Catholic Southerners, Catholic Soldiers

Roman Catholics lived in the antebellum South, fought for the Confederate States of America, and participated in the postwar Lost Cause tradition. They encountered a Protestant-dominated South, but retained their minority religious identity. The creation of a southern brand of Catholicism, therefore, required that both Catholics and Protestants identified with some nondenominational attributes of southern culture. An examination of a white Creole regiment, the Orleans Guard, and their Catholic chaplain, Father Isidore Francois Turgis, challenges the historiographical omission of southern Catholicism from American religious history. As southerners, the Creoles of New Orleans reinforced the white supremacist, honor-driven cause of the Confederacy. They joined the predominantly Protestant Confederate Army, in which Catholics and Protestants fought and died for the same causes. As Catholics, the Confederate soldiers valued the accompaniment of a priest for sacramental and spiritual guidance. The experience of combat energized their religious sensibilities, but they did not express their religion in the same ways as Confederate evangelicals. After the war, Catholic southerners participated in the remembrance of the Lost Cause. Yet in addition to focusing on the standard Confederate icons of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, they emphasized the memory of ordinary soldiers, their brothers-in-arms. Moreover, they transformed the figure of Turgis into a hero of the South, acceptable even to non-Catholics, despite his position as a recent French immigrant and an anti-slavery advocate.