Hughes

of friendly candidates on both tickets and a few
Catholics, who were at that time virtually re-
garded as disqualified for public office. Both
parties were horrified and James G. Bennett
[g.t'.]» in his New York Herald, charged the
bishop with an attempt "to organize the Irish
Catholics of New York as a distinct party, that
could be given to the Whigs or Loco-focos at the
wave of his crozier." The Hughes ticket polled
only 2,200 votes, yet it demonstrated what might
be done with time and more perfect organization.
Politicians did not care to force a continuation of
the experiment, however; and a law was enacted
which secularized the public-school system. This
Hughes accepted as a necessary reform, while he
condemned in principle a school program which,
in an effort to satisfy men of all creeds or none,
included no moral or religious teaching. He
committed Catholics to the construction of pa-
rochial schools at an enormous expense and at
the cost of double school-taxation. Nativists
made Hughes their target, and charged him and
his co-religionists with hostility to American in-
stitutions. He kept the peace when they invaded
the Irish wards with "no-popery" banners (April
1844), but he boldly assailed J. G. Bennett and
W, L. Stone of the Commercial Advertiser as
the virtual instigators of the nativist mobs, and
assured an inactive mayor that he would protect
his own institutions from threatened burnings
such as had taken place in Philadelphia. No
churches were burned in New York, and the city
took steps to keep rioters under control. Threats
of assassination left an Ulsterite like Hughes un-
concerned. Again he was an object of attack in
the Know-Nothing days. In 1853, he was as-
sociated with Msgr. Bedini, papal legate, and
with him was subjected to the abuse of nativists
and foreign radicals. Through Postmaster-Gen-
eral Campbell he sounded the administration re-
garding the acceptability of a nunciature repre-
senting the Holy See at Washington, only to
learn that the administration would receive only
lay representation from the papal states. In 1855,
he published as Brooksiana, his letters to Erastus
Brooks, state senator and editor of the New York
Express, in answer to charges concerning the
episcopal holding of church properties. In 1856,
when Cassius M. day [q.v+] urged the merits
of the Republican party for Catholics, Hughes
<fefried that he was a party man or that there was
a Catholic vote save in the popular mind. Other-
wise^ he did not concern himself to any extent
with the charges of the American party. Called
from tiie Cornell at Baltimore to confer with the
War Department concerning the appointment of
army chaplain^ Hughes declined a mission to

Hughes

Mexico when Polk could not accord him the full
rank of envoy. While on confidential terms with
Democratic chieftains, he could hardly be de-
scribed as a Democrat, for his only known vote
was for Clay in 1832 when his congregation was
furiously Jacksonian. At the request of J. Q.
Adams, Calhoun, Benton, Douglas, and others,
he preached before Congress on "Christianity
the only Source of Moral, Social, and Political
Regeneration" (Dec. 12,1847). About this time
he published in the New York Freeman's Jour-
nal (1847-48) his letters to "Kirwan" (Kirwan
Unmasked; a Review of Kirwan in Six Letters
Addressed to Rev. Nicholas Murray, 1848), in
reply to the bitter anti-Catholic and personal
charges of Rev. Nicholas Murray's letters.

No man was more active in famine relief and
in movements which he judged beneficial for
Irish immigrants, though Hughes never offi-
ciously concerned himself with Irish politics and
always urged the American Irish to cling to
America as their first and chosen allegiance. For
the Young Irelanders and the Smith O'Brien
fiasco, he had only contempt. He also fought the
radical Irish press established in New York by
political exiles like Thomas Darcy McGee of
the Nation and John Mitchell of the Citizen,
and he opposed Kossuth from his very arrival as
a demagogue and enemy of the Catholic Church.
In no way was Hughes more mistaken than in
his opposition to the Irish movement westward
in the fifties. His intentions were honest, but he
must bear the blame of keeping many Irish im-
migrants on the seaboard when cheap lands and
opportunity were beckoning them elsewhere. In
1850 New York was created an archdiocese with
Hughes as archbishop. Going to Rome, he re-
ceived the pallium from the hands of Pius IX on
Apr. 3, 1851. Three years later he returned to
Rome to attend the Council on the definition of
the dogma of the immaculate conception. In
1858, what he himself regarded as the high point
in his career occurred, when he laid the corner-
stone of St. Patrick's Cathedral, though the
country was more acquainted with his part in
the ceremonies at the completion of the Atlantic
Cable. A year later, he took a bold stand for the
papacy and the inviolability of the papal states.

Far from being an Abolitionist, Hughes had
a horror of slavery, yet he opposed the manifesto
of his Irish friends, Daniel O'Connell and Theo-
bald Mathew, who urged the American Irish to
vote against the slave interest (1842). After he
had traveled through the South, slavery ceased
to shock him and he wondered if emancipation
would not be detrimental to the negroes. With
regretted bitterness in 1861 he answered in his

354