Missionaries of Republicanism

The term "Manifest Destiny" has traditionally been linked to U.S. westward expansion in the nineteenth century, the desire to spread republican government, and racialist theories like Anglo-Saxonism. Yet few people realize the degree to which "Manifest Destiny" and American republicanism relied on a deeply anti-Catholic civil-religious discourse. John C. Pinheiro traces the rise to prominence of this discourse, beginning in the 1820s and culminating in theMexican-American War of 1846-1848. Pinheiro begins with social reformer and Protestant evangelist Lyman Beecher, who was largely responsible for synthesizing seemingly unrelated strands of religious, patriotic, expansionist, and political sentiment into one universally understood argument about the future of the United States. When the overwhelmingly Protestant United States went to war with Catholic Mexico, this "Beecherite Synthesis" provided Americans with the most important means of defining their own identity, understandingMexicans, and interpreting the larger meaning of the war. Anti-Catholic rhetoric constituted an integral piece of nearly every major argument for or against the war and was so universally accepted that recruiters, politicians, diplomats, journalists, soldiers, evangelical activists, abolitionists,and pacifists used it. It was also, Pinheiro shows, the primary tool used by American soldiers to interpret Mexico's culture. All this activity in turn reshaped the anti-Catholic movement. Preachers could now use caricatures of Mexicans to illustrate Roman Catholic depravity and nativists could point to Mexico as a warning about what America would be like if dominated by Catholics. Missionaries of Republicanism provides a critical new perspective on ''Manifest Destiny,'' American republicanism, anti-Catholicism, and Mexican-American relations in the nineteenth century.

This book is essential reading for students of the Mexican War as well as American political culture. Pinheiro is especially strong in documenting how Protestant Anglo-Saxonism shaped political discourse throughout the conflict but also conditioned military decisions and the wartime experiences of countless Protestant and Catholic soldiers. Although scholars have long recognized the influence of anti-Catholicism in antebellum society, Pinheiro convincingly demonstrates that anti-Catholic Anglo-Saxonism sparked militant nativism long before the late nineteenth century., John C. Pinheiro provides an elegant and concise overview of the growth of American anti-Catholicism in the 1830s and 1840s ...The most compelling consideration yet of the power of anti-Catholic discourse on the U.S. side of the conflict.

John C. Pinheiro is Associate Professor of History at Aquinas College.