Abstract
Cortés begins Chapter 7 by noting the prevalence of religious mobility in the early republic. He then shows how Brownson was transformed into a Catholic sectarian by Boston Bishop John Fitzpatrick during the years 1844–1854. Consideration is given to the reception of Brownson’s polemical writing among readers of the Brownson Quarterly Review. Cortés stresses that Brownson’s argumentativeness is largely representative of the Review, but also a response to the surge of nativist sentiment in the 1850s.
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Notes
- 1.
Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850 (New York: Octagon, 1981; originally 1950), 324.
- 2.
Russell E. Miller, The Larger Hope: The First Century of the Universalist Church in America, 1770–1870, Vol. 1 (Boston: Unitarian Universalist Association, 1979), 197.
- 3.
Lincoln Austin Mullen, ‘The Varieties of Religious Conversion: The Origins of Religious Choice in the United States,’ (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 2014), 262–263.
- 4.
Burton Gates Brown, Jr., ‘Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century America’ (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1972), 65.
- 5.
Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 13.
- 6.
Lawrence Foster, ‘Had Prophecy Failed? Contrasting Perspectives of the Millerites and Shakers,’ in Ronald L. Numbers and Jonathan M. Butler, eds., The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993), 184. Further support for this trend is noted in Anna White and Leila S. Taylor, Shakerism: Its Meaning and Message (Columbus: Fred J. Heer, 1905).
- 7.
See Michael Barkun, “‘The Wind Sweeping Over the Country’: John Humphrey Noyes and the Rise of Millerism,” in Numbers and Butler, The Disappointed, 156.
- 8.
Paul K. Conkin, American Originals: Homemade Varieties of Christianity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 7.
- 9.
Cross, Burned-over District, 37. To date, historical assessments of nineteenth-century religious mobility remain anecdotal. Nevertheless, this evidential record suggests that there was much greater religious mobility among Protestants than there was among Catholics. Even large-scale events like the Second Great Awakening appear to have yielded very few converts from Catholicism. See Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, ‘Charles G. Finney and Evangelical Anti-Catholicism,’ United States Catholic Historian 14 (1996): 39–52. Evidence of an empirical nature improves drastically in the twentieth century. Here a key contribution is Rodney Stark and Charles Y. Glock, American Piety: The Nature of Religious Commitment (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), who argued that ‘the overwhelming amount of church-switching that goes on in American society is within the Protestant community.’ (183) Conversely, Stark and Glock found that 86 percent of Catholics remained in their faith of origin. A follow-up study confirmed these conclusions: See Wade Clark Roof and Christopher Kirk Hadaway, ‘Denominational Switching in the Seventies: Going Beyond Stark and Glock,’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 18 (1979): 363–377. A decade later, Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), observed that the ‘movement from one church to another is common in the United States, especially among Protestants.’ (162) The most current snapshot of religious mobility by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life shows that Catholics now suffer the greatest net change of all Christian bodies. See http://www.pewforum.org/2009/04/27/faith-in-flux/; http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/chapter-2-religious-switching-and-intermarriage/
- 10.
Orestes Brownson, ‘Random Thoughts,’ The Philanthropist (February 28, 1832): 136, RBSC.
- 11.
Elizabeth Peabody to Orestes Brownson, January 2, 1844, Orestes Brownson Papers, Archives of the University of Notre Dame (hereafter Orestes Brownson Papers, ND Archives).
- 12.
The irony of course is that at the same time that Brownson argued for people to remain in their religious traditions, he encouraged friends to try the Episcopal church. He also followed this advice up by switching himself—from Transcendentalism to Catholicism. I am persuaded that Brownson did not know he was going to convert until weeks before he did so, on October 20, 1844. Hence rather than seeing Brownson as inconsistently preaching one thing but doing another, he probably meant to stay where he was, but found that ultimately he could not keep himself from going the next step and becoming a Catholic. It is revealing that as late as 1835 Brownson had written, in his half-biographical fashion, that ‘all who belong to the movement party [which included his own Transcendentalist flock] do not see whither they tend, nor do they know the spirit which controls them. Many are carried along by an impulse of which they can render no account.’ (42) O.A.B., ‘Essays for Believers and Disbelievers—No. III,’ Boston Observer and Religious Intelligencer 3 (1835): 42–43.
