TIMELINE

1790: Anti-Catholic Propaganda
Anti-Catholic laws, prejudices and propaganda, long standing and deeply rooted in the thirteen Colonies, continued strong during the early years of the American Revolution, especially in Massachusetts. Though the Federal Constitutional Convention was not a party to this bigotry, nine of the thirteen state constitutions were opposed to Catholics. Bishop John Carroll, first Catholic bishop in the U.S., estimated there were 35,000 Catholic in a population of three million, half living in Maryland.

1793-99: The Rise of Lyman Beecher
Lyman Beecher (1775-1863) entered Yale University at 18. Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), the grandson of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) who had inspired the Great Awakening of the 1740s with his memorable ser- mon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," was appointed president of Yale in 1795. The strict Cal- vanism of Edwards had been shaken to the core by the liberalism and Deism of the Revolution; Dwight became an advocate of the "New Measures," a more rigid fundamen- talism of the Colonial Puritanism, which he preached in revivals. Beecher was among the considerable number of converted students; and, after remaining to study for the ministry, he was called to be pastor of the Presbyterian church at East Hampton, Long Island, N.Y, in 1799. Beecher attracted attention by his preaching and in 1810 was called to the Congregationist parish in Litchfield, Conn., which was then one of the cultural centers of New England. He began to take a more liberal view of the doctrine of predestination, and he preached his more hopeful faith with revivalist vigor. Conducting two services on Sunday and other meetings during the week, he acquired a large and devoted following.

1798: The Alien and Sedition Laws
Earliest expression of American nativism under the new constitutiona1 system was manifest during the John Adams administration with the infamous Alien and Sedition laws directed especially against foreign immigrants. Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson asking, "Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic religion?"

1810: Ohio Grows
Population of the State of Ohio was 230,760 and almost doubled each decade to number 1,519,000 by 1840. Twelfth among the states in 1810, it became third in 1840.

1825: The Protestant Propaganda Periodicals
Over a hundred periodicals were published in the United States, three-quarters religious and almost half of these anti-Catholic. No clear understanding of the depth or scope of American nativism is possible without a consideration of the vast flood of propaganda loosed against the Catholic Church in the first half of the nineteenth century. The average Protestant was trained from birth to hate Catholicism. Juvenile literature and school books were filled with a spirit of intolerance. Books for youth deepened prejudice; religious and even secular newspapers warned of the dangers of "Popery": novels, poems, gift books (a large industry before the Civil War), histories, travel accounts and theological works confirmed these beliefs.

1826: The Second Awakening
Beecher was invited to become pastor of the Hanover Street church in Boston. Congregationalist churchmen there had been troubled by the defection, in 1813, of a large number of churches to Unitarianism. They hoped Beecher, in the pulpit of a new church, could recover their lost congregations. So successful were Beecher's evangelical methods that he was soon compared to Jonathan Edwards and became the acknowledged leader of the Second Great Awakening.

1829: English Catholic Emancipation Bill
The First Provincial Council of American bishops met in October in Baltimore. The pastoral letter issued referred to the flood of propaganda flossing from Protestant presses. The bishops spent most of their time defending the faith and warding off vicious attacks. Parishes were urged to build their own parochial schools. The passage of the English Catholic Emancipation Bill aroused the American Protestant press making anti-Catholicism a political issue. The Leopoldine Society to Aid the Missions in Cincin- nati was formed in Vienna, Austria, in response to the pleas of Bishop Edward Fenwick, the first bishop of the diocese of Cincinnati. Contributions were never large, but they assisted in development.

1830: The Leopoldine "Conspirarcy"
In Ohio there were twenty-two churches, twenty-four priests, twenty thousand Catholics, one Catholic newspaper, a college, and a seminary. The preponderant number of Catholics, especially German, among the immigrants flooding into the Midwest caused American nativists to think that the power of the Pope might be transferred there. Samuel F.B. Morse (1791-1872), inventor of the telegraph, who gained his first fame as an artist, was the descendant of a New England Puritan family in Boston. He became aware of the grants of money by the Leopoldine Society to the Church in the West and viewed this as a foreign conspiracy. He decided to dedicate the greater part of his life to opposing the Church of Rome.

(to be continued...)