“Our Enemy, Who for Our Religion… Abhorred Us”: The Establishment and Maintenance of 18th-Century Anti-Catholicism in North America (original) (raw)
Related papers
For God, King, and Country: Nineteenth-Century Methodist Interpretations of the War of 1812
The War of 1812 almost ruined Episcopal Methodism in Upper Canada. During the War, the American itinerants were unable to travel in the land and, after the War, their detractors used their connection to America to undermine their influence in the loyal Province. This article offers two examples in order to highlight the ways in which the Methodists themselves used the war to prove their loyalty as well as their role in developing the land that would one day become Canada. The first example looks at how Methodists in the Reform party of the 1828 House of Assembly viewed their denomination's role during and in the years following the War. The second example looks at the publication of two popular books in 1880 that defended the contribution American Methodists had made to the British war effort. These examples moved the issue of Methodist loyalty into the sphere of politics and public policy and showed how the ongoing interpretation of the War of 1812 continued to affect these Methodists throughout the nineteenth century.
Religion and the American Revolution
Since at least the time of Alexis de Tocqueville's mid-nineteenth century study of the American system, scholars have been intrigued by the connection between religion -Christianity and its various denominations -and the creation of the United States. One of the foremost subjects that historians have undertaken regarding this relationship is the dynamic between religion in the American colonies and the American Revolution.
Scholars of the American Revolution have devoted considerable attention to the mobilization of Congregationalists against British power. Religion is otherwise often relegated to a secondary plane in portrayals of the revolutionary struggle. This is certainly true in regard to Catholicism. Yet, to many colonists, the wars of religion and the Glorious Revolution were of very recent memory. Nourished by colonial wars, a vigorous and malleable anti-Catholicism still thrived. This paper looks beyond the social and legal condition of Catholics in the Thirteen Colonies to depict the “Roman” faith as a constitutional problem, which raised difficult questions regarding British institutions. When anti-Catholic rhetoric receded, from 1776 on, it was not a mark of declining Protestant zeal, but rather a concession to political and military imperatives, as seen in the conquest of Quebec and the support of France. More than an act of justice towards Catholic Canadians, or yet the lesser of the Intolerable Acts, the Quebec Act of 1774 challenges historians to address the role of anti-Catholic constitutional rhetoric in British North America on the eve of the Thirteen Colonies’ struggle for independence.
2020
Particular attention is paid to their religious beliefs and participation in colonial warfare. This thesis argues that missions in New England, New France, and New Mexico were spaces of Indigenous culture and autonomy, not due to differing colonial practices of colonizing empires, but due to the actions, beliefs and worldviews of Indigenous residents of missions. Indigenous peoples, no matter which European powers they interacted with, reacted to Christian worldviews that permeated all aspects of European colonial cultures. All Colonialism is Religious On May 4, 1493 the Catholic pope, Alexander VI signed the papal bull Inter Caetera. Known colloquially today as one of the key documents in the "Doctrine of Discovery," the Papal Bull highlights the common Christian mentalities and practices that defined colonialism in North America in the following centuries. The Bull's immediate purpose was to grant all land west of an imaginary line in Brazil to Spain, and to the east of that line to Portugal. Throughout its text, the Bull emphasizes the "divine right" of Christian princes to claim title to foreign lands and convert and colonize all of the peoples living in those lands, while arguing that Catholic global dominance is what the Christian god desired. In the eyes of Catholic leaders, all of the good things that came to the Christian princes were a result of God's will. This Christian world view rested on the belief that Christian doctrine was the only correct belief system, and everything else was not only wrong, but an instant path to damnation. Those who converted would receive eternal life, those who refused were not only destined for hell, but fair game for Europeans colonizers to enslave or kill. This was considered "just warfare." As
Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 2003
War under Heaven provides an eventfil and comprehensive account of the reasons for and implications of Pontiac's War. Critically engaging over one hundred years of historiography on the subject, Gregory Evans Dowd weaves a richly textured and complicated tapestry of the North American frontier in the period between the end of the Seven Years' War and the American Revolution. While Pontiac himself is a central figure in the work, Dowd successfully reinserts myriad other actors who consciously or unknowingly shaped the policies of the British Empire towards her newly acquired territories and the role that Native Americans sought for themselves within this changing landscape. Indeed, the point that is clearly discernible in the tangled web of actions and reactions during the 1760s is that "Pontiac's war was not an inevitable conflict pitting expansionist Anglo-American farmers against Native American defenders of the soil. The first issue was not land but authority and submission" (p. 82). While the chronology of events is meticulously laid out and analyzed, the focus is less on the military history and more on the ambiguities and difficulties that these events raised for Indians, imperial officers, colonial governments, and settlers. Pontiac's War, for Dowd, was a contest over the definition of rights that each group claimed for itself and wanted to have recognized by others. Its legacy, following this argument, is that due to the enormous self-interest of its representatives, subjects, and enemies in North America, Britain failed to provide stability, and this failure ultimately shattered the bonds of the empire. One of the strongest features of the book is its demonstration that both the British and Native Americans were unsure how to conceive of their roles in a single-empire world and compromise their expectations towards one another. These problems give insight into one of the main explanations Dowd provides for the war's duration-that rumors served as one of the most powerful tools on the frontier (and beyond) in prolonging and pursuing Anglo-Indian conflict and instability. That rumors could be so potent and credible, even when completely improbable, indicates a great deal of anxiety and ambiguity among the conflict's various participants. The power of rumor among European-American colonists has been explored somewhat by other historians (like Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia [19991), but here it is used effectively to explain the stand-off in