Chapter Fourteen



Pluralists




Pluralism as a type of culture characterized the
many different Indian groups that occupied the
region from New York State, through Pennsylvania,
New Jersey, down through Delaware and Maryland.
Both great nations, the Iroquois and the Algonquin,
were represented by a number of tribes. By the end of the
eighteenth century, they had been reduced to small units,
clinging precariously to lands begrudged them
by European newcomers.

In upper New York State, New Englanders moved in,
and in lower New York, Dutch took hold and ascended the Hudson River.
They also followed the marshy coast and sands of New Jersey
to where they encountered, at the mouth of the Delaware River,
settlements of Swedes, mostly Finns, which were taken over.
The English defeated the Netherlands in the 1660's
in struggles over trading rights here and there in the
wide world, effectively enlarging the new British Empire.

Dutch remained in strength in New York, and
their property rights were recognized by the English.
Well-connected Englishmen tried to shape their own estates
according to the patroon system, semi-medieval in nature, that
bound tenants to the plantation. But the system
encouraged many tenants to flee West as soon as they could,
and others to stay and plot assassinations and riots.
Because the colony lacked the abundant excellent soils and
highly motivated farmers of Pennsylvania,
New York developed less rapidly.



I use the word "farmer" here to mean a
reasonably free cultivator. No one is quite free.
Americans have always called the farmers of Europe
"peasants," using the French term for "country-dwellers"-
Mexican and Spanish "peon," Italian "paesano."
Less commonly the French use "fermier."
Since Americans think that the farmer is something better
than a peasant, the practice sustains a myth about the farmers of the
two regions. Hence I avoid the use of the term
"peasant," knowing how irritated American readers would
become if the word "peasant" were to refer to the American farmer,
who has benefitted by lyrical praise in media and myth.

There have been ten types of American farmers:
the Indian free part-time hunter-gatherer-farmer;
the Indian collective farmer of the Southwest;
the plantation owner;
the plantation slave;
the indentured farm worker;
the farm laborer;
the share-cropper;
the tenant farmer;
the independent landowning farmer;
the partnership; and
the large corporate farm run by a manager or owner.

The European peasant did not become a farmer by crossing the
ocean; he became so in name only. If he took
to the land, some of his skills and customs would be used,
others abandoned and new ones taken up.
Often the abilities and affinities of one wave or type of
immigrant would be superior to those of the American farmers
he would encounter, sometimes not.



Since Englishmen began now to arrive in some number and
other nationalities skipped ship frequently,
New York City became an early example of American pluralism.
By 1643, if we may credit a Jesuit missionary,
"On the island of Manhate there were men of eighteen
different languages." The population was 5,000. Its government was
corrupt and since the colony's government came directly under the
Crown without the intervention of a proprietor or corporation,
responsibility for the archetypical mess could not be assigned
elsewhere than to the royal officers.

The Governors were without exception thieves over a hundred years
of time. One, Lord Cornbury the Transvestite, gave a group of
speculators two million acres of public land for a pittance. In the next
generation, Governor Clinton complained that he had too little land,
yet managed to retire to England with 80,000 pounds sterling,
equivalent to at least $4,000,000 today. In all, some thirty men were
granted three-fourths of all the land of the
huge colony of New York.

The early English Governor Colonel Fletcher was a model of the type.
He was under orders to halt the use of New York Harbor by pirates;
piracy had become so inconvenient to the several European
governments that they one by one declared war against it. Wealthy
merchants, who had hitherto sold to privateers (buccaneers, pirates -
the terms were loose to fit the practices) their outfits and bought their
goods for resale, were taking disagreeable losses from their sometime
clients. With his stern manners and continual resort to prayer, Fletcher
at first frightened the Dutch, English and other sponsors and their
pirates who had found haven in the spacious port of New York.
Fletcher governed with the advice of a Council, composed of wealthy
men in cahoots with the Board of Trade in London and with
local piratical rings.

The New Man caught on quickly, the good word went out, and the
pirate vessels standing offshore sailed into safe harbor.
Soon New York became a flourishing center for illegal traffic.
The Fletchers lived magnificently, collected gold and silver,
invited pirates to dinner, and Mrs. Fletcher
rode in a carriage drawn by six horses.

Where the demi-mondaine flourishes, the arts are sown.
By the time that President George Washington arrived to
administer the new USA briefly from New York City,
he found that he could enjoy himself greatly with the
plays being performed. He learned there, too,
to read serious books, especially about agriculture.



