Catholics in the Old South

A Book Review by J.C. Sullivan

Randall M. Miller and Jon L. Wakelyn have edited a score of essays dealing with a number of issues that affected Catholic life in the American South, a topic that heretofore has received no historical attention in mainstream literary life. Gathering from a multitude of little-known resources however, they have pieced together an intellectual masterpiece about this almost unknown subject. Although the Irish influence can be found throughout all resource material and subsequent chapters, Irish America will find the one that is most interesting to us is  The South’s Irish Catholics:  A Case of Cultural Confinement by Dennis Clark.

Because of our legacy of exile, Clark points out that our presence is demonstrated with our priests in Florida’s Spanish missions, as officials for the Spanish crown in Louisiana and Texas, convicts in George, settlers in the Carolinas and traders among the Indians. While in Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans we kept our cultural identity through social societies such as the Hibernians. Others of us not so fortunate contracted for indentured service that benefited tradesmen and householders.

Clark maintains that it was not only the “Scotch-Irish” from Ulster that peopled the Appalachian, Ozark and Smoky Mountains but also Irish-Catholic fugitives fleeing from indentured service. He quotes Colonists in Bondage:  White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607-1776. We gained security in the impenetrable mountains and because of the freedom we sought, created the “distrust of strangers, authority and inquisitive influences” that has long been notable among mountain people.

This scholarly piece takes us away from the notion of our  large cities. Many of our ancestors did, indeed, settle the cities, but so many, many more moved throughout America where the work was to be found. My own maternal gggfather, Patrick W. Murphy worked the rivers and railroads, wherever he found the work. American actor Tyrone Power, father of the late actor Tyrone Power, encountered them everywhere. He found we were “clannish, strangers to the local population, sharing their own speech and secret morale. Their itinerant work on flatboats, railroads and drainage gangs made them peripheral to the religious and social communities they touched.”

The myriad of footnote references makes those of us with a historical bent more anxious to see these become part of Irish-American mainstream literary bookshelf collections.  Niehaus The Irish in New Orleans; The Life and Times of John England, First Bishop of Charleston; Catholicity in Washington, Georgia; Catholicism in the Lower South; all beggar the inquisitive mind to seek this nourishment for the Irish soul.