Untitled - Digitizing America

During this period more than two hundred Catholic
elementary schools began operation. This marked
the beginnings of the greatest private system of
education in the world, an enterprise which would
grow, by the early 1970's, to include an enrollment
of 4.42 million students in 11,560 elementary and
high schools, and 426,205 students in 213 colleges
and universities.
Eleven years after New York became an Archdiocese,
the CivilWar broke out. Archbishop Hughes
did not see its end. He died, in January of 1864,
after a long illness.
Archbishop Martin John Spalding of Baltimore initiated
the Second Plenary Council in the fall of
1866 to dealwith the challenges facing the Church
after the Civil War. He wanted the Council to be an
exhibit of Catholic unity in a land recovering from
tragic division. The urgent situation of four million
emancipated Blacks was to be taken up. Tension
was not completely absent from the deliberations,
but much was accomplished in the areas of planning,
church discipline, and seryice. President
Andrew Johnson attended the solemn closing of
the Council on October 21, 1866 at Baltimore's
venerable Cathedral.
Missions In A Changing rilTorld
elected President
braham Lincoln was
and South Carolina seceded
from the Union in 1860. The six other south-
ernmost states followed suit in the next two
months. The Great Emancipator, who had spoken
out against anti-Catholicism some sixteen years
earlier and was now determined to block the
spread of slavery as well as to hold together the
Union, was not as revered in his own day as he is
now.
Every colony had some Negro slave labor, but the
South depended on it for survival. And although
most Northerners could afford to free the few
workers they owned, some Yankee shipowners
profited greatly from the slave trade-a practice
generally more inhumane than slaveholding.
From the April 12, 1861, bombardment by southern
forces of the federal government's Fort Sumter
in Charleston untilthe bloodbath finally ended with
the Texas surrender in May of 1865, a month after
the president's assassination, religious differences
were all but forgotten. Protestants,
Catholics, and Jews joined forces according to
their political beliefs and homestate allegiances.
Well-known Catholic generals in the Civil War
were General Pierre Beauregard and General
William Rosecrans, brother of the Bishop of
Cleveland.
The draft riots of 1863 caused heartache to New
York's Catholics, since most of the demonstrators
were poor Irish who had no politicalpullorfinancial
means to avoid conscription. Much of their anger
was heaped upon freed slaves who were becoming
a threat to their hard-won jobs, in addition to
representing a reason for the draft.
ln that same year, the rebellion in Poland provided
a spur for Polish immigration to "the land of the
free and the home of the brave."
But on and off the batilefields, great missionary
endeavors carried on. The first privately owned
hospital in Washington, D.C., was founded in June
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