Patrick N. Lynch, 1817-1882

Stephen J. White Sr., David C. R. Heisser

Description

Patrick Neison Lynch, born in a small town in Ireland, became the third Roman Catholic bishop of the Diocese of Charleston, South Carolina. Lynch is remembered today mostly for his support of the Confederacy, his unofficial diplomatic mission to the Vatican on behalf of the Confederate cause, and for his ownership and management of slaves owned by the Catholic diocese. In the first biography of Lynch, David C. R. Heisser and Stephen J. White, Sr. investigate those controversial issues in Lynch's life, but they also illuminate his intellectual character and his labors as bishop of Charleston in the critical era of the state and nation's religious history. For, during the nineteenth century, Catholics both assimilated into South Carolina's predominantly Protestant society and preserved their own faith and practices.

A native of Ireland, Lynch immigrated with his family to the town of Cheraw when he was a boy. At the age of twelve, he became a protégé of John England, the founding bishop of the diocese of Charleston. After studying at the seminary England founded in Charleston, Bishop England sent Lynch to prepare for the priesthood in Rome. The young man returned an accomplished scholar and became an integral part of Charleston's intellectual environment. He served as parish priest, editor of a national religious newspaper, instructor in a seminary, and active member of nearly every literary, scientific, philosophical society in Charleston.

Just three years before the outbreak of the Civil War Lynch rose to the position of Bishop of Charleston. During the war he distinguished himself in service to his city, state, and the Confederate cause, culminating in his "not-so-secret" mission to Rome on behalf of Jefferson Davis's government. Upon Lynch's return, which was accomplished only after a pardon from U. S. President Andrew Johnson, he dedicated himself to rebuilding his battered diocese and retiring an enormous debt that had resulted from the conflagration of 1861, which destroyed the Cathedral of St. John and St. Finbar, and wartime destruction in Charleston, Columbia, and throughout the state.

Lynch executed plans to assimilate newly freed slaves into the Catholic Church and to welcome Catholic immigrants from Europe and the northern states. Traveling throughout the eastern United States he gave lectures to religious and secular organizations, presided over dedications of new churches, and gave sermons at consecrations of bishops and installations of cardinals, all the while begging for contributions to rebuild his diocese. Upon his death, Lynch was celebrated throughout his city, state and nation for his generosity of spirit, intellectual attainments, and dedication to his holy church.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Religious
• HISTORY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Henry Washington
• James Henley Thornwell
• James Murray Mason
• Hugh Judson Kilpatrick
• James Gibbons
• William Gilmore Simms
• William Henry Elder
• Catholic Church
• Henry Ward Beecher
• William H. Seward
• Peter Claver
• Samuel J. Tilden
• History of the Americas
• Catholic
• Christianity
• Ambrose Burnside
• Orestes Brownson
• Isaac Hecker
• John McCloskey
• United States
• James Duggan
• Stephen A. Douglas
• FL
• William Henry Seward
• John Henry Newman
• KY
• LA
• Robert Gould Shaw
• TN
• MS
• Samuel Jones Tilden
• SC
• NC
• AR
• VA
• GA

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 27 janvier 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611174052
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

P ATRICK N. L YNCH , 1817-1882
Patrick N. Lynch 1817-1882
T HIRD C ATHOLIC B ISHOP OF C HARLESTON
David C. R. Heisser and Stephen J. White, Sr.


