by Paul Harvey
Following the glory period of the missions in the eighteenth century, the areas under Mexican dominance had declined and could only be redeemed by the force of U.S. westward expansion and civilization. Ignoring the presence of some missions and the vital tradition of Hispanic Catholic worship that continued in the area, Anglo-American propagandists and settlers assumed that these lands lay in spiritual isolation and desolation, awaiting the coming of Christian (Protestant) civilization. As one Protestant leader expressed it, the Anglo-American expansion into Texas indicated the will of Providence to spread Christian truth into Mexican lands and suggested as well “the beginning of the downfall of [the] Antichrist, and the spread of the Savior’s power of the gospel.”
Anglo-American colonists to Texas would have seen their situation as just the reverse of that of the pilgrims. Rather than fleeing religious persecution and finding religious freedom in America, they saw themselves as leaving religious freedom to go to a land dominated by the church most closely associated with religious intolerance. “Rome! Rome!” Stephen F. Austin exclaimed. “Until the Mexican people shake off their superstitions & wicked sects, they can neither be a republican, nor a moral people.” Protestant churches were officially prohibited until the independence of Texas, although Protestant ministers were active in the state. Tejanos in San Antonio faced the dilemma of tolerating or ignoring the Protestant presence and thus violating the official Mexican law or actively prohibiting Protestant preaching and thus offending the very Anglo-American settlers that they had sought to come to their land in the first place. The result was a sort of modus vivendi in which Protestants could work as long as they were not too open and obvious about it. Nonetheless, Protestants had to adapt to the Mexican and Tejano Catholic presence, as there appeared to be no imminent signs of any complete conversion of the Catholic population to American ideas of Protestant freedom. The continuance of festivities such as Our Lady of Guadalupe processions, with participation by Anglo-Americans who had intermixed with the Tejano Catholic elite, and the popularity of fandangos and other Tejano Catholic social customs, made it clear that Tejanos would retain a Catholic identity even as they incorporated Anglo Protestants into the texture of life and government in San Antonio itself.
Tejanos, then, adapted to the Anglo-American presence, bringing them into their public celebrations and processions and creating in the process a Tejano identity that had roots in, but was increasingly distinct from, the Mexican homeland. By that time, Hispanic Texas identity was established as Tejano, and a distinct form of Catholicism, with particular public celebrations and practices, was a part of that. Tejanos did not see themselves as a Catholic immigrant group, but as long-standing settlers who had created the major institutions of the region and had welcomed in outsiders and brought them into their social customs and public life. Historian Timothy Matovina explains,
As Tejanos were separated from Mexican political jurisdiction and incorporated into the United States, they responded by claiming their own history, origin legends, and Texan birthright as the basis for a renewed group identity. This renewed identity fostered religious and ethnic pluralism at San Antonio, as it distinguished native-born Tejanos from recently arrived immigrants and formed the basis of Tejano defense against Anglo-American aspirations for cultural dominance.
Catholic and Protestant leaders alike condemned the religious celebrations of ordinary Latino Catholics. As a Baptist minister sarcastically wrote of one ritual in Santa Fe in 1853, the celebrations accompanying Good Friday involved “the farce of crucifying the Savior.” Protestant visitors to the Southwest especially condemned the brotherhood of Los Hermanos de Nuestro Padre Jesus Nazareno, popularly (and notoriously) known as the Penitentes. By 1833, when the bishop of Durango visited, the Penitentes were well established, enough so that the bishop warned against them: “I prohibit those Brotherhoods of Penance—or more accurately or Butchery,” he decreed. Pastors and church administrators, he ordered, should ensure that “not a single one of these Brotherhoods remains and that there is no storeroom or other place to keep those huge crosses or other instruments of mortification which some men half kill their bodies, which at the same time they take no care of their souls, leaving themselves in sin for years on end.” Moderate penance was good and healthy, he suggested, but illegal Brotherhoods which encouraged bodily excess were sinful: “Let every man whom the Good Spirit calls to do so take up the usual instruments, which bespeak mortification rather than self-destruction; but let them wield them in privacy.”
Similar criticisms and attempts to ban the Penitentes came from future archbishops as well as from other Catholic officials as well as Presbyterian missionaries—to no avail. In many isolated rural communities, the Brothers of Blood (younger penitente members primarily responsible for carrying out the excruciating physical actions involved in the central ceremonies of the group) and Brothers of Light (older and revered Brothers no longer required to do their penances) effectively were the church. With no priest or perhaps only one visiting occasionally, and with many of the other institutions of civil society relatively inaccessible to relatively poor and isolated New Mexicans, the Brotherhoods provided communal bonds that were essential. They provided informal courts for law and order, took care of burials and looked after the sick, and negotiated with outside authorities when necessary. They also controlled politics in parts of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, despite criticisms by church authorities and attempts to stop them.