The key to American pluralism was not New England
nor the South, not New York or other colonies.
It was Pennsylvania, and the man who named it
for himself, William Penn, the Younger.
His father was a politically powerful admiral, whose extensive
estates in Ireland he allowed his son to manage.
The son gained business experience and a love for rural life;
he also became a religious radical, a devoted friend
of the Quakers. He became a Trustee of West New Jersey
in 1674 and sought then a proprietorship,
which he obtained in 1681.

This gift of Charles II is a peak action of
American history, an act equal in material consequences
to the Massachusetts and Virginia foundings and in
moral consequences greater. It became the cement of
the union, for if the Yankee and Slave Cultures had arisen
cheek by jowl, a united front for independence or
federation would have been most difficult to organize.

William Penn did not think of his Quakers as
the chosen instrument for the future of America.
He admired their doctrine, the preachments of J. Fox,
praised their way of life, and pitied their poverty.
Their fervent belief that the God was within one,
their close familial ties, their intense sense of community
of friends who believed alike and resolved all issues
by the collective emotion of consensus,
their pride in their poverty and devotion to toil:
such were the traits that drew to them this quite
remarkable man who could
live in baronial style yet work diligently to
create equality of standing and opportunity.
He thought they were the sort of people who could realize the
dream of rural paradise. What luck for them and the world:
he received from the debauched monarch a bit of land to the
North of Maryland and South of New York,
extending then Westward five degrees of longitude.
This was enough to give a farm to all Quakers
who then lived or would ever live.

Actually, Pennsylvania was a capitalist enterprise.
Even though he gave every advantage to Quakers,
Penn did not give them their land but sold it to them,
5000 acres for a hundred pounds sterling.
He expected that several Quaker families would
get together, buy what they could, and divide it up
into workable farms. They did so.

He had another fine idea, that there should be a city,
which he called Philadelphia,
"City of Brotherly Love, or of Loving Brothers" -
he was not afraid of the Classics (though his clientele
were as far from Oxbridge Englishmen as you could get) -
and in this city, provided that you had bought a sizeable
rural area to farm, you would receive a
large city lot dirt cheap.
Quakers received preference, but others,
regardless of religion, could also buy into Pennsylvania.

Here was pluralism: a leader who realized that country and city,
agriculture and commerce, should be two sides of the civilized coin,
a planner who could lay out a region and bring in his people,
a leader who could legislate for diverse religions and ethnic groups.
He compares favorably with Moses and Aeneas.

Economically and familially, the Society of Friends
acted the prototype of millions of households
that immigrated to America, with modest yet rare qualities.
Thomas Jefferson later coupled them with Jews
as two international sects who could live in the foreign world
of society while remaining apart from it.



They were originally lodged in the Northwestern corner
of England and in Wales for the most part,
just about the poorest part of poor old England
of the seventeenth century. Most were on long leases or
owned a little land. Their large broods
could not possibly live off the land, but somehow
had to be placed as apprentices or tenants somewhere.
They hated to send their offspring to distant places
where there were no Quakers, among people
who gave them this ridiculous name.
(True, sometimes they quaked, as when you are
tremendously excited by the sensed presence of your God,
who enlightens you on matters that would otherwise
be all too perplexing. You shiver, you
shake [there were Shakers, too],
you quaked in awe and pride, that you should be of a
stature, despite your poverty and lowliness,
to be at one with Jesus.)

It was a Quaker idea that all men are brothers -
an ancient idea that could be traced through Greco-Roman
Stoicism and then through the Gospels of Jesus,
an idea that had lost its way many times, to be
rediscovered and applied by cults like the Quakers.
A radical group, threat to both church and state, they were
determinedly, obstinately egalitarian,
pacifist, anarchistic, anti-statist,
anti-ceremonial, anti-all that most people
seemed to want out of life.

As if to assure that other people would know
how different they were, they affected
different dress and speech, so that they could be detected
coming down the road. Remarkably, although
consistent with their pacifist and fraternal philosophy,
Quakers were tolerant of other sects and nationalities.
With all of this, they were persecuted
everywhere they went, beginning with their ancestral haunts.
So when Penn put on his hard sell, as if they were
sophisticated metropolitans, they assembled
in their neat hovels and in their meeting houses
(if their hostile neighbors allowed them) and
considered whether Mr. Penn had presented an
altogether promising offer, that they should accept.

Penn composed promotional literature, which he had circulated into
the Quaker corner of England-Wales, and elsewhere.
Within a few years, the little communities
where they congregated were depopulating.
The biggest city of the whole area was Chester
(to be bigger in the New World as Chester, Pa.)
with 7,000, prettier than most towns of England,
and always to be prettier than its American namesake.
They left Chester and the region around, but, too,
departed from their Quaker circles elsewhere
in England where they had carefully maintained their ways
despite inducements to stray and persecution.
The main body of Quakers began to arrive
in 1675 (in West New Jersey) and
continued until 1689.

