Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South

• Published in: The journal of the Civil War era 2021, Vol.11 (1), p.127-130
• Main Author: Tate, Adam L.
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: American Civil War; Catholicism; Elder, William Henry; Politics; Religion
• ISSN: 2154-4727; 2159-9807

Interest in Civil War-era religion also drove the 2016 publication of the massive Civil War diary of Confederate chaplain James Sheeran and the 2019 edition of David Conyngham's unfinished nineteenth-century manuscript, Soldiers of the Cross, which details the efforts of Catholic chaplains and religious sisters during the war.2 Recently, Benjamin Miller's In God's Presence: Chaplains, Missionaries, and Religious Space during the American Civil War (2019) incorporated the experiences of Catholic chaplains into a broader study of religion in Civil War armies. [...]he demonstrates that many Catholic southerners did not discuss politics openly at all. [...]the exact sentiments or beliefs of southern Catholics on a range of issues are not readily discernible. James M. Woods, A History of the Catholic Church in the American South, 15131900 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011); Andrew H. M. Stern, Southern Crucifix, Southern Cross: Catholic-Protestant Relations in the Old South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012); Michael Pasquier, Fathers on the Frontier: French Missionaries and the Roman Catholic Priesthood in the United States, 1789-1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); William B. Kurtz, Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016).