As Protestant Americans came into control of lands taken from Mexico, they contemplated how to bring Spanish-speaking residents into the light of American ideas of freedom. Some emphasized parades and public celebrations as a means of cultural assimilation. As one white San Antonio resident put it in 1851, “We have many foreigners among us who know nothing of our government, who have no national feeling in common with us. . . . Let us induce them to partake with us in our festivities, they will soon partake our feelings, and when so, they will be citizens indeed.” Despite the persistent drumbeat of complaint and the frequent attempts by church authorities to repress Hispanic Catholic practices, the relative isolation of many Latino communities in places such as northern New Mexico and southern Colorado allowed for the maintenance of cultural customs. At a celebration for Our Lady of Guadalupe in the San Luis Valley of Colorado in 1874, for example, a Jesuit priest in attendance described how the “enthusiasm and devotion of the faithful were great throughout the day,” powerfully suggestive of the “religious spirit of the people of this locale.”
In other cases, conflicts developed between local Hispanic Catholic priests and higher authorities (usually bishops or archbishops), usually French or Irish, who were their overseers. In one particularly well-known episode, Padre Antonio Jose Martinez, a native of Taos who pursued a distinguished career in the law, the church, and politics, fought bitterly with Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy, who arrived in 1851 to preside over the parishes centered around Santa Fe. Lamy immediately reinstituted mandatory tithing as part of Catholic Church membership and threatened to excommunicate heads of family who would not comply. Martinez took his objections public, making known his displeasure in the Santa Fe Gazette and also in correspondence with Lamy himself. “Your excellency is well aware that in our republican form of government citizens have the freedom to express their opinions and even to publish them in the newspaper, especially when it involves issues that threaten the common good,” Martinez wrote to Lamy in 1857, one of a series of public letters that followed Lamy’s suspension of Martinez. Eventually, Lamy excommunicated Martinez for disobedience and insubordination, worsening the schism between Martinez’s supporters and the leaders of the Santa Fe diocese. Martinez was then 64, and Lamy excommunicated him “for grave and scandalous faults, his writings against due order and discipline in the Church.” Martinez had started a coeducational school to train seminarians, served in the New Mexico legislature during the Mexican period, and generally refused to obey orders from European and North Ame
rican bishops that he saw as inimical to the interests of Latinos in New Mexico. Martinez later became the basis for a character in Willa Cather’s Death Comes to the Archbishop. His bitter feud and struggle with Lamy, a French Ultramontane Catholic who perceived Latinos in the Southwest as lacking in vitality and spirituality, presaged generations of conflict in the American Catholic Church. Those conflicts often took the form of Euro-American Catholic leaders berating the local practices and customs of Latino, black, Italian, and Eastern European adherents.
CONCLUSION: RACE, RELIGION, AND THE CIVIL WAR
On November 29, 1860, some 2,000 parishioners gathered at the First Presbyterian Church of New Orleans to hear the leading Southern Presbyterian (and founder of what became Rhodes College) Benjamin Morgan Palmer defend secession and more generally explain the role of the South in God’s plan for the world. Southerners, he said, had a “providential trust to conserve and to perpetuate the institution of slavery as now existing . . . a trust to preserve and transmit our existing system of domestic servitude, with the right, unchallenged by man, to go and root itself wherever Providence and nature may carry it.” Through the war, Palmer repeated his theological view that God had assigned special missions to nations. The Confederacy’s role was to persevere through trials and conflicts to carry out God’s will.
These theological pronouncements fit with millennialist views common in the era in both North and South. Divines sanctioned the war in speeches and sermons, forecast the blessings to come out of it, and led fast days and other public ceremonial civil religious events for their sections. Prominent ministers of the Confederacy sanctified the creation of their new nation. They interpreted victories and losses as part of God’s plan to bless as well as to chastise the new nation. White southern Christians praised the religiosity of their new government and its leaders. All the white southern denominations endorsed the formation of the Confederacy as a political entity.
The outcome of the Civil War and the advent of Reconstruction raised difficult theological questions. Southern Christians hoped they might come out of the trial purified for God’s work, but the questions proved more difficult than those kinds of pat answers. If God had sanctioned white caretaking of Negroes in bondage as the divine plan for southern Christian civilization, then what was God’s will in a world without slavery? What might be salvaged out of a cause that was lost?
For black southerners, who had awaited the coming of this moment for generations, the meaning of freedom would be linked to the spread of Christianity, civil rights, and civilization, each complementing the other. Where whites sought redemption, a cleansing of the regional soul from the taint of the rule of Reconstruction, black southern Christians embraced a new version of both revivalism and revolution. Ultimately, no matter what whites early in the conflict said, this was a war about the meaning of freedom, and African Americans understood that to be a spiritual and moral as well as an economic and political question. They understood that black freedom and black Christianity were just at the moment of their true rebirth. They perceived that the constricted bounds of habitation for black Americans was about to expand, and they trusted that God was the author of that revolution.
The coming decades, from the end of the war to the early twentieth century, would see a massive contest to reorient conceptions of religion, race, and citizenship. The end result was a re-creation of white American nationalism. But that form of racial nationalism took form within the context of a massive immigration of European Catholics and Jews and the domination of the last groups of Native peoples who fought to preserve their lands and liberties in the West. These racialized conceptions of nationalism in the post–Civil War era arose alongside the rapid pluralization of the American populace. That basic paradox set the terms for the discussion of religion, race, and citizenship from the end of the Civil War to the twentieth century. And it framed a discussion which, to this day, has never fully disappeared.
