During the past decade, Robert Emmett Curran, the distinguished historian of American Catholicism, edited the correspondence of the Lynch family of South Carolina, who contributed significantly to rooting Catholicism in the Deep South. Conlaw and Eleanor Lynch migrated to the United States from Ireland in 1818 and settled in Cheraw, South Carolina, in the upcountry. They had twelve children, several of whom were prominent in the religious history of the state. Patrick Lynch, the eldest child, studied in Charleston and Rome before becoming the bishop of Charleston during the 1850s. Patrick was a scholarly man, interested in ancient languages, as well as science and technology. Ellen Lynch became Mother Baptista, the head of the Ursuline convent that opened in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1858. John Lynch worked as a medical doctor while his brother Francis labored as a businessman and entrepreneur. Luckily for historians, the Lynch family left over 1,600 personal letters, allowing for fascinating glimpses into the nineteenth-century American South.

In The Lynches of South Carolina, Curran picks up where his 2019 edited volume For Church and Confederacy ended. The current book, published as part of the Voices of the Civil War series with the University of Tennessee Press, contains 532 letters from the years 1866 to 1882 (15). Curran abridged the letters, reprinting excerpts in chronological order over thirty-one chapters. He briefly introduces each chapter, providing commentary on and brief context for the letters’ contents. Most of the letters come from Mother Baptista. Few are from Bishop Lynch, who did not write frequently or save many copies of his personal correspondence. Most are addressed to Bishop Lynch from his siblings. The vast majority seek financial assistance and economic advice regarding failing business and religious endeavors, signaling the tremendous economic and social upheavals of the post-bellum South.

The letters reveal the severe economic depression of post-war South Carolina. Although Curran did not frame the letters in this context, they magnify the concerns of the southern middle class that had developed during the antebellum period. As historians Jonathan Daniel Wells, Jennifer Green, and Tom Downey have shown, the southern middle class sought progress through education, industry, and urban professional careers, different paths from the planters and yeomen of the rural South. The Lynches fit perfectly in that model. Curran, however, comments more on the political opinions expressed by family members during Reconstruction. The Civil War, especially by ending slavery, disrupted the labor system of the region and made economic times tough (72). Many letters decried the new property taxes levied by the Republican state government that caused serious financial difficulties for the Lynches and other middle-class southerners who often lacked the cash to pay. The dearth of domestic capital also prompted the family to look north for sources of credit. Some family members even wrote Bishop Lynch to see if he could obtain jobs for them in northern cities where the economy was more stable (286). Tough economic times and increased taxation led the Lynches to push for the end of Reconstruction. Interestingly, though, the letters mention politics only in passing and spend little time discussing racial tensions.

The letters also show the challenges for Catholics in the post-Civil War South. Catholics were a small minority in South Carolina and lacked financial resources. Mother Baptista called her brother a “carpet bag bishop” due to his almost constant travels in the North raising money for the diocese (187). In this, Bishop Lynch resembled the first Catholic bishop of Charleston, John England, who had faced the economic tough times of the 1820s and late 1830s with appeals for external funding. Lynch’s travels took him away from his diocese when the people needed a strong leader (274). The lack of clergy, another endemic problem among Catholics in the Deep South, had deleterious effects in the diocese. One of Bishop Lynch’s nephews, for example, who was farming in a rural part of the state, told his uncle that he could rarely get to mass due to his poverty and the great distance he lived from the closest parish (198). Also, clergy who had mental problems or difficulties with alcohol caused Bishop Lynch much trouble, especially because he had no way to replace them (283). Some family members complained that the lack of clergy and religious infrastructure kept the young detached from their religion altogether (290, 294). In 1866 and 1867, Bishop Lynch had pursued plans for a black Catholic colony along the South Carolina coast for the freed people. He also hoped that his fellow bishops would support missionary efforts among American Blacks. However, his visions never came to fruition (46–47, 55, 64–67). Lack of funds plagued the Ursulines too, as Mother Baptista’s attempts to found a school and convent in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, failed. South Carolina Catholics lacked the money even to rebuild the cathedral in Charleston, which had burned in an 1861 fire. Reconstruction was a difficult time, then, for the Lynches and Catholicism in the South. Expansion proved nearly impossible.

Robert Curran labored diligently to provide accessible sources to study an important Catholic family in the Reconstruction-era South. His volume will be of special interest to historians of post-bellum southern Catholicism, a field that is ripe for deeper study.