| This dissertation argues that in the mid-nineteenth century, anti-Catholicism was a natural inclination of the intellectual outlook of both citizens of the United States and subjects of the British Crown in colonial Upper Canada. This project is a historical work; its source base is archival, and its methodology qualitative.;By 1830, Protestant evangelicals had begun to draft a Christian account of American history; in this narrative, the Reformation had begun a process whereby freely saved Christian men founded colonies in the New World and subsequently fought a Revolution for the spiritual and political freedoms of that land. This version of American history illustrated merely one logical conclusion of a similar British narrative. In that account, the United Kingdom, seen as an inherently Protestant place despite the presence of several million Catholics, had already achieved perfection in spiritual and political freedoms. These, Britons passed on to the North American colonies still under the Crown. In Upper Canada, for instance, Loyalism, not independence, became the logical product of post-Reformation events. Despite this divergence in the understanding of the history of the United States and Upper Canada, anti-Catholicism would he common in both places---not due to simply religious bigotry, but because it was widely understood that the triumph of Protestantism was crucial to the success of the nation and the colony, respectively.;"Anti-Catholicism and the Development of Protestant Nationhood," examines the creation and application of the common reality of anti-Catholicism in American and Canadian intellectual and public life, highlighting the struggle over religious identity during this major period of nation-building. Suspicion of Catholic theology, Catholic clergy, Catholic laity and the Pope in Rome pervaded American and Canadian histories of this period; it infused systems of education, and infested public speeches. The occasional convent-burning, and the more than occasional Catholic-Protestant riot were but the by-products of a larger reality in the character of nineteenth-century North America. |