- 13.
Orestes Brownson, Brownson Quarterly Review (January 1848): 49, RBSC.
- 14.
Orestes Brownson, Brownson Quarterly Review (January 1849): 8, RBSC.
- 15.
Orestes Brownson, Brownson’s Quarterly Review (July 1845): 456, RBSC.
- 16.
Quoted in Hugh Marshall, Orestes Brownson and the American Republic (Washington: Catholic University of America), footnote No.52, pp. 80–81.
- 17.
[James Freeman Clarke], ‘Orestes A. Brownson’s Argument for the Roman Catholic Church,’ The Christian Examiner and Religious Miscellany 48 (1850): 229.
- 18.
Orestes Brownson, Brownson Quarterly Review (July 1850): 301, RBSC.
- 19.
Orestes Brownson, Introduction to [Brownson’s Quarterly Review], in Patrick W. Carey, ed., The Early Works of Orestes A. Brownson, Vol.7: Life by Communion Years, 1843–44 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2007), 419. As late as 1857 Brownson insisted that ‘I never changed once in my principles or my purposes, and all I did change were my tools, my instruments, or my modes of operation.’ (76) Orestes Brownson, The Convert: Or, Leaves from My Experience (New York: E.J. Sadlier, 1876; originally 1857).
- 20.
Orestes Brownson, Brownson Quarterly Review (July 1850): 302, RBSC. Brownson’s commitment to immutable creeds was demonstrated early in his Catholic years. In July 1846 he critiqued John Henry Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) in part because he believed it ushered in an ambiguity of interpretation and practice that harkened back to Brownson’s Protestant years. (Brownson conceded change in theology, but not in Church doctrine.)
- 21.
Thomas O’Connor, Fitzpatrick’s Boston, 1846–1866: John Bernard Fitzpatrick, Third Bishop of Boston (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1984), 44.
- 22.
Isaac Hecker, ‘Dr. Brownson and Bishop Fitzpatrick,’ The Catholic World 45 (1887): 2.
- 23.
Ibid., 6. This same point is repeated by Brownson’s son. See Henry F. Brownson, Orestes A. Brownson’s Middle Life: From 1845 to 1855 (Detroit: H.F. Brownson, 1899), 4–5. Several sources point out that Fitzpatrick was initially suspicious of Brownson’s interest in the Church (given the latter’s radical reputation). If true, one possible explanation for why Brownson took up such an extreme position upon becoming Fitzpatrick’s student was so that he could prove his fidelity to Catholicism, thereby assuaging Fitzpatrick’s doubt.
- 24.
Patrick W. Carey, Orestes A. Brownson: American Religious Weathervane (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004), 156–157. Brownson’s emphasis on supernaturalism led him to regard his former socialist ideals as anathema. Having long seen temporal happiness as the most pressing human good, Brownson now shifted his gaze toward happiness in the afterlife (even while continuing to say that Christianity was committed to alleviating human suffering on earth).
- 25.
Brownson, Convert, 281.
- 26.
Orestes Brownson, Brownson Quarterly Review (January 1874): 114.
- 27.
Orestes Brownson, Brownson Quarterly Review (April 1847): 221, RBSC.
- 28.
Ibid., 222. Pusey was an Anglican divine and part of the leadership of the Oxford Movement.
- 29.
Ibid., 223. Maynard has observed justly that ‘it is still rather curious that a man [Brownson] who had discovered truth in so many unexpected places, who knew that there is no doctrine that does not contain at least some germ of truth, and who knew that most of the people he had met…sincerely desired the truth…should have been so severe with anybody who had not yet reached the completion of truth which was now his.’ (163) See Theodore Maynard, Orestes Brownson: Yankee, Radical, Catholic (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1943).
- 30.
