In the final chapter of John Loughery's engaging book on Archbishop John Hughes of New York, he suggests that what should interest us is ‘a life lived in its time’ (p. 348). This is indeed what Loughery has achieved in this insightful and empathetic study of Hughes who was in his time loved, despised, respected and denigrated. He was such a divisive figure that some New York state senators opposed a resolution eulogising him after his death. All the issues that are current in political discourse are present in this book – race, immigration, religious bigotry – and while the book centres on the ‘life’ of Hughes, his ‘time’ is also represented powerfully and vividly.

Hughes embodies the Irish immigrant story. His family was separated for two years between 1816 and 1818 because of his father's need to emigrate first and prepare the way, and his father remained homesick for Ireland all his life. Hughes himself worked as a dollar-a-day labourer on the Pennsylvania turnpike and as a gardener and groundskeeper at Mount St Mary's in Emmitsburg, Maryland, before he entered the seminary there. But Hughes looked upon America as an opportunity – to further his education and to become ‘somebody’, pointing out in later life that the United States made him a freeman and an American citizen in spite of his Catholicism. As he entered the seminary Loughery states that he looked like what he was ‘a well-built Irish immigrant labourer with a square jaw, a prominent nose and aspirations beyond his station’ (p. 41). These aspirations brought him to New York as its coadjutor bishop in 1837, bishop in 1842 and archbishop, receiving the pallium from the pope himself, in 1851.

Loughery portrays Hughes as an activist and political operator who wanted to be a publicist for the faith rather than simply a spiritual leader. This led him to speak and write publicly in defence of Catholicism but did not endear him to those already suspicious of the church. Neither did his Irishness. Loughery's description of the anti-Irish sentiment before the mid-century Famine migration is revealing. The Irish were identified with the reviled religion of Catholicism in spite of the fact that there were other strong Catholic congregations in the cities. The ethnic divisions in the American Catholic church are identified by Loughery as a key element in Hughes's narrative – in a three-day anti-Catholic riot in Philadelphia in 1844 no German churches were torched. Hughes himself was given money in Vienna on the understanding that it was to be used for German Catholics only. It was the Irish who were universally despised, for their religion certainly, but also for their ethnicity and all it represented – dirt, drink, and despair.

Recognising that Irish immigrants were not turning to their church because it was itself disorganised, Hughes made it his mission to bring a structure and a coherence to the church in the diocese of New York so that it would provide a haven and a bulwark for the despised Irish, and command respect from those who were anti-Catholic. His belligerent and confrontational style gained him his nickname ‘Dagger John’ as much as the cross which preceded his name and which was interpreted in the press as a dagger. It also made him a recognisable character in the pulp fiction of the period, and alienated many of his own priests and bishops who lobbied against him becoming a cardinal.

His high profile was used by some to try and influence those that they could not. President Polk invited him to the White House on the eve of the Mexican-American War to avert suspicion that the war was a sectarian land-grab. But Loughery points out that he did not have political control of his flock as, in voting terms, they were unbiddable. Hughes advised New York Catholics to vote for candidates who supported state aid for denominational education in the Carroll Hall slate (p. 131), but more often than not they ignored his political direction. He supported Lincoln and the Union unequivocally, flying the American flag over the old St Patrick's Cathedral in Mott Street at the beginning of the Civil War, but Irish Catholics voted overwhelmingly for the Copperhead Horatio Seymour as New York governor in 1862.

Hughes's efforts to create an image of respectable Irish Catholics were constantly thwarted notwithstanding the laying of the foundation stone for St Patrick's on Fifth Avenue on 15 August 1858. The New York draft riots of 1863 caused a crisis that he could not curtail and the Irish were stigmatized once again as brutal and uncivilized. Hughes had feared the Emancipation Proclamation – while he believed slavery to be ‘ill-advised’, he despised American abolitionists – he had met Daniel O'Connell in Ireland and was ‘silenced’ by his anti-slavery position but ‘not convinced’ (p.117) – and Loughery points out that his relations with black Americans were ‘practically nil’ (p.163). But the Civil War reinforced Hughes's hyphenation and the fight for what he perceived as a just cause in America led him to reconsider his attitude towards the Fenians. He allowed the funeral of Terence Bellew McManus to be held in St Patrick's on its way to Ireland in September 1861 and delivered a eulogy, a gesture denied in Dublin by then Archbishop Paul Cullen.

The authoritarian and often courageous Hughes is regularly mythologised but Loughery also brings out the man, his capacity for friendship as well as minor interesting details such as his addiction to snuff, his fluency in French, and that he wore a toupee. The author is not blind to Hughes's failings and yet there is an empathy between subject and biographer to the extent that the reader, and possibly the author, is disappointed with William H. Seward that he could not see past the politics and attend the funeral of his old friend. Loughery has sought out the sources, found the letters, read himself into Hughes's mind on occasion, and developed an understanding of the person behind the myth. Despite a very odd citation style that uses page numbers instead of endnote numbers in referencing, this is a well-paced, confidently written, and thoughtful book that situates the ‘game’ archbishop in his own era.