An Honest, Alternative U.S. History

What does it mean to be American? And how does being American relate to being Catholic? In the Catholic Textbook Project’s lavishly illustrated and helpfully annotated high school history textbook The American Venture, author Christopher Zehnder makes clear that the second question is more challenging than many admit. After all, what we call “America” can be traced back to 13 English colonies that were not only dominated by Protestants but often led by Freemasons. This does not mean that a devout American Catholic cannot love America; it does mean that, as Americans, Catholics cannot relate to the Founding Fathers in exactly the same way a French Catholic patriot might relate to, say, Joan of Arc.

For instance, Catholics who pretend there is no tension between Catholic identity and American nationality should consider the controversy aroused by King George III’s Quebec Act of 1774. As Zehnder retells it:

The act guaranteed to the French in Quebec the freedom to practice their Catholic faith and allowed them to govern themselves by French rather than English laws…. British colonists were appalled that a Protestant king would tolerate the Catholic Church anywhere in his domain. Propagandists warned that the act might be the first move to force them to follow “tyrannical” French law, and convert to the Catholic Church. Alexander Hamilton of New York worried that “a nation of Papists and slaves” threatened the liberties of English America. Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty spread the rumor that George III was himself secretly thinking of becoming Catholic.

All this has been public record for a couple centuries, yet to this day it has not sunk into the American Catholic consciousness: One of the grievances against King George was that he seemed too friendly toward Quebec’s Catholics.

Elsewhere, Zehnder acknowledges the plight of American Tories, along with some awkward truths. Only about a third of the American colonists were committed to the revolution, with another third noncommittal, and the last third downright opposed. Hence, “it was difficult (if not impossible) to defend the idea that Congress derived its powers from all the people or even the majority of them,” Zehnder explains. He goes on to describe how “Committees of Safety” were established to enforce devotion to the revolutionary cause, whereby revolutionaries might punish their Tory neighbors with tarring and feathering or even execution. Such committees seem a little sinister in light of the French and Bolshevik Revolutions, especially given that it is to this period that we owe the term lynching. (A judge named Charles Lynch took it upon himself to punish Tory opponents of the American Revolution without bothering with the niceties of law.)

To be clear, this is no quixotic brief for Britain. Zehnder’s text relates Edmund Burke’s defense of the colonists, and, in any event, the colonists had other, more creditable grievances against the British crown, such as Parliament’s abrupt break with a longstanding, royally sanctioned policy of exempting the colonies from taxation. If Parliament had really needed money so badly, it could have applied fees to colonial trade instead of meddling in the colonies’ internal affairs. Long accustomed to self-governance, the colonies were shocked by Parliament’s sudden, heavyhanded measures.

Zehnder makes clear that his aim is not to belittle the colonists but to make us see how our story is much more complicated — and richer and more human — than what a shallow American nationalism might have us believe. Maybe an ideological nationalist has to pretend that George III was nothing but a despotic evildoer, and the American cause a purely righteous crusade; an American patriot surely need not be so delusional. We need not pattern our worldview on shallow Hollywood blockbusters.

Perhaps this point is most easily made through Zehnder’s meticulous treatment of the U.S. Constitution. Just as he refuses to reduce the American Revolution to a one-dimensional narrative of liberty-loving heroes pitted against wicked tyrants, so, too, does he decline to cast the fascinating debate about the Constitution as a morality play about the defeat of narrow-minded Anti-Federalists by sage Federalists. After all, what we think of as America’s constitutional order exists not as the result of a Federalist victory but because of a compromise, one that emerged from the struggle between the two factions. Our celebrated first ten amendments were only stapled onto the tail end of the Constitution as a means of placating Anti-Federalists suspicious of the new federal power. If the Federalists can be credited with the Constitution, the Anti-Federalists can claim the Bill of Rights.

In any event, Zehnder fairly and impartially relates the arguments of both sides. Anti-Federalists like Richard Henry Lee and Patrick Henry feared that the new Constitution “would establish a consolidated government that in time would rob states of their sovereignty and make them dependent on it,” and they warned that under the new system, “congressmen would be so far removed from the people they represented that they could easily be influenced and even controlled by the wealthy.” In retrospect, such warnings give us food for thought, as do the Anti-Federalists’ fear that “the new judiciary — the federal courts and ultimately the Supreme Court — had no real checks on its power. Since judges were appointed for life and could only be removed by a difficult process of impeachment, they answered to no one.”

For their part, Federalists like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton denied that consolidated government would ensue, since only truly national issues like foreign policy and currency would fall under the purview of the central authority. Their position was that “the very structure of the federal government protected states’ rights,” as Zehnder remarks. “Everything having to do with what happens within state boundaries and does not affect other states or foreign countries would still be addressed by the states alone.” Interestingly enough, the very theory whereby the Federalists advocated the Constitution would today appear somewhat controversial; we live in an age when the “consolidated government” rejected by both sides is widely taken for granted as a good thing.

Inevitably, this discussion of centralization and federal authority brings us to Zehnder’s account of the American Civil War. Once more, he offers a wealth of detail, as well as some alternative observations we are now unlikely to encounter in the public square:

What perhaps was the South’s greatest asset was the resolution on the part of many of her people, men and women, to resist what they saw as an invasion of their homeland by strangers. Not all, or perhaps even most, southerners fought to preserve slavery or for some constitutional ideal like states’ rights; rather, as one southern man said, they fought because “the South is our country, the North is the country of those who live there.” Indeed, the man who became the South’s greatest general, Robert E. Lee, though deeply attached to the union, joined the southern cause because he would not fight against his home state, Virginia.

Until the past decade or so, the preceding passage would have been unexceptional in any history textbook published in any part of America, North or South. In this age of woke hypersensitivities, however, what is distinctly impressive about Zehnder’s chapters on the Civil War is his candid engagement of the Southern point of view. Like it or not, he reminds us that there were many Confederate Catholics — not only soldiers and politicians, such as General P.G.T. Beauregard and Confederate Navy Secretary Stephen Mallory, but even clergy, such as French-born Augustin Vérot, the “zealous pro-Confederate” bishop of Florida who ministered to Union POWs during the war and afterwards worked on behalf of freed slaves.

Also, unlike other textbooks published nowadays, The American Venture concedes that the abolishment of slavery was not the war’s only result. Federal triumph dealt a crippling blow to “the cause of decentralized power and state sovereignty championed by the likes of Thomas Jefferson,” Zehnder muses, as under postwar presidents like Ulysses S. Grant, “the states were to function as instruments of Washington.” Yet, at the same time, The American Venture pulls no punches in addressing either the abuses of the plantation system or the cruelty of the slave trade, nor does it minimize the heroism and motivation of Union champions, including Union Catholics. Zehnder relates in detail inspirational stories like that of Augustus Tolton, the runaway slave who later became the first African-American priest in the United States. So, any suggestion that Zehnder has a pro-Southern bias cannot be sustained.

All told, it is clear to the careful reader that Zehnder is no eccentric revisionist but a conscientious scholar, one who leaves no stone unturned in his exploration of the past. Whether covering the Founding, the Civil War, or, for that matter, American involvement in World War I or the atomic bombings that punctuated its successor, his honesty and diligence are refreshing. It is to be hoped that they are contagious. For only through such honesty and diligence can we American Catholics recover our roots and remember who we are.

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