See Carey, Orestes Brownson, 157; O’Connor, Fitzpatrick’s Boston, 46. One important implication regards Fitzpatrick’s relationship with the Protestant community in Boston. On the surface, Fitzpatrick cultivated a positive relationship with Protestants but privately he referred to some of them as ‘bigots.’ See O’Connor, Fitzpatrick’s Boston, 109. This raises the distinct possibility that Brownson may have served Fitzpatrick in beating back Protestant nativism with a forceful pen, allowing Fitzpatrick to enjoy cordial relations with Protestant Boston. Perhaps only in this way could O’Connor say that Fitzpatrick ‘seldom raised his voice in anger, rarely used intemperate language, and never called for acts of violence.’ (116)
- 31.
Orestes Brownson, Brownson Quarterly Review (April 1847): 230, RBSC.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
Ibid., 238–239.
- 34.
Orestes Brownson to John B. Fitzpatrick, 1857; Fitzpatrick Papers [Archives of the Archdiocese of Boston], 1.19.
- 35.
Orestes Brownson, Brownson Quarterly Review (July 1848): 343, RBSC.
- 36.
Orestes Brownson, ‘A Sermon on Righteousness,’ in Carey, Early Works, Vol. 2, 165.
- 37.
It is worth pointing out that prominent Catholic clerics disagreed with Brownson on this question, among whom were Bishops John Carroll and John England.
- 38.
Orestes Brownson, Brownson Quarterly Review (April 1853): 188, RBSC. Protestants were puzzled and amused by this form of argumentation. One writer in a prominent Protestant periodical mocked Catholics in the following dialogue: ‘“What do you believe?” asks the Protestant. The Catholic answers, “I believe what the Church believes.” “What does the Church believe?” “Answer—What I believe.” The Protestant continues: “Then what do you and the Church believe together?” “We both believe the same thing.”’ The writer concludes that ‘this is the grand Catholicon for believing everything without knowing anything!’ (40) Reformation Advocate 6 (April 20, 1833), RBSC.
- 39.
Orestes Brownson, Brownson Quarterly Review (July 1852): 290, RBSC.
- 40.
Mott wrote that while other writers ‘may have had a larger number of readers,…no one has readers of such various character [as Brownson]. He has the attention of intelligent men of all sects.’ (691) Frank L. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741–1850 (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1930). Thus the varied reaction to Brownson stemmed from his varied readership.
- 41.
J.H. Loughborough to Orestes Brownson, January 22, 1846, Orestes Brownson Papers, ND Archives.
- 42.
Joseph H. Allen to Orestes Brownson, October 25, 1849, Orestes Brownson Papers, ND Archives.
- 43.
[Clarke], ‘Orestes A. Brownson’s Argument,’ 240.
- 44.
Patrick Quigley to Orestes Brownson, July 1, 1850, Orestes Brownson Papers, ND Archives.
- 45.
Francis Alger to Orestes Brownson, April 14, 1845, Orestes Brownson Papers, ND Archives.
- 46.
Quoted in Maynard, Orestes Brownson, 160–161.
- 47.
Ibid., 178–179. Readers familiar with Brownson’s trajectory cannot accept his supposed forgetfulness. More plausible is that Brownson was trying throughout the late 1840s and early 1850s to excise from his memory much of his religious past, which he considered something of a burden.
- 48.
Writing on September 5, 1853, one Asher A. Davis told Brownson that ‘I should be glad to have the work [the Boston Quarterly Review] from the beginning; I mean before you became a Catholic…so that I may be able to trace the progress of your mind from rationalism to the faith which you now entertain.’ Asher A. Davis to Orestes Brownson, September 5, 1853, Orestes Brownson Papers, ND Archives. Another correspondent, L. Williams, wrote that ‘I understand you are preaching a different doctrine from what you did then [when you were a Universalist]…. Will you please send me a coppy [sic] [of] one paper [the Review] so that I may see what sentiments you now advocate.’ L. Williams to Orestes Brownson, March 5, 1860, Orestes Brownson Papers, ND Archives.
- 49.
157.111 Orestes Brownson, Brownson Quarterly Review (October 1848): 493, RBSC.
- 50.
