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‘The Prayer of the South’

Christine Stoddard | Catholic Herald

Bishop John McGill was the bishop of the Diocese of Richmond, then the only diocese for Virginia, during the Civil War.

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St. Peter Cathedral, now St. Peter Church, was the seat of the Diocese of Richmond during the Civil War.

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The White House of the Confederacy, previously known as the Dr. John Brockenbrough House, is located at 1201 E. Clay St. in Richmond. Today, it is part of the Museum of the Confederacy, which includes a newer building adjacent to the house, as well as property in Appomattox. This Library of Congress photo belongs to a compilation dating back to the 1930s.

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“On the 17th day of April, 1861, Virginia issued the
proclamation of secession, and the clouds which long since
had gathered black and blacker over this country broke; the
pen was declared useless, and it was left to the sword to
settle the issues and contentions agitating the political
parties of these States,” wrote Charles T. Loehr, secretary
of the Old First Virginia Infantry Association in his
post-war recollection, 1884 War History of the Old First
Virginia Infantry Regiment, Army of Northern Virginia.
Today, the Civil War lives in reenactments, books,
documentaries and museum exhibits. Some may remember it
through single artifacts – a cannon, the hoop skirt – or
dates on a timeline. But when it ended 150 years ago with the
April 9 surrender at Appomattox Court House, the Civil War
was a conflict that haunted Americans on a daily basis. In
his book, Commonwealth Catholicism, Father Gerald P. Fogarty,
a professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville,
claims that Virginia may have been the state most impacted by
the Civil War. The War Between the States affected everyone –
black and white, immigrant and native-born, Christian and
non-Christian. In that respect, Virginia Catholics were no
different. Yet their history is their own.
A land of “anti-Papist” sentiments
Maryland was historically established as Mary’s Land, the
land of the Catholics, home to the first Catholic Mass in the
English colonies. Virginia, founded by the English with the
Jamestown colony as testament, was the land of Protestants.
According to the Museum of Virginia Catholic History in
Richmond, it was not until Thomas Jefferson’s Bill for
Establishing Religious Freedom was passed in 1786 that
Catholics were “free to worship openly in the Old
Dominion.”
From there, it took about a decade for formal Catholic
communities to emerge in Virginia. Established in 1795, St.
Mary Church in Alexandria was the first Catholic parish in
the state. As late as 1822, when Norfolk-based Bishop Patrick
Kelly returned to his home in Ireland for lack of financial
support, Richmond lacked an organized Catholic community.
As border states, many everyday Virginians and Marylanders
were torn between the Union and the Confederacy, but the
matter of religious identity was cut and dried. Though
Puritans took over Maryland and created anti-Catholic laws in
the 1650s, those laws were abolished in the 1830s. Maryland
never returned to being a Catholic-majority state but Irish
Catholic immigrants settled there during the Great Potato
Famine of the 1840s. Far fewer settled in Virginia, where
Catholics remained a distinct, sometimes hated, minority.
The fighting Irish in Maryland and
Virginia

According to Maryland State Archives’ documents for grade
school history classes, more than 200,000 Irish had
immigrated to Maryland by 1850. As a popular point of entry
for European immigrants, Baltimore especially saw an increase
in its Irish population, third only to New York and Boston.
This influx was unwelcome by self-proclaimed “nativists” –
those who used their American birth as a point of moral
superiority.
The State Archives’ lesson plan entitled, “Irish Immigrants
in Baltimore,” points out the discrimination Irish immigrants
endured for bringing few skills valued by the American
workforce. Because of this, “they were viewed as inferior
people.” Virginia would not witness a spike in its Irish
population until after the Civil War, when many Irish
immigrants headed there to work in coal mines. One could
argue that, in Maryland, the Irish were looked down upon for
being Irish; in Virginia, they were looked down upon for
being Irish and Catholic.
On both the Union and Confederate sides, many Irish Catholics
saw the Civil War as an opportunity to prove their
willingness to conform to an American identity. They wanted
to counter the stereotypes portrayed not only in everyday
talk but in print. Widely circulated magazines, like Punch
and Harper’s Weekly, published cartoons negatively portraying
Irish Catholics before and after the war. In a 2012 email
made public by The Cagle Post, California art instructor,
Michael Dooley, described 19th-century political cartoonist
Thomas Nast’s depictions of the Irish “as a bunch of drunken,
violent apes.”
But not everyone agrees with the argument that Irish – or any
immigrant identity – played a distinct role in the Union or
Confederate efforts.
“I don’t think the ethnic differences among Catholics had
much impact on Catholic participation in the war (in the
Confederacy),” said George C. Rable, a professor in Southern
history at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. “Some
Confederates claimed they were much more tolerant of
Catholicism than northerners (they often referred to Know
Nothingism).”
In the South, “Catholics tended to uphold both slavery and
the Confederacy,” said Rable. In the North, Catholics railed
against them both.
Regardless of their reasons for fighting, conscious or
subconscious, Irish Catholics were the single largest
Catholic group represented in the military at the time,
whether in Virginia, Maryland or elsewhere.
In his book, Father Fogarty writes, “Virginia probably never
before had a greater percentage of Catholics, as regiments
from the more Catholic states of Louisiana and Alabama moved
north to the theater of war and as Union troops occupied
Northern and later Western Virginia.”
Catholics in the Museum of the
Confederacy

