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"To Take up Arms against Brethren of the Same Faith"

Lower Midwestern Catholic Volunteers in the Mexican-American War

Purdue University tylervjohnson{at}hotmail.com

Scholars of the antebellum era in U.S. history have traditionally understood the Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848 as an extension of Manifest Destiny, the belief that the United States had a divine mandate to spread across the breadth of North America. Historians usually describe this ideology as a distinctly Protestant phenomenon, especially in the case of the war with Mexico, noting the existence of widespread anti-Catholic prejudice among the men who fought in the war and the citizens of the nation at large. This article seeks to problematize that picture by discussing the service of Catholics among the volunteer units of the U.S. Army in Mexico. Why did U.S. Catholics volunteer their services to fight a Catholic neighbor in the name of an overwhelmingly Protestant nation? This and other questions challenge our understanding of Manifest Destiny, American expansionism, and nationalism in the early republic

Key Words: Mexican-American War • volunteers • Catholic soldiers • Manifest Destiny • anti-Catholicism • nativism

Armed Forces & Society, Vol. 32, No. 4, 532-548 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0095327X05279873


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