1. The Escaped Nun and Other Narratives , 154.

2. John Hughes, " The Decline of Protestantism and Its Cause, " 26. Barbara Welter, "From Maria Monk to Paul Blanshard," discusses the episodic resurgence of nativist hostilities. Welter usefully seeks to examine Protestant hostility without undue reference to "paranoia."

3. Lyman Beecher, A Plea for the West , 141, 116. Bryan Le Beau, "Saving the West from The Pope," discusses nativist anxiety about the vulnerability of the Mississippi River Valley and the establishment of successful Catholic schools. St. Louis University had nearly three hundred students, Protestant and Catholic, by 1855.

4. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men , 230. An account of the sectional politics of nativism that remains useful is W. Darrell Over-dyke, The Know-Nothing Party in the South .

5. Pope or President? 350. The notion of hidden government appears in a favorable light, however, in contemporary discussions of the family. William A. Alcott's Young Wife suggests that the husband's eduction of the wife should proceed "by indirect means—silent, gentle, and often unperceived, but always operative" (24). The parallel to the hated methods of alleged papal intrigue is a close one.

6. For the roots to American civil religion, see the classic study by Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ; and Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America .

7. Helen Dhu [pseud.], Stanhope Burleigh , ix.

8. Ibid., xiii.

9. Isaac Taylor, Loyola , 16. Popular novels reiterated the image of Jesuit control extending from individual psyche across the entire globe. Overhearing the conspiratorial plans of his superiors, one Jesuit novitiate claimed: "The veil withdrawn, I beheld myself face to face with one of the most mysterious powers which has ever been known to reduce to system, on a vast scale, the art of subjugating all sorts of passions—the passions of the mass, and the passions of sovereigns—to the obtaining of a fixed and immutable purpose" ( The Jesuit Conspiracy , 27).

10. Horace Bushnell, A Letter to His Holiness Pope Gregory XVI , 8. Bushnell's letter is a fascinating example of the passive-aggressive rhetorical stance assumed by many genteel Protestants when discussing Roman Catholicism. The letter to the pope concludes: "If I would not have you go to lay up accusations against me, I ought as earnestly to hope that you may so discharge the responsibility laid upon you, by this letter, as not to be required to accuse yourself" (24).

11. Michael F. Holt, "The Politics of Impatience," 309-31.

12. "The Church of Rome in Her Theology," Christian Examiner 65 (1858): 2.

13. "Notices of Recent Publications," Christian Examiner 47 (1849): 322. The remark appears in a review of Isaac Taylor's Loyola; and Jesuitism in its Rudiments .

14. Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men , 260. Foner concludes: "The events of the 1850s clearly demonstrated that the Republican ideology, which identified the South and slavery as the enemies of northern 'free labor' and which offered immigrants a place in the economic development of the nation, had a far broader appeal to the native-born Protestants who made up the bulk of the northern population than did anti-foreign and anti-Catholic animus." See also David Brion Davis, ed., The Fear of Conspiracy , 102, and his classic piece: "Some Themes of Counter-Subversion, Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (1960-

61). The essay is reprinted in David Brion Davis, From Homicide to Slavery: Studies in American Culture (Oxford University Press, 1986). For a study of abolitionist rhetoric (and its anti-Catholic bias), see Peter F. Walker, Moral Choices , parts 1 and 2.

15. David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 , 251. For the view that anti-Catholicism functioned as a scapegoat, see the New Catholic Encyclopedia , s.v. "American Nativism," where the author observes that "the Know-Nothing uproar was used to distract the public from the slavery controversy." Potter points out that the rural Protestant North was "sympathetic to anti-slavery and temperance and nativism and unsympathetic to the hard drinking Irish Catholics." For an account of the Louisville riot see Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace, eds., American Violence , 314. The quotation in the text is from the anti-Know-Nothing journal the Louisville Courier , as reprinted in the New York Times , Aug. 10, 1855.

16. Ray Allen Billington observes: "In the south the ever-present fear of a slave insurrection was played upon by writers who conjured up supposed evidence of a Catholic-Negro alliance against Protestant whites." Billington notes that such southern fears were seemingly legitimized by Bishop England's establishment of his school ( The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860 , 139 n.56).

17. Davis, analyzing antebellum fears of conspiracies emanating from the slave power, the banking power, Freemasons, Mormons, and Catholics, notes that the significant factor was "that the ultimate peril was always conceptualized as 'slavery.'" He speculates, persuasively I think, that "this may have reflected a deep-seated guilt over the expansion of Negro slavery at a time of widening freedom and opportunity for white Americans" ( The Fear of Conspiracy , 68).

18. Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , 35.

19. Ned Buntline [Edward Zane Carroll Judson], The Jesuit's Daughter , 163.

20. See J. V. Ridgely, "George Lippard's The Quaker City," Studies in the Literary Imagination 7, no. 1 (1984), for a helpful breakdown of the novel's entangled plots, which Ridgely reads as representing the "convolutions" of the "mass mind" (79). Ridgely further observes that the novel's message is one of ubiquitous enslavement: "The road of the Republic had led from Independence Hall to Monk Hall, from the liberated spirit of man proclaimed by the patriots to the enchained minds and bodies of the Monks'' (94).

21. My figures are from Ray Allen Billington, "Tentative Bibliography of Anti-Catholic Propaganda in the United States (1800-1860)," Catholic Historical Review 18 (1932-33).

22. Western Monthly Magazine 3 (June 1835), quoted in Billington, The Protestant Crusade , 346.

23. "Are We to Have Fiction?" Metropolitan 1 (1853): 294.

24. "The Priest—the Wife—the Family," United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17 (1846): 131.

25. Calvin Colton [pseud.], Protestant Jesuitism , 30-31. Billington cites this passage as well ( The Protestant Crusade , 244).

26. David Meredith Reese, Humbugs of New-York , 225.

27. Davis, The Fear of Conspiracy , xx. Frederick Somkin, Unquiet Eagle , makes a similar point in discussing the generalized fear of America's impending doom: "In thus weaving a web of significance, the idea of the cataclysm paradoxically served the function of building a sense of security" (46). The pseudo-religion of anti-Catholicism bore evidence of the increasing heterogeneity and secularization of American society. As an accusatory structure that covertly promoted the complacency and prosperity it ostensibly attacked, anti-Catholic sentiment expressed nostalgia for the order and authority of the system it so strenuously opposed.

28. Taylor, Loyola , preface. Davis, "Some Themes of Counter-Subversion," also relates nativism to the anxieties provoked by modernization; the literature of countersubversion served a "double purpose of vicariously fulfilling repressed desires, and of releasing the tension and guilt arising from rapid social change and conflicting values" (220).

29. Beecher, A Plea for the West , 130.

30. Nicholas Murray [Kirwan, pseud.], " The Decline of Popery and Its Causes, " 6.

31. "Sacrifice," Christian Examiner 65 (1858). References to this essay are given parenthetically in the text.

32. Samuel F. B. Morse, Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States , 131-32.

33. John Adams, Letters , 1:35, quoted in Howard Mumford Jones, America and French Culture , 371 n.63.

34. Morse, Foreign Conspiracy , 186.