunderstood facet of the war with Mexico, Devotion to the Adopted Country adds to the scholarship on immigration and religion in antebellum America, illustrating the contentious and controversial process by which immigrants and their supporters tried to carve out a place in U.S. society.

In Devotion to the Adopted Country , Tyler V.Johnson looks at the efforts of America's Democratic Party and Catholic leadership to use the service of immigrant volunteers in the U.S.-Mexican War as a weapon against nativism and anti-Catholicism.

On the eve of the Civil War, the Irish were one of America's largest ethnic groups, and approximately 150,000 fought for the Union. Analyzing letters and diaries written by soldiers and civilians; military, church, and diplomatic records; and community newspapers, Susannah Ural Bruce significantly expands the story of Irish-American Catholics in the Civil War, and reveals a complex picture of those who fought for the Union.While the population was diverse, many Irish Americans had dual loyalties to the U.S. and Ireland, which influenced their decisions to volunteer, fight, or end their military service. When the Union cause supported their interests in Ireland and America, large numbers of Irish Americans enlisted. However, as the war progressed, the Emancipation Proclamation, federal draft, and sharp rise in casualties caused Irish Americans to question - and sometimes abandon - the war effort because they viewed such changes as detrimental to their families and futures in America and Ireland.By recognizing these competing and often fluid loyalties, The Harp and the Eagle sheds new light on the relationship between Irish-American volunteers and the Union Army, and how the Irish made sense of both the Civil War and their loyalty to the United States.

In The Shamrock and the Cross: Irish American Novelists Shape American Catholicism, Eileen P. Sullivan traces changes in nineteenth-century American Catholic culture through a study of Catholic popular literature. Analyzing more than thirty novels spanning the period from the 1830s to the 1870s, Sullivan elucidates the ways in which Irish immigration, which transformed the American Catholic population and its institutions, also changed what it meant to be a Catholic in America. In the 1830s and 1840s, most Catholic fiction was written by American-born converts from Protestant denominations; after 1850, most was written by Irish immigrants or their children, who created characters and plots that mirrored immigrants’ lives. The post-1850 novelists portrayed Catholics as a community of people bound together by shared ethnicity, ritual, and loyalty to their priests rather than by shared theological or moral beliefs. Their novels focused on poor and working-class characters; the reasons they left their homeland; how they fared in the American job market; and where they stood on issues such as slavery, abolition, and women’s rights. In developing their plots, these later novelists took positions on capitalism and on race and gender, providing the first alternative to the reigning domestic ideal of women. Far more conscious of American anti-Catholicism than the earlier Catholic novelists, they stressed the dangers of assimilation and the importance of separate institutions supporting a separate culture. Given the influence of the Irish in church institutions, the type of Catholicism they favored became the gold standard for all American Catholics, shaping their consciousness until well into the next century.

This paper takes as its subject the complex ethnic, religious, and political entanglements of the American-born Irish elite of nineteenth-century New York City. Because historians have traditionally viewed the Irish famine as a watershed event in the history of organized Catholicism in New York, the contributions of American-born Irish elites to Irish Catholic political culture have largely gone unnoticed. Having come of age in the early nineteenth century, when institutional Catholicism had scant presence in the Empire City, these lawyers, politicians, and statesmen embraced a secular and metropolitan identity that allowed them to mix easily with the city’s Anglo-Dutch Protestant ruling class. However, mass immigration at midcentury, coupled with growing nativist persecution of the Catholic Church, forced these elites to navigate a middle ground between the secular world of New York politics and the rising sectarianism of the Irish immigrant community. Ultimately, these men would leverage their influence within the Democratic establishment—which at the time remained tied to the pro-slavery Southern elite—to advance the institutional interests of the Church, while reaping personal benefits from the growing power of the Irish vote. Though never fully assimilated into the immigrant community, they nonetheless adapted Irish Catholicism to the hardscrabble world of machine politics, forging an alliance between the Catholic Archdiocese of New York and Tammany Hall that would endure for half a century.

