In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Catholicism was often presented in the U.S. not only as a threat to Protestantism but also as an enemy of democracy. Focusing on literary and cultural representations of Catholics as a political force, Elizabeth Fenton argues that the U.S. perception of religious freedom grew partly, and paradoxically, out of a sometimes virulent but often genteel anti-Catholicism. Depictions of Catholicism's imagined intolerance and cruelty allowed writers time and again to depict their nation as tolerant and free. As Religious Liberties shows, anti-Catholic sentiment particularly shaped U.S. conceptions of pluralism and its relationship to issues as diverse as religious privacy, territorial expansion, female citizenship, political representation, chattel slavery, and governmental partisanship. Drawing on a wide range of materials--from the Federalist Papers to antebellum biographies of Toussaint Louverture; from nativist treatises to Margaret Fuller's journalism; from convent exposés to novels by Catharine Sedgwick, Augusta J. Evans, Nathanial Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain--Fenton's study excavates the influence of anti-Catholic sentiment on both the liberal tradition and early U.S. culture more generally. In concert, these texts suggest how the prejudice against Catholicism facilitated an alignment of U.S. nationalism with Protestantism, thus ensuring the mutual dependence, rather than the putative "separation" of church and state.

Elizabeth Fenton is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Vermont.

Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction Privacy, Pluralism, and Anti-Catholic Democracy Chapter One Catholic Canadians and Protestant Pluralism in the Early Republic Chapter Two Pleas for Democracy: Federalism, Expansionism, and Nativism Chapter Three Papal Persuasions: Religious Conversion and Deliberative Democracy Chapter Four This is My Body Politic: Catholic Democracy and the Limits of Representation Chapter Five Haitian Catholicism and the End of Pluralism Chapter Six Losing Faith: Ultramontane Liberalism and Democratic Failure Afterword Index