Non-Quaker Welsh and English came.
Then came Palatinians, Swiss, Moravians and
other German-speaking nationalities. There were
Amish, Mennonites, Pietists, Anabaptists, and Lutherans,
all of these Germanic (I do not say "German"
because we must wait until 1870 for German
unification, and meanwhile the religio-ethnic components
thought of themselves as Germanic in dialect and customs,
but as special cultural and political entities.

And after them came Scots-Irish, Anglo-Irish, and Scots.
French Huguenots came. People from other
colonies migrated in, and a pot-pourri of
nationalities as individuals.



In 1682 William Penn journeyed through
Germany advertising Pennsylvania for its
religious and political toleration and bountiful nature.
In 1683 Mennonites from the Rhineland arrived,
led by a Frankfurt lawyer. William Rittenhouse
built the first paper mill in America in the same year.
Next year there arrived a Christian communist
commune from the Rhineland which settled in Maryland,
then broke up after a few years. But heavy
Germanic settlement occurred there, founding
towns like Frederick and Hagerstown.

In the same decade some Germans had reached the Hudson
Valley, where the Dutch Patroon system commanded society,
and where shortly a revolt of tenants and the poor broke out,
organized and led by a German named Jacob Leisler,
from Frankfurt. They called themselves the People's Movement and
in 1690 called for a
"First Congress of the American Colonies."
Leisler was soon captured, then drawn and quartered.
His partner in treason, Jacob Miloure, was also executed.

I referred earlier to the 3000 Palatinians
who ended their complicated journey on the
Hudson Valley frontier next to the Mohawks.
Between 1720 and 1770 about
2000 Germans a year came to America,
most to become indentured servants.

A Lutheran Pastor Brunnholtz in 1750
decried the frauds committed by shipping agents and the
brutality of conditions aboard the boats, of
the ruthless disposal of the sick and dying at sea.
He tells how the people arriving in debt or without resources
were penned up like cattle in huts and on straw
to await the sale of their labor for the years to come
to whoever would pay for them.

So powerful was the dream in the Germanies,
"that everyone could become as rich as a nobleman, etc."
that no amount of information sent back
seemed to penetrate the heavy veil of delusion. In words that
would be repeated for two centuries without effect,
"the province is crowded full of people and living
becomes continually more expensive."

In the 1760's a number of Germans emigrated to
Catholic New Orleans. Pennsylvania, however,
was the paramount Germanic establishment.
By 1775 nearly half the quarter-million population of
the colony was of Germanic origin. That would be 10% of the
population of the thirteen colonies. Before the century was
out, there would occur through desertions and discharge an
accretion of perhaps 10,000 Hessian
mercenaries from the British Army of the Revolution.

As the best of the land - and it was indeed the best
to be found in America - was taken up,
the later Germans of the 1700's bumped
against Indian territory, and halted, for the
Quaker Proprietor and elected legislature would not
on principle commit acts of aggression
against the natives. The Quaker government meant to
observe its treaties. So the German colonists began to
move along the Eastern rim of the Allegheny
Mountains Southward.

Some of the first to arrive obtained large and
rich farms that they worked with a diligence and science
unknown to the English, and they brought with them
schoolmasters and books and a more literate and artistic
culture generally than the Anglophones around them.
Classical musical culture in America was a German
importation, through their own teachers and
performers and choirs.
Superior church music was of German origin, too.

Germans of the early 1700's were not well-off
and well-prepared as immigrants. The majority were
wracked by wars, economic dislocation, and
religious and political persecution before coming to
America; they were told the usual lies about
conditions there; they arrived as bonded servants or
with no money after having paid their passage.
The miracle of location and adaptation operated for
some. They found a job and could buy a parcel of land
soon afterwards. Or a Quaker group or preceding
Germanic group would hire a batch and
put them to work on a farm.



Those who worked their way West and then South,
for lack of any other possibility en route,
might found some tiny village a day's walk
through wilderness to the nearest settlement, where their
shacks were protected by a stockade and the largest building
served as a meeting house for daily prayers and singing
and as a last refuge should Indians break into the compound.
Meanwhile they scratched the ground for
tubers and raised a few animals.

In 1710 650 Germans made their way
to New Bern, North Carolina.Two years later
they were nearly wiped out in a war with Tuscarora Indians.
Nevertheless, by 1750 Germanic settlers had
gotten down to Savannah, Georgia. To the North,
in Maine, they established the town of Waldoboro.
From here they sent a force to join the British
in attacking the French at Louisbourg. Whereupon
in the following year, Indian allies of the French
attacked and destroyed Waldoboro.

