Abstract
There is no shortage of scholarly analysis concerning the American Civil War’s domestic impact: the end of sectionalist fervor and regionalism, the end of slavery, the catalyst for Westward expansion unto the Pacific, and the first seeds of what would become the American behemoth in the twentieth century. Far less, however, is known about the international, in particular European, aspects of the War, a crucial theater that, in many ways—from the Cotton Crisis to the Trent Crisis to, especially, the potential of British and/or French intervention—was every bit as important as the Battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg.
This essay is rooted in this lesser known European theater. It is a study of Confederate diplomacy, more specifically a Catholic-Confederate diplomacy where two clergymen—Patrick Lynch, Bishop of Charleston, and the chaplain Father John Bannon—were sent by Jefferson Davis’ government as official state-sponsored envoys to the European powers and the pope (Pius IX) late in the War. Why study the diplomatic exploits of Catholic priests? The prime reason concerns allegiance. These men, like all Catholics in the South, were natural “dual-citizens,” invested members of their surrounding Southern culture yet, simultaneously, members of the universal Catholic religion headquartered in Rome. That a great number of Catholic priests had been born in Europe, as was the case with Bannon and Lynch (both born in Ireland), only adds to a multifaceted allegiance paradigm uncommon to other Civil War Southerners and casts a thoroughly American topic in a European light.
