Crusade and conquest: Anti-Catholicism, manifest destiny, and the United States-Mexican war of 1846-1848

This dissertation examines how anti-Catholic sentiment affected Americans' conduct in, and opinions of, the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846–1848.; Chapter One explores how increased immigration and republican ideology allowed anti-Catholicism and nativism to fuse in the late 1830s and early 1840s. Nativists and many evangelical Protestants claimed that the Pope conspired to undermine American liberty by establishing a Catholic stronghold in the West with the help of a Jesuit-led army of Catholic immigrants. Moreover, many Americans argued that Roman Catholicism was incompatible with civil and religious liberty, the two hallmark freedom of republicanism. They pointed to Mexico's political troubles as an example of this incompatibility in action, and pre-war portrayals of Mexico and Catholicism helped to establish a preconception of Mexicans as a congenitally inferior, superstitious, and lazy race. Chapter Two analyzes how nativist politicians used incidents relating to the war, such as the appointment of Catholic chaplains to the U.S. army, to support further their' argument that Catholics were subverting the American republic. Contrary to their usual anti-immigrant rhetoric, nativists also supported the annexation of Mexico in its entirety in the name of Manifest Destiny, and for racist and anti-Catholic reasons. Chapter Three, through an examination of sermons, inter-denominational voluntary societies, and newspapers, investigates the interplay between anti-Catholic, evangelical Protestants and the war. Voicing their opinions in republican language, many evangelicals saw the war as a Providential opportunity to evangelize Catholic Mexico with a “pure” gospel. To them, the Manifest Destiny of the United States included the spread of Protestantism as the necessary foundation of republican government. Chapter Four looks at the experience of the American invasion force in Mexico. American soldiers, in their observations of Mexican culture, mixed racism and religious bigotry with Anglo-Saxonist, republican rhetoric. This denigration fostered a mindset among some that enabled them to commit atrocities, accost priests, and rob and vandalize churches. Using the interpretive framework of anti-Catholicism, Chapter Five examines the All Mexico debate, treaty deliberations in the U.S. Senate, and the effect of the war's end on nativists and evangelicals. When the war ended, Protestant missionaries streamed into the Mexican cession in an attempt to convert Catholics, Indians, and newly-arrived settlers.; Certain tenets of American republicanism were brought into play when the overwhelmingly Protestant United States waged war on Catholic Mexico. Located at the middle point in the growth of the antebellum anti-Catholic movement, the U.S.-Mexican War helped to hone the concept of American republicanism as an ideology that included Anglo-Saxonism and anti-Catholicism under the greater umbrella of Manifest Destiny.