Persistent Anti-Popery: The Continuity of Political Anti-Catholicism in New England, 1750-1860

Anti-popery, political prejudice against Catholicism on the basis that it is not conducive to liberty, contributed to the American religious and political discourses of the Seven Years' War and the American Revolution. While some have argued that anti-popery diminished in New England during the Revolution, this paper shows that it persisted as a political assumption among New England Protestants and continued to be expressed in sermons and political debates of America's early republican period. The Franco-American alliance was a pragmatic alliance which did not ultimately do away with anti-papal sentiment. Following history to the nativist movement of the mid-nineteenth century, this paper then shows that the arguments deployed against Catholic Irish immigrants were of the same vein as those deployed by Protestant New Englanders before the American Revolution and that the assumption of religio-political anti-popery never truly faded in the early republic, allowing for it to be enlivened by the dramatic increase in New England's Catholic population in the 1820s and 1830s.