Andrew Stern has done a great service in exploring relations between elite white Protestants and Catholics in Charleston, Louisville, and Mobile. Catholicism in the South has been at issue at least since the poet Allen Tate observed that the region was a feudal society without a feudal religion, yet historians have reflected relatively little about how Catholic practice and institutions fit into the questions we ask about the region.

This brief book adds nuance to the literature on elite Catholics first explored by Jon Wakelyn in 1983, and it should encourage future work. As late as 1840, Catholics in the southern states made up the majority of all American Catholics. They held positions of prominence throughout the region and Catholic institutions served people of all kinds. Jefferson Davis, to cite one example, was educated in Catholic schools in Kentucky.

Stern boldly argues that “tolerance and cooperation, more than violence and animosity, marked Catholic-Protestant relations in the antebellum South” (2). This was rooted in Catholics' accommodation to slavery. “The Catholic Church, like the Protestant churches of the South, mirrored the racial values of its adherents. This gave the church a cultural home in southern society,” Stern writes. “Southern Protestants supported the institutions—charities, schools, and churches—central to Catholicism, and Catholics supported the institution central to the South” (146).

The strongest evidence of tolerance came in the cooperation between Catholics and Protestants in building charitable institutions, schools, and churches. Catholic nuns nursed residents of Augusta during a yellow fever epidemic in 1839. In 1836, the Sisters of Nazareth opened St. Vincent Infirmary in Louisville. Catholics opened orphanages in Mobile. Kentucky boasted a large system of Catholic schools that educated many Protestants. Catholics worshipped in buildings owned by Protestants, and raised monies for their own churches from wealthy patrons, who often praised the beauty of Catholic liturgy. The point of cooperation that mattered most, Stern argues, was Catholic support for slavery. In this, he affirms earlier work on the subject, but the focus on cities outside of Maryland and Louisiana, home to the largest numbers of black Catholics in the region, mean that the book does not engage in their experiences.

Case studies can be suggestive, and Stern is right to claim that scholars have often focused on the notorious incidents of violence and prejudice against Southern Catholics (two of the most notorious anti-Catholic riots in the period occurred in Louisville and Charleston) at the expense of the more ordinary ways that Protestants and Catholics lived together. Notoriety is easier to find in the archives, and the evidence of institutional cooperation that Stern has found deserves more consideration. His finding that Catholic identity was more complicated than historians have allowed is an important contribution.

Yet Stern's broad claims of Catholic-Protestant tolerance in three cities rest mainly on Catholic sources, including newspapers, diocesan records, and printed primary sources. No Protestant denominational newspapers are cited, and Protestant voices are often mined from memoirs or biographies published later in the century. When a Catholic newspaper announces that people of all denominations attended an Irish woman's funeral, or a Catholic bishop declares that Episcopalian women whose tract denounced Roman Catholicism must have been mistaken, there is little suggestion of Protestant tolerance. Instead, the public rhetoric of Catholics assuring people that they were loved was likely evidence of the opposite. We cannot be sure unless Protestant voices are given equal time and more attention is paid to the context of such declarations.

Equally important is understanding the motives for such public declarations of tolerance. Stern's evidence of tolerance often hangs on the slim thread of public praise. What was the deeper meaning of such praise? Where was it voiced and why? Were Protestants seeking Catholic votes by contributing to Catholic institutions? What were the class dimensions of this tolerance? Did wealthy Catholics and Protestants ally with one another in northern cities by comparison? Wealthy Episcopalians often gave money to build Baptist churches in the Old South, and pastors often appeared in other congregations' pulpits. Actions and rhetoric need to be interpreted within the broader context of nineteenth-century conventions.

Stern follows generations of scholars who have assumed a Southern identity rather than demonstrating it, invariably fitting evidence into preconceived notions of what “the South” or “Southern identity” was. If Catholics' proslavery stance allowed them to be “loyal” Southerners, if they adopted “a southern view on social issues” (155), then Catholics also contributed to something called “southern identity.” This was true of both black and white Catholics. Identities are always in process; they are not fixed.

This is a suggestive and original book, and the evidence it offers of financial support and rhetorical tolerance of Catholics in an era marked by notorious anti-Catholic violence is significant. More work is needed, however, to determine the deeper meaning of this cooperation.