Three of my grandparents had been raised Catholic and thus, I was raised Catholic. During much of the year I was in the San Francisco Bay Area going to Catholic schools and felt much at home. Every summer my younger sister and I were put on an airplane to go to New Hampshire, where we would stay with my grandparents. My Papa was raised Northern Baptist and his wife, my Nana converted to Protestantism after being disowned by her Catholic family for marrying him. During the summer when we were around our aunts, uncles, and cousins, we were the sole Catholics and that just felt odd. The small town my grandparents lived in had a small Catholic Church, but during the summer services moved to a larger building near the lake so that tourists from Massachusetts and New York could attend Sunday mass. When I was at home in California, I saw so many Catholic Churches and assumed that most Americans were Catholic, but every summer I was reminded that was not the case. The history of Catholics in America has always been interesting to me, and my favorite topics are Colonial America and the Revolution. My husband comes from a prominent Protestant family that can trace its history in both New England and in Georgia. Searching for my family is a much more daunting task. I even searched in vain to find evidence of their involvement in the American Revolution in a hope to join DAR, but no luck. The ones who had moved to the Americas from Europe were established in Quebec, however most would not arrive until a century or two later.
The Catholic nations of Europe simply were never as enthusiastic about spreading out and settling like the Protestants of England of even the Netherlands, thus they had exceedingly small numbers even decades after their settlement in the Americas. I was curious what could find in the way of older sources on the contributions of Catholics during the American Revolution, so I searched the database Sabin Americana, which has a wide collection of monographs and pamphlets on Americas, written in many languages and spanning the 16th through early 20th centuries. I came up with a text on the Catholic History of North America and explored the chapter on the American Revolution. This text is a collection of lectures that were given by Thomas D’Arcy McGee who had authored a book on the Irish during the Reformation and their settlement in North America.
McGee confirms what I already knew about Catholics in America
but has stories and data to back it up. For example, in 1774, there were only sixteen
Catholic missionaries in all of Pennsylvania and Maryland and all of them were
Jesuits and that the Catholics who did join the Continental Army came from the
lower classes of Catholic immigrants.[1] Although most colonists were not Catholic,
there was still a role played by Catholics in support of the revolutionary
experience. The French sent thousands of Catholic troops in support of the
Americans and the Lithuanian-Polish hero Tadeusz Kościuszko also played a
crucial role in obtaining an American victory.[2]
[1] Thomas D'Arcy McGee, The Catholic History of North America: Five Discourses: To Which Are Added Two Discourses on the Relations of Ireland and America (Boston: P. Donahoe, 1855, 1855). https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CY0100535948/SABN?u=vic_liberty&sid=bookmark-SABN&xid=e1bae8f4&pg=85, 78.
[2] McGee, The Catholic
History of North, 84.
[3] Charles H. Metzger,
"Catholics in the Period of the American Revolution," Records of the
American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 59, no. 3 (1948), accessed
2023/04/09/, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44210031, 216.
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