At the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Catholics make
a minimal appearance in the collections. Among a collection
of 15,000 documents and 500 flags, there are two artifacts
with an obvious Catholic association.
In researching for the museum magazine’s fall 2014 edition,
John Coski, historian and vice president of research and
publications, found a single Catholic Bible. It belonged to
Tucker Randolph, brother of Norman V. Randolph, and
brother-in-law of Janet Weaver Randolph, “who were a rare FFV
(First Families of Virginia) Catholic family.” Pope Pius IX’s
1863 letter to Jefferson Davis-“the Honorable President of
the Confederate States of America” – is on display in the
collection “Knickkackery: Curiosities from the Museum’s
Vaults.” What it lacks is the letter that Davis first sent
the pope, in which he expresses “deep grief … for the
ruin and devastation caused by the war.”
“I am deeply sensible of the Christian charity which has
impelled you to this reiterated appeal to the clergy,” Davis
writes. “It is for this reason that I feel it my duty to
express personally, and in the name of the Confederate
States, our gratitude for such sentiments of Christian good
feeling and love.”
As Michael P. Foley points out in his book, Why do Catholics
Eat Fish on Friday?, the pope’s response to this letter held
no legal weight, yet it pushed Congress to cut diplomatic
ties with the Vatican shortly after the war.
Two Virginia Irish-Americans
The Museum of Virginia Catholic History, nestled by the crypt
in the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Richmond, currently
has an exhibit about Catholic Virginians entitled “The Prayer
of the South” after a poem by Civil War-era priest, Father
John Teeling of Richmond.
Curated by Richmond’s diocesan archivist, Edie Jeter, the
exhibit focuses largely on James Henry Dooley and Bishop John
McGill, the third bishop of the Richmond Diocese. (Due to its
Catholic minority, Virginia Catholics had previously been
administered by the Archbishop of Baltimore.)
The son of Irish immigrants, Dooley was a lawyer, businessman
and philanthropist today best known for his 100-acre estate,
Maymont, which is now a public park in Richmond. He grew up
attending St. Peter’s Church, a largely Irish-American church
then the seat of the Richmond Diocese. It was the same parish
that Secretary of the Navy, Stephen Mallory, the only
Catholic in Jefferson Davis’cabinet, attended.
After about two years of service, Dooley’s time in the First
Virginia Infantry – a regiment proud of its Irish identity –
ended. He was wounded at the Battle of Williamsburg in 1862,
briefly imprisoned and then sent home to work in the
Confederate Ordnance Department.
Bishop McGill, who also was born to Irish parents, served a
much more prominent role during the war. When he became the
bishop in 1850, the diocese had, according to Richard Henry
Clark’s Lives of the Deceased Bishops of the Catholic Church
in the United States, 7,000 Catholics, eight priests and 10
churches. In his 1917 essay, “Catholicity in Virginia during
the Episcopate of Bishop McGill,” Joseph Magri describes
Bishop McGill as “a fearless leader of Catholic thought, a
veritable intellectual giant” with “strength of character and
tenacity of purpose.”
One of the bishop’s main concerns during the war was
providing for the soldiers so they could worship in the
field. This meant recruiting chaplains and preparing reading
materials at a time when both men and paper were scarce. One
effort was to write and print the Catholic Devotional for
Confederate Soldiers, a book he noted “may not contain all
that some may (desire but it is an) aid for the most
essential practices of Christian life.”
“In Richmond, everybody knows about (Mr. and Mrs. James
Dooley) because of Maymont,” said Jeter, but his religious
identity is not widely discussed.
“The war would not have been the same without the Irish
Catholics,” she said, nodding to Bishop McGill.
“The Prayer of the South” will be on display through at least
the end of the month as the museum prepares for its summer
renovation, which is scheduled for mid-June.
“It made sense to have the exhibit now,” said Jeter. “We
wanted to be part of the Sesquicentennial programs taking
place across the state, and have a chance to tell Virginia’s
Catholic story.”
Stoddard can be reached at [email protected].
Find out more
To learn more about the Museum of Virginia Catholic History,
go to richmonddiocese.org/archives. To learn more about Civil
War events around the state, go to virginiacivilwar.org. For
more information about Catholic destinations in Richmond,
read the travel story at bit.ly/CatholicRichmond.

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