T HE U NIVERSITY OF S OUTH C AROLINA P RESS
2015 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Heisser, David C. R.
Patrick N. Lynch, 1817-1882 : third Catholic bishop of Charleston / David C.R. Heisser and Stephen J. White, Sr.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61117-404-5 (hardbound : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-1-61117-405-2 (ebook) 1. Lynch, Patrick Neison, 1817-1882. 2. Bishops-South Carolina-Charleston- Bishops-Biography. 3. Catholic Church-South Carolina-Charleston-Bishops- Biography. I. Title.
BX4705.L963H45 2014
282.092-dc23
[B]
2014023112
JACKET ILLUSTRATION: painting of Bishop Patrick N. Lynch, courtesy of Catholic Diocese of Charleston Archive
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Prologue
1 | Formative Years
2 | Priest in Charleston
3 | Advancement in the 1850s
4 | Slaveholdings
5 | The War
6 | Rome Mission
7 | Slavery Treatise
8 | War s End and Return Home
9 | Baltimore Second Plenary
10 | Reconstruction
11 | 1870s to His Death
Epilogue
ABBREVIATIONS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ILLUSTRATIONS
Map of Ireland
Map of South Carolina
Buildings of Conlaw Lynch
John England
Propaganda Fide
Young Patrick Lynch
The Reverend Dr. James H. Thornwell
Bishop Ignatius Reynolds
Cathedral of St. Finbar
St. Mary s Church in Edgefield, South Carolina
Lynch s Slave List
James Corcoran
Archbishop John Hughes
Ruins of Catholic Cathedral of St. Finbar
Lynch at Fort Sumter
Jefferson Davis
Commission from Jefferson Davis
Cardinal Antonelli
Pope Pius IX
Slavery treatise
Presidential pardon
Pro-Cathedral
Pinckney House
Immaculate Conception
Cardinal McCloskey
Daniel J. Quigley
Bishop Lynch
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This biography of Bishop Patrick Neison Lynch is the work of several decades. Dr. David Heisser began his research in the 1980s. A native Charlestonian, he was educated in the Cathedral Grammar School, which was located in the former procathedral building that Lynch commissioned just after the Civil War. He earned his bachelors of arts degree at the College of Charleston, on whose board Lynch sat in the 1870s. Heisser received a doctorate in European intellectual history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and subsequently earned a master s in library science from Columbia University. He taught history at the University of Miami and at the University of South Carolina-Salkehatchie. And finally he retired from the post of research librarian at the Citadel s Daniel Library. In all of these positions he was a consummate researcher. He traveled all over the United States and to the Vatican Library in Rome in pursuit of information and documentation related to Lynch s life. But alas, illness and death ended his quest to provide a public narrative of his most worthy subject.
One of his dying requests was that I complete his nearly lifelong project. He left behind several essentially complete chapters, along with fifteen boxes of research materials, which included photocopies of primary and secondary sources and unpublished dissertations and theses, as well as complete published works on Lynch s era, Catholic history and theology, and the antebellum and Civil War periods of American history. David s relentless research resulted in a mass of material that will remain for future scholars in the Charleston Diocesan Archives in the Heisser files.
Along the way he met and incurred debts to many archivists, scholars, and historians, each of whom ultimately became his friend. In Ireland, David joined the Clogher Historical Society and benefited from extensive hunts performed by Theo McMahon and the society s staff. Padrig Clerkin of the Monaghan County Museum filled lengthy e-mails with information gathered about the Lynch legacy in his birthplace in the Emerald Isle. In Cheraw, South Carolina, Sarah Cain Spruill offered hospitality, tours, and much vital historical information on the Lynch family and on the buildings constructed by Conlaw Peter Lynch. In Boston, Dr. William Scott McDougal retrieved records from Massachusetts General Hospital archives relating to Lynch s surgery there in 1877. Dr. William Turner of the Medical University of South Carolina offered expert diagnosis and analysis of the medical condition that led to Lynch s death. David communicated with every Catholic diocese in the eastern United States that might have received correspondence from or sent correspondence to Bishop Lynch. He scoured the Library of Congress and the Special Collections of the University of Notre Dame, Georgetown University, and Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and received tremendous assistance from the staffs of these institutions. He was allowed access to rarely seen documents in the Vatican Library by Monsignor Liam Bergin, Rector of the Irish College, Rome, and by the Secretariat of the Pontifical Gregorian University.
