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Patrick J Hayes, American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era, Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 2, September 2024, Page 361, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae131
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Robert Emmett Curran, emeritus professor of history at Georgetown University, has already written numerous studies on American (Irish) Catholics in the Civil War era, but the present volume takes a step back and offers a broader perspective on how they were perceived and how they engaged a culture that often held them in suspicion. The wider lens shows how Catholics became a robust and growing social group, not simply by dint of numbers but also through bloody involvement in a war of principles and economic and civil gain. His starting point is the war with Mexico, and while his focus is on a relatively small band of Irish Catholic deserters who joined the Mexican army against northern invaders, their symbolic value in siding with fellow Catholics showed that their loyalties could not be dismissed.
Slavery, of course, was another litmus test. Southern Catholics could be counted on to more or less accept the institution. By 1860, of the 100,000 or so Black Catholics in the United States (about 5 percent of the total Catholic population), Curran reckons that the vast majority were in bondage. Politically, the Catholic tended to vote Democratic and helped elect Franklin Pierce in 1852. The stage was being set for the slow march toward division under James Buchanan and egged on by the Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision delivered by the hand of the Catholic chief justice Roger Taney.
