Dagger John

Dagger John presents the first Catholic archbishop of New York as an immigrant who made good, an architect of Irish American identity, and a cleric whose public profile reflected the burdens of office and the crises he faced. In this book, John Joseph Hughes presides over critical decades in American history and also within the history of immigrant Irish settlement in the United States. He orchestrates pioneering church expansion in New York, battles spirited anti-Catholic expression, debates social reform, and struggles against all-consuming sectionalist forces. He emerges as the public face of immigrant Irish ambition to surmount the cataclysm of the great famine of the 1840s and 1850s. A crusader with flashes of virtuosity, a volatile disposition, and what amounted to insufficiencies in character, Hughes harnessed ramrod-straight principles and unalloyed visions to controversies regarding denominational education, the Catholic Church's role in the Civil War, and the fantastical notion of constructing a mighty cathedral monument to Catholicism in the face of virulent nativist upsurge. The public profile he constructed on pillars of faith and ambitions to secure his church in the American mainstream empowered Hughes to exchange challenging early years in Baltimore and Philadelphia, where he honed abilities in oratory, authority, and self-assurance, for Mott Street—a stone's throw from the disreputable Five Points neighborhood. Possessed of a manner as cerebral as it was obdurate, he relished the company of political personages such as Thurlow Weed and William Seward. By the 1850s, John Loughery shows, Hughes's access to elevated sociopolitical spheres underscored his status as America's foremost Irish Catholic. He engaged city, state, and national political leaders, including Presidents James K. Polk, Millard Fillmore, and James Buchanan, and his European tours combined diplomatic undertakings with American Catholic Church expansion. The outbreak of the Civil War saw him weakened by the illness that would kill him by 1864, despairing of his lifelong ambitions for his ethnic compatriots and church

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