Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [435]
“POPERY OUGHT ALWAYS TO BE LOATHED AND EXECRATED”
As New York’s Catholic Church changed during the 1820s—became more working class, more militant, more Irish, less middle class, less French and Spanish, less respectable—anxieties and resentments rose in various Protestant quarters. These concerns were heightened at decade’s end by a particular confluence of events. Catholic emancipation in England (1829) generated a flood of antipopery books and tracts decrying the new license; many of these were exported to New York, where they agitated local activists. The advent of Finney’s revivals exacerbated tensions by generating millennial enthusiasm and heightening denominational aggressiveness. The sudden spurt of Irish Catholic immigration seemed menacing too, in the light of Vatican support for various reactionary European governments. Some believed it signaled an attempt by monarchists and despots to establish a beachhead in New York City, as a step toward infiltrating and overthrowing the republic.
In January 1830, accordingly, a small group of clerical and lay militants established the Protestant, an avowedly anti-Catholic weekly. In its initial number of January 2, 1830, the Rev. George Bourne declared that the paper’s goal would be to expose the papacy’s “present enterprising efforts to recover and extend its unholy dominion, especially on the western continent.” This initiative was followed, in January 1831, by formation of the New York Protestant Association under the leadership of the Rev W. C. Brownlee, a Dutch Reformed pastor. The group began disseminating anti-Catholic literature and, in 1832, sponsoring public meetings to discuss the history and character of popery. Attendance at these biweekly gatherings soon swelled from three hundred to fifteen hundred (not counting the spinoffs in Brooklyn), in part because Catholics began showing up as well, to cheer on their spokesmen. Brownlee, somewhat incautiously, had dared Catholic priests to come debate the issues, only to find that Felix Várela and other apologists proved formidable opponents.
These battles spilled over into the sectarian press, with the Truth Teller leading the Catholic camp, and the Protestant side upheld in Brownlee’s new biweekly, the American Protestant Vindicator and Defender of Civil and Religious Liberty Against the Inroads of Popery (1834). The Vindicator’s prospectus (endorsed by twelve clergymen) announced that as “Popery ought always to be loathed and execrated,” Brownlee would lay bare its “detestable impieties, corruptions and mischiefs.” Agents fanned out across the country, offering lectures, selling Vindicator subscriptions, and inspiring local imitations of the New York Protestant Association.
Also in 1834, Samuel F. B. Morse, just back from Europe, published a series of letters in the New York Observer, an evangelical paper, concerning a “Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States.” The artist announced that in Vienna he had discovered the existence of a plot by European monarchs leagued in the Holy Alliance to flood the United States with Catholics. In another Morse series, issued as a pamphlet in 1835, the newly appointed NYU professor warned of “foreign turbulence imported by ship-loads” at the behest of “priest-controlled machines” and rhetorically demanded: “Can one throw mud into pure water and not disturb its clearness?” The answer was clear: Morse called on all New York patriots to stand tall against the growing power of the Catholic hierarchy and the onrushing influx of Irish.
“DAMNED IRISH!”
By March 1835 the Irish were in a fury. When the New York Protestant Association sponsored a meeting at Broadway Hall to discuss the question “Is Popery Compatible with Civil Liberty?” a crowd of Catholics forced their way in, broke up furniture, and destroyed