Anti-Catholicism and Nativism in Antebellum America

The Rise of Anti-Catholic Conspiracy and Nativism (1830s - 1850s)

Intellectual Origins: Articulating the Subversive Catholic Plot

During the 1830s, concurrent with the initial wave of anti-Catholic sentiment (such as the violence against convents), prominent thinkers began to articulate a sophisticated narrative of Catholic subversion. These intellectual elites, Samuel Morse and Lyman Beecher, did not traffic in sensational