Finley Peter Dunne, American journalist and humorist, is justly famous for his creation of Mr. Dooley, the Chicago Irish barkeep whose weekly commentary on national politics, war, and human nature kept Americans chuckling over their newspapers for nearly two decades at the beginning of this century. Largely forgotten in the files of Chicago newspapers, however, are over 300 Mr. Dooley columns written in the 1890s before national syndication made his name a household word. Charles Fanning offers here the first critical examination of these early Dooley pieces, which, far better than the later ones, reveal the depth and development of the character and his creator. Dunne created in Mr. Dooley a vehicle for expressing his criticism of Chicago's corruption despite the conservatism of most of his publishers. Dishonest officials who could not be safely attacked in plain English could be roasted with impunity in the \"pure Roscommon brogue\" of a fictional comic Irishman. In addition, Dunne painted, through the observations of his comic persona, a vivid and often poignant portrait of the daily life of Chicago's working-class Irish community and the impact of assimilation into American life. He also offered cogent views of American urban political life, already dominated by the Irish as firmly in Chicago as in other large American cities, and of the tragicomic phenomenon of Irish nationalism. Mr. Fanning's penetrating examination of these early Dooley pieces clearly establishes Dunne as far more than a mere humorist. Behind Mr. Dooley's marvelously comic pose and ironic tone lies a wealth of material germane to the social and literary history of turn-of-the century America.

It often comes as a surprise to learn that most contemporary Americans who think of themselves as “Irish” are, in fact, Protestant, not Catholic. While commentators generally agree that these Protestant Irish-Americans are descended mainly from the Irish who settled in the United States prior to the Famine, the story of how theybecamethe Protestants they are is—this article argues—more complicated than first appears. To understand that story, however, one must correct for two historiographical biases. The first has to do with the presumed religiosity of the so-called “Scotch-Irish” in the pre-Famine period; the second involves taking “being Irish” into account in the post-Famine periodonlywith dealing with Catholics, not Protestants. Once these biases are corrected, however, it becomes possible to develop an argument that simultaneously does two things: it provides a new perspective on the contribution made by the Irish (generally) to the rise of the Methodists and Baptists in the early nineteenth century, and it helps us to understand why so many American Protestants continue to retain an Irish identity despite the fact that their link to Ireland is now almost two centuries in the past.

Irish immigrants to America during the second half of the nineteenth century presented significant challenge to the existing Protestant ruling elite. The provenance, religion and behaviour of the arriving Catholic Irish stood in particular opposition to the morality of the Puritan descendents, an ancient enemy of the Irish, who claimed cultural hegemony over the new United States. The result was a contest of wills over the consumption of goods, public and private, religious and secular. This article seeks to chart historically this clash of religion, politics, gender, race and labour. In doing so, it approaches several issues of interest today. It reframes questions about whether consumption can be a subversive political behaviour, and calls into question schemas in cultural theory about the role of the 'culture industry'. As the Irish eventually came to participate as fully as their 'oppressors' in the new market economy and its burgeoning consumer culture, the outcome of the narrative challenges us to rethink whether oppressed groups reach mainstream respectability as a total 'sellout' or as the legitimate ends of revolution. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

In Secret \"Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America,\" Mark Carnes contends that the popularity of fraternal secret societies in the late 19th century was a response to the extreme gender divide within Victorian society. Carnes posits that all but the highest fraternal rituals further perpetuated a gendered bifurcation of society, constructing male identities that were predicated upon men's alienation from both women in the household and from religious spheres that also carried the taint of femaleness in Victorian culture. This article explores the ideals of manhood articulated in the records and publications of the first generation of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization, arguing that the commitments that followed from being immigrant Catholics muddied the supposed \"separateness\" of Victorian separate spheres for early Knights, embedding powerful evocations of faith and family in their fraternal rituals and rhetoric. The Knights advocated sensitive and nurturing fatherhood, sentimentalized men's emotional ties to women, and assumed a harmonious relationship between fraternalism and family. Thus, men did not escape bonds of religious and domestic attachment in Columbian fraternity, rather, they gained from it rites, rhetoric, and heroic figures that legitimated and valorized the embedded reality of their lives.