Resources and assistance in Charleston were most vital in supporting David s and my research. Local lawyers and historians Donald Williams and Robert Rosen provided Charleston Irish and Civil War contexts that all historians welcome. Robert Salvo at the Charleston Library Society must be noted, along with many of that institution s staff. Dr. Nicholas Butler at both the South Carolina Historical Society and, later, the Charleston Archives of the Charleston County Library was an indispensable source of help. At the College of Charleston, Addlestone Library Special Collections Department, we must mention Marie Ferrara, Harlan Greene, Gene Waddell, and John White. From the History Department of the College of Charleston, Dr. David Gleason, Dr. Lee Drago, Robert P. Stockton, and Dr. Bernard Powers offered valued input and advice.
The greatest collection of personal and professional papers relating to Lynch s life is contained at the Catholic Diocese of Charleston Archives, housed in the carriage house of the old Pinckney Mansion purchased by Lynch in 1866. Diocesan archivists Sister Anne Francis, Susan King, and Mary Giles all gave unflinching support to both David and me. But by far the largest contribution in both research and advice (serving as a reader on many chapters) came from the current diocesan archivist, Brian Fahey. To these individuals and institutions I offer my heartfelt gratitude in my name and in that of Dr. David Heisser.
S TEPHEN J ENNINGS W HITE Sr.
Prologue
A one-year-old in the arms of his worried and pregnant mother, as the ship rolled across the waves of the northern Atlantic, Patrick Neison Lynch sailed west to his destiny. Alongside, his father held tight the hands of the boy s elder sister, who was but a toddler herself. His parents had braved the dangers of a sea voyage to seek opportunities in the New World. In search of a better life in America, they left behind in Ireland a lineage of ennobled ancestors. Aboard ship, his mother gave birth to his brother, John, who not only became a lifelong friend and companion but also established a distinguished career in medicine. This volume, recounting the life of Patrick Neison Lynch, is a story of journeys across dangerous seas to make a career as a churchman. It encapsulates the stories of thousands who fled Ireland to grasp the opportunities that awaited them in America. For the lure of the United States was that it was a nation of people who risked losing their memories and traditions in a struggle to fulfill or to remake lives in the most open society that humanity had yet created.
The Irish made up a good proportion of the flood of peoples that made America. Four and a half million souls emigrated from the Emerald Isle between 1820 and 1920. The largest number arrived in the era of the Great Famine, between 1846 and 1854, most of them small farmers and farm workers from the hungriest, most impoverished rural counties. Irish immigrants constituted 44 percent of the foreign-born white population in the United States on the eve of the Civil War. Irish labor built the roads, canals and railroads of the United States, performing labors considered too dangerous for enslaved African Americans-actual chattel with retail value-to perform. In the post-Civil War years, millions more came and found doors shut both socially and economically in the northern urban centers. Yet they persevered and clawed their way first to acceptance and then to prominence in every part of their adopted nation.
Charleston and the Carolinas offered more felicitous circumstances than many other landing sites. Irish adventurers were passengers on the first ships that landed on the Ashley River in 1670. Irishmen from the upcountry fought as Whigs and Tories bravely and with distinction in South Carolina during the American Revolution. Four South Carolina descendants of Irishmen signed the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, the founding documents of this nation. An Irish-Catholic priest, the Reverend Dr. Simon Felix Gallagher, helped save and taught at the College of Charleston in the early nineteenth century. He also served as the first president of the Hibernian Society.
John England, a Cork native, arrived in 1820 to establish a diocese for Roman Catholics south of Virginia. The Lynches of County Monaghan had landed in Georgetown, South Carolina, just months before the arrival of this Irish cleric. Their paths crossed at the Episcopalian town of Cheraw, and this historic rendezvous fundamentally shaped the story of Catholics in South Carolina. Bishop England was a well-educated cleric. Lynch s father had aristocratic ancestors and had arrived from Erie with both an e