Archbishop Hughes

John Joseph Hughes was the Archbishop of New York in 1860. He was born in Ireland in 1797. His family emigrated to the United States in 1816, and he followed them the next year. He studied at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Maryland, and he was ordained in 1826 in Philadelphia where he acquired a reputation as a vigorous defender of the church. He was appointed the coadjutor bishop of New York in 1837; he was consecrated as the fourth bishop of New York in 1842 and as the first archbishop of New York in 1850.

The archbishop’s cathedral was Saint Patrick’s, located on Mulberry Street just north of Prince Street. The building was completed in 1815. Archbishop Hughes initiated the construction of the present Saint Patrick’s Cathedral at 50th Street and Fifth Avenue – the cornerstone was laid in 1858, although it was not completed until after the archbishop’s death. Old Saint Patrick’s became a parish church when the new cathedral was consecrated, but it remains in operation, its churchyard and burial ground surrounded by a high redbrick wall. (The parish website has an interesting video about Archbishop Hughes and another about the architecture of the church and its associated buildings.)

In the presidential election of 1860 much was made of the associations with Catholicism of Stephen A Douglas, nominee of one segment of the Democratic Party and United States senator from Illinois. Senator Douglas’ second wife was a Catholic, and with his permission she sent his children by his first wife to a Catholic school. Inasmuch as Archbishop Hughes was regarded as the most prominent member of the Catholic clergy in the United States, it was not unusual for his name to be invoked by newspaper articles about Senator Douglas and Catholicism.

The Press & Tribune of Chicago on July 21, 1860 ran a lengthy article entitled “Is Douglas a Catholic?” that repeated the familiar, decades-old arguments directed by Protestants against Catholics in the United States. The following excerpts give the flavor:

We have never asserted that Judge Douglas is a Catholic. We do not intend to make that assertion until we can prove it. But in spite of our honest forbearance, the talk on the streets makes out a prima facie case against him….

The super human efforts of the Catholic papers in his behalf, before and after the meeting of the Charleston Convention; and the fact of the appearance of Archbishop Hughes at a Douglas meeting in New York – a meeting held to influence the action of the New York delegation in Baltimore; the unaccountable zeal of the Catholics in the delegation when the Convention assembled – these things couples with the fact that every Catholic journal in the United States, and as far as we know every priest and bishop and an overwhelming majority of the laymen of the Catholic Church are now supporting him as they never support anybody but a brother in the faith, make out what zealous Protestants call a strong case….

Judge Douglas has an unquestioned right to join the Catholic Church if he wants to….

Most men believe that Catholicism in this country is not so much a system of religion as a politico-ecclesiastic system – an engine for obtaining political power to the detriment of Liberty … and when it is proposed to establish a center of Catholic influence in the White House, for controlling the country’s diplomacy and domestic legislation, naturally enough people want to know it. The Protestant principle is very dear to Americans. It is the principle of religious and political liberty. To it we owe the Republican government and all the blessings which flow therefrom; and to it the hopes of all patriots are turned as the star which is to light all nations to independence and freedom. They want no impediment put in the way of the onward progress of that principle in its mission for freeing and blessing mankind. Least of all do they want this Protestant government turned over to the tender mercies of Catholic hands….

Who has ever known of the attendance of Archbishop Hughes upon partisan meetings, except in this one case that we have cited, in which Judge Douglas’ interests were at stake. It cannot be personal friendship; the Archbishop has greater friendship for Mr. Seward than for the Senator from Illinois; but when did he ever go to a Republican mass meeting for forward Mr. Seward’s claim?

The New York Times reported on the pro-Douglas meeting before the Democratic Convention (which failed to nominate a presidential candidate when it first convened in Charleston) reconvened at Baltimore, and it noted the attendance of Archbishop Hughes “and a number of other Catholic clergymen”.

The Wyandot Pioneer of Upper Sandusky, Ohio ran a briefer piece on July 5, 1860 under the headline “Now and Then”, which took a somewhat different spin on the subject. It is a more clever and effective piece of propaganda both for its brevity and for asserting conclusions without troubling the reader with a litany of facts:

When Gen. [Winfield] Scott was a candidate for the Presidency [as a Whig] the Democratic party considered him unfit for that high office because some of his family were Catholics, and they went so far as to intimate that the brave old man was in league with the Pope. Now they are engaged in singing hosannahs to Stephen A. Douglas whose family are not only Catholics, but who worships in that Church himself, and to whose nomination no man contributed more than did Arch-Bishop Hughes, the head and front of the Church in America. How circumstances do alter the cases – What a change has come o’er the spirit of their dreams since 1852.