“In the Cause of American Liberty:” Catholic Contributions to Independence

Eighteenth-century America was predominantly Protestant, and the Thirteen Colonies suffered from a virulent strain of anti-Catholicism. Despite this, the mostly-Protestant Founding Fathers, while being greatly inspired by their Protestant English forebears, were greatly inspired by Catholic thinkers as well.

The United States was not established as a Christian country, with American diplomats asserting in 1797: “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.”[1] But while the separation of church and state remains an important tenet of the American republic to this day, the Founding Fathers, while taking many of their philosophical ideas from the rationalist notions of the Enlightenment, believed that virtue was necessary to sustain a republic, with religion being the most common source for virtue.[2] While Christianity was not seen as the only faith that provided virtue, with Benjamin Rush remarking “I had rather see the opinions of Confucius or Mahomed inculcated upon our youth, than to see them grow up wholly devoid of a system of religious principles,”[3] Christianity, particularly Protestant Christianity, was seen as the best source for virtue, with the notion best illustrated in Samuel Adams’ idea of a “Christian Sparta” that combined the best aspects of classical political tradition and Protestantism.[4]

Virtue could be attained through Protestantism in the eyes of many eighteenth-century Americans, but not through Catholicism. Eighteenth-century British Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic were largely anti-Catholic, with this anti-Catholicism stemming from the bloody conflicts over religion in Europe. After Martin Luther started protesting against the abuses of the Catholic Church in the early sixteenth century, Europe split into Protestant and Catholic camps. Because the countries had state-sponsored churches in this time, the divisions caused by the Reformation were not only spiritual but political as well. England came to support the Protestant Church under Henry VIII in the 1530s, but in the following centuries England would occasionally revert to having a Catholic monarch, causing both religious and political turmoil in the American colonies. For instance, during the reigns of James II and Charles II, many northern colonial governments briefly lost their political charters as well as much of their autonomy. Because of these trends, the predominantly Protestant Anglo-Americans of the time associated their own faith with liberty, and Catholicism with tyranny. [5]

Nonetheless, British Catholics had played their part in the founding of the Thirteen Colonies, with the colony of Maryland, being led by the Catholic Cecil Calvert, being founded in the seventeenth-century. Calvert granted religious freedom to all Christians in the colony, though his interests in founding Maryland were more economic than religious. Unfortunately, this period of toleration did not last and by the end of the seventeenth-century Catholics had lost their protection, with Anglicanism becoming the colony’s preferred religion. Nonetheless, Catholics in Maryland still had more rights than their coreligionists in other colonies, with large numbers of Catholics existing in in St. Mary’s and Charles counties during the eighteenth-century. Making up 10 percent of the colony’s population, Maryland’s Catholics greatly contributed to the colony’s economy, with many being wealthy planters, while others served in trades such as blacksmithing and carpentry or worked on the Chesapeake Bay. Jesuit priests also contributed to Maryland’s development as a colony, with many running manors on which they maintained chapels where the local Catholics would gather.[6] Maryland proved to be economically vital during the American Revolution, with the Chesapeake Bay and the Eastern Shore being particularly important, [7] but the colony’s economic sufficiency would have been lacking if not for the vital contributions of Catholics throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.