The Germans of Pennsylvania generally supported the
Quakers in politics. Their religious principles and behavior were
more akin to these, than to the Presbyterian culture
of the Scots-Irish who had arrived in large numbers and
mostly moved West. When these came up
against the Indians, they, too, moved Southwards
via the Cumberland and Shenandoah Valleys,
as far as North Carolina. The Scots-Irish
tended to be domineering and
congenitally hostile to Indians.

Current conditions at mid-century found them,
as usual, riled up against the Indians blocking their
way West (as per Treaty) and even
shooting and scalping invaders, and against the Quakers,
who would not vote money for arms nor declare
open season on Indian scalps.

Because they, too, coveted Indian lands and
were indignant at the Indians for forcefully fighting back at
trespassers, the Germanic settlers switched their support to the
advocates of a war policy and the Quakers partly
resigned from government and partly were electorally defeated.
This was the year 1756.
It denoted the end of Quaker domination
of Pennsylvania; war policies would rule the Colony
and State for a quarter-century to come.

Some scholars say that the Quakers failed at governing.
This is nonsense. Would that every government
could organize a large territory, admit diverse and
sometimes hostile groups, and be conducted with so little
corruption and so equitably for a hundred years.
That most Quakers chose to be just in foreign relations
with the Indians, rather than to break treaties and wage an
aggressive war to exterminate or dispossess them, and
that they should resign power rather than alter their
position should elicit commendation.
One can only say that evil government
triumphed over good government,
but that is the way that one America won over another -
so let those who will, be thankful for sundry fruits of evil.



The Scots-Irish formed over a dozen congregations of the
Presbyterian Church in Pennsylvania; several
more congregations were of English or other stock.
They preferred the term Presbyterian to Congregational,
the two designations by this time meaning relatively little,
parish members and ministers determining the degree of
democracy in church affairs and the extent of deviation or
conformity with respect to the continual doctrinal disputation.
This was in 1730, when Scots-Irish
immigration was heavy.

The immigrants preferred Pennsylvania. They were treated better than
in New England or the South, or upstate New York, for that matter.
They enjoyed the free-wheeling movement and variety of
life-chances that came with the pluralism of the region. They developed,
too, that kind of frontier adaptation that
would characterize many of them for over a century to come.
They were quite poor, and did not do as well
economically as the Quakers and Germanic groups.

A problem they had now and always would have
was that they were inordinately individualistic - like the others,
true, but without the deftness to wrap a shell of
communitarianism around the personalism.



Quakers made up an oligarchy in Pennsylvania;
there is always an oligarchy and they composed most of it.
Putting aside the question whether it was the God
in their soul that illuminated their lives and work,
we can nevertheless understand that, given excellent land,
dutiful children, hard work, and thrift over time,
plus land in town and city that rose in value steadily,
plus freedom from persecution by their
neighbors or the government, and a refusal to go chasing
after Indians and Frenchmen, very many Quakers prospered.
Over half the merchants, entrepreneurs and professional men of
Philadelphia, then competing with Boston
for title of the largest American city, were Quakers.
The average Quaker owned more land, buildings, cattle,
and personal property than the average non-Quaker.
And far fewer of the Quakers were poor.
A third of the Quakers could be termed affluent.

Half of these lived from rents and investments.
It would be useful to know how many of the top hundred fortunes
of America, say in 1760, were held by Quakers;
an unreliable "guesstimate" might give 25,
one-fourth, another fourth being held by Southern planters,
another by New England shipping fleet owners, and
the final fourth by New York's great land-holders and
miscellaneous individuals from other colonies.
I have no information as to who might be joining this group
from Puerto Rico, the Southwest, or New Orleans.

At the same time, the average Pennsylvanian was
probably better off than the average of any other colony.
The land was fertile and affordable. The laws were benign.
Religious and political and therefore personal freedoms were ample.
Taxes were low. Prices were rising. Cultural activities were
increasing rapidly. Probably not more than 50%
of the population could be counted as materially poor,
orphaned or distraught by abandonment or excessive mobility,
overworked, illiterate, or diseased; this would be the
highest level of well-being of any colony.



In the first part of the 1700's the movement
known as Freemasonry took hold in England with the
founding of a Grand Lodge in England
by Dr. James Anderson and Dr. John T. Desaguliers,
with others. They devised a general program combining a
zeal for social and political reform, a set of ancient
symbols - some of the order of masons, some
from Egyptian antiquity - a philosophy of the Enlightenment
just beginning in France, and an internal structure of
ritual and government, some of it secret.