4
Religion, Race, and the Reconstruction of Citizenship
IN THE IMMEDIATE POSTWAR YEARS in New Orleans, a handful of local black men met to summon the spirits of the ancestors. Those spirits, when they came, delivered messages addressing the volatile political situation of African Americans after the Civil War. Afro-Creole members of the Spiritualist group Cercle Harmonique furiously transcribed messages emanating from spirits of historical personages ranging from Confucius and Montezuma to Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, a litany of Catholic saints, Union heroes from the Civil War, and even Robert E. Lee. The spirits also commented on the long history of abuses to which African Americans had been subjected, including those perpetrated by the Catholic Church. The spirit voices rejoiced in the fact that “the chains of slavery are falling under the voice of Reason and Logic.” Another voice recorded by the Cercle praised Jesus and Lincoln: “one will regenerate humanity, the other the U.S. Republic.” Jesus died to save humanity, while Lincoln “was sacrificed for wishing to liberate the black race, subdued under a degrading yoke by brute force; and to elevate the white citizens of the south, subdued under a moral yoke more powerful than a physical one.” They also condemned the institutional Catholic Church for sanctioning slavery, and for “blessing banners of the battalions which were forging new and stronger chains for their brothers, black as well as white.” An egalitarian society clearly was heavenly writ. “God demands liberty,” the spirit of slain black war hero Andre Cailloux called out.
The transcriptions left by members of Cercle Harmonique suggest much about the hopes and aspirations, as well as struggles and difficulties, facing black Americans during Reconstruction. From the 1860s to the 1890s, Americans fought over the rapidly altering definitions of race, religion, and citizenship. It involved political wrangling and normally messy democratic processes. It also incited violent acts of terrorism and a wrenching reshaping of the terms of race, religion, and citizenship. Race, reunion, and rights formed the central core of the story of religion and citizenship after the war and going forward into the decades leading to the twentieth century.
Because of its connection to the Civil War, Reconstruction historically has been placed within the framework of the struggle for freedom and citizenship among African Americans in the post–Civil War South. More recently, historians have broadened this to include discussions of Native peoples, Asian Americans, and Latinos in a Southwest that had recently been forcibly incorporated into the United States. As a topic of historical study, Reconstruction has gone national, incorporating stories not just from the North/South and white/black conflict but also the West, and incorporating other racialized groups.
Following that historiographical move, this chapter follows the life stories of the Georgia legislator black religious leaders William Jefferson White and Henry McNeal Turner, the Paiute Prophet Wovoka (Jack Wilson), and the Chinese American Congregationalist minister Jee Gam. It also discusses the struggle between the Catholic establishment and Latino parishioners over proper Catholic practice and who should be in positions of church leadership. In an era redefining whiteness as a standard of American citizenship, Jim-Crowing blacks, excluding Chinese immigrants, and attempting to assimilate (or eliminate) Indians, each sought a path to navigate an America after the reforging of the white Republic following the Civil War.
These seemingly disparate stories of race, religion, and Reconstruction are linked. Defining citizenship for black Americans in the Fourteenth Amendment, for example, involved a deliberate discussion of whether race or religion was the fundamental constituting element of American citizenship. If black Christians could be included in the Republic, what about heathen others? And what about Christian others, including Christianized Indians, Chinese Protestants in California, and Latinos who had been assimilated into the United States after 1848? Looking at these questions through short biographical sketches here provides some insight into how Americans thought about how race, nation, and religion came together in the context of a pluralizing society in the late nineteenth cen
tury.
RECONSTRUCTION
On the evening of January 12, 1865, following the Union Army’s successful capture of Savannah, the Baptist minister Garrison Frazier led a delegation of black Georgians in a meeting with conquering General William Tecumseh Sherman, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and Oliver O. Howard, soon to be head of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The African American ministers from the Georgia lowcountry advised Union war officers on the strong desire of freedpeople to till their own land with their own labor. By doing so, “we can soon maintain ourselves and have something to spare,” they assured the Union officials. Following the meeting, as a temporary measure Sherman set aside for black war refugees lands in the lowcountry on a coastal strip from northern Florida to the region just south of Charleston. Some freedpeople took this as a governmental promise to provide land and hoped for a more egalitarian society.
For black Americans, Reconstruction presented the prospect of triumph over oppression and the ability to win rights to land and to the ballot box. Knowing that, southern white Redemptionists—those who sought to “redeem” the South from “Black Republican” rule—targeted ministers and religious institutions as part of their campaign to restore white supremacist rule in the region. The freedpeople had significant white allies in the North, but even more menacing opposition from whites who lived all around them.
After the Civil War, newly independent churches and black religious organizations sprang up. A black “exodus” from white-run churches transformed the nature of southern religious life. This process occurred over a number of years. Individual ex-slaves weighed competing principles and desires in deciding on church attendance. Still, by the end of Reconstruction, racial separation in Protestant religious organizations was nearly complete, and segregation of Catholic parishes and services was the norm as well.