• DOI:10.1353/NHR.2001.0063
• Corpus ID: 145550276

Charleston's Bishop John England and American Slavery

@article{Kelly2001CharlestonsBJ,
  title={Charleston's Bishop John England and American Slavery},
  author={Joseph Kelly},
  journal={New Hibernia Review},
  year={2001},
  volume={5},
  pages={48 - 56}
}

• Joseph Kelly
• Published 1 December 2001
• History
• New Hibernia Review

we can trace the corporate life of a community—and its ideology—through the biographies of its eminent men and women.1 In the history of the American South, biography can help us explain why slavery—once considered an evil to be tolerated—came to be defended as a postive good.2 The life the first Roman Catholic bishop of Charleston, John England, and especially his failures in the summer of , helps explain this ideological reversal. Born in Cork City, John England (–) was the oldest child of a family that had suffered under the tyranny of the anti-Catholic Penal Laws: his grandfather had been imprisoned for four years, and his father, threatened with transportation to the West Indies for the terrible crime of teaching school, had spent a year hiding in the mountains of County Cork.3 Called to the priesthood, England spent his earlier years as a cleric running a local newspaper that actively agitated for Catholic emancipation. It was not Joseph Kelly