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