David J. Endres, ‘Know-Nothings, Nationhood, and the Nuncio: Reassessing the Visit of Archbishop Bedini,’ US Catholic Historian 21 (2003): footnote No.6, pg. 4.
- 51.
Robert Francis Hueston, The Catholic Press and Nativism, 1840–1860 (New York: Arno, 1976), 34–35.
- 52.
Ibid., 48ff.
- 53.
O’Connor, Fitzpatrick’s Boston, 130.
- 54.
For a concise treatment of nativism as a political movement, see Michael F. Holt, ‘The Politics of Impatience: The Origins of Know Nothingism,’ Journal of American History 60 (1973): 309–331.
- 55.
O’Connor, Fitzpatrick’s Boston, 10. The disproportionate number of immigrants in antebellum jails is corroborated by Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860 (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1964; originally 1938), 35.
- 56.
Quoted in Charles E. Deusner, ‘The Know Nothing Riots in Louisville,’ The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 61 (1963): 124.
- 57.
Ira M. Leonard and Robert D. Parmet, American Nativism, 1830–1860 (New York: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Co., 1979), 69.
- 58.
See Richard H. Clarke, ‘The Right Reverend John Bernard Fitzpatrick, Third Bishop of Boston,’ in Lives of the Deceased Bishops of the Catholic Church in the United States, Vol. 2 (New York: Richard H. Clarke, 1888), 322.
- 59.
Deusner, ‘Know Nothing Riots,’ 134.
- 60.
Quoted in Peter Guilday, ‘Gaetano Bedini: An Episode in the Life of Archbishop John Hughes,’ Historical Records & Studies 23 (1933): 137.
- 61.
Quoted in Margaret C. DePalma, Dialogue on the Frontier: Catholic and Protestant Relations, 1793–1883 (Kent State: Kent State University Press, 2004), 106.
- 62.
Endres, ‘Know-Nothings,’ 11.
- 63.
Quoted in DePalma, Dialogue, 106.
- 64.
O’Connor, Fitzpatrick’s Boston, 159.
- 65.
Rev. James F. Connelly, The Visit of Archbishop Gaetano Bedini to the United States of America (Rome: Libreria Editrice Dell’Universita Gregoriana, 1960), 143. A sympathetic Catholic response to the Bedini affair can be found in the Catholic Mirror (November 26, 1853).
- 66.
Houghton wrote long ago that the decades before and after 1850 drove many people to adopt ‘extreme and unqualified positions. Many Victorians were “downright infidels or downright Christians, thorough Tories or thorough democrats” or, in a larger category…they were Ancients or Moderns.’ (165) Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).
- 67.
Orestes Brownson, Brownson Quarterly Review (October 1847): 456, RBSC.
- 68.
Orestes Brownson, Brownson Quarterly Review (January 1854): 103, RBSC. Houghton has argued that this sort of dogmatism is identifiably Victorian. See Houghton, Victorian Frame of Mind, 137.
- 69.
The bishops’ endorsement of the Review was eventually lifted in 1856.
- 70.
Orestes Brownson, Brownson Quarterly Review (April 1854): 218, RBSC.
- 71.
I am indebted here to Carey, Orestes Brownson, 205.
- 72.
Carey accurately points out Brownson’s sober evaluation of Horace Bushnell, Philip Schaff, and John Williamson Nevin’s theological works. See Carey, Orestes Brownson, 209ff.
- 73.
Ibid., 209.
- 74.
Corroboration for my view is supplied by Alvan Ryan, who found that Brownson’s post-1844 essays were ‘overvehement in their rejection of his earlier views. The tone is militant, unyielding, even at times almost mockingly contemptuous.’ (116) Alvan S. Ryan, ‘Orestes A. Brownson, 1803–1876,’ in Alvan S. Ryan, ed., American Classics Reconsidered: A Christian Appraisal (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 98–120.
- 75.
Orestes Brownson, Brownson Quarterly Review (July 1854): 362.
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Cortés, Á. (2017). ‘We are Ourselves Too Polemical’: Formation of a Rhetorical Pugilist. In: Sectarianism and Orestes Brownson in the American Religious Marketplace. Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700-2000. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51877-0_7
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