The Masons advocated brotherhood, equality, religious
toleration, civic responsibility, and the
pursuit of science and rationality in the universe.
They were anti-Catholic, anti-royal, freethinking progressives
who supported other Masons elsewhere.

Within two years, the Grand Lodge established 64 lodges in the British
Isles and by 1732 102 lodges. Simultaneously, lodges sprang up
around the world, including Philadelphia, Boston,
Savannah, and New York.

Freemasonry was vigorously attacked from the start.
The Roman Catholic Church condemned it and forbade
Catholics to join as members. Many leading Americans
joined the Order, among them Franklin, who had at first
lampooned it in his newspaper. The Masonic
lodges became a powerful force behind the
liberalization of American religion and government,
centers for free discussion, means for the advancement of
secular youths, a secret yet effective pressure group
for the modernization of American laws, and an instrument for the
assimilation of otherwise unattached thinkers,
politicians, and merchants.

Divided between Loyalist and Revolutionary sentiments,
Freemasonry received a setback in the Revolutionary Period,
when Rebels won over some lodges and Loyalists held others.
After the Revolution, the movement resumed its
momentum, and became as important a factor
in the economy, politics, and social life of a great many
American communities as any one of the many
religious denominations. Freemasonry also
provided a model for the numerous American fraternal
orders that much later enlisted millions of
men (often with auxiliary female sections), frequently
providing a substitute for church affiliation.



That Benjamin Franklin became an active Mason
is not surprising. It is hard to find a worthwhile idea or
activity of the times that he did not put his hand to.
A principal founder of the University of Pennsylvania
and the Academy of Sciences, a self-made millionaire in printing,
publishing, and other ventures, an experimental scientist, and a
political adventurer par excellence, who also
organized the U.S. Postal Service, was one of the
top five leaders of the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania, represented the American colonies
in immensely important diplomatic relations with France
and Britain, and was a top Revolutionary and
Constitutional leader, he has had no peer in
American history as a Renaissance character,
excellent at many things.

If one were to compare him with Leonardo da Vinci,
who lived four mnemonic generations earlier,
one would say that both possessed a multiple excellence,
but, besides being sexual opposites, and the one
being preponderantly artistic and the other being
preponderantly political, Franklin was the fuller moral man.
Leonardo would have sold a bridge design to the Turks,
fortifications to the tyrants of Milan,
advanced weaponry to the French.
"I serve anyone who pays me," he declared.
He lived comfortably and died at a French royal castle,
the same that Jean Calvin lived in but fled in disgust.
Franklin would never had said or behaved so.
He was pragmatic yet moral.

He managed to combine high competence with
sensitive moral judgment in science, business,
politics, and personal life. He bravely defended
peaceful Indians from massacre by a mob of
armed Scots-Irish moral fools, and denounced them
for their other atrocities. He helped Germans get their
publications into print. He gave freely of
time and money, to education and science and public
affairs. His type of philanthropy, which might be generalized as
typically Quaker, had merits lacked by the typical
New England philanthropy, aside from its greater generosity.

It was more truly voluntary welfare in that it was not
part and parcel of the deliberate scheme for the compulsory
and controlled morality of others.
Franklin's philanthropy was thus more modern,
more public, more open-handed.

It needs be said that he made a profit on his investment
in German publications. Also that he enjoyed
fully his role as the exciting "natural man" among
the ladies of France, and he did not stint
in his personal comforts - perhaps explaining the gout
that tortured him in his last years. He resisted
Quaker arguments that the frontier with the Indians
should not be guarded by force. He realized that there was
no stopping the aggressiveness of the Scots-Irish,
Germanics, and others, pushing across the frontier.
He encouraged hypocrisy among Quaker legislators,
who finally voted for provisions, destined for an armed force,
but not for weapons and ammunition.
He was aiding another exuberant Quaker, Wharton,
to obtain an immense land grant from the English Crown offices
when the Boston Tea Party squelched the scheme;
it would certainly had resulted in the
dispossession of many Indians.

He compares unfavorably as philanthropist with
the saintly Woolman, who went to live among the Indians,
a modern anthropologist, to discover what motivated their lives
and what they might have useful to tell
to the paleface world. Franklin came ultimately to denounce
slavery and the slave trade, but he carried advertisements for the
sale of slaves and indentured servants, and occasionally
dabbled in the buying and selling of slaves and redemptioners
through the medium of his Pennsylvania Gazette.
He helped set up a school, but wanted it used
only for anglicizing the children.

His position emerges clearly: he was an assimilationist;
he believed in a single culture, a single language,
and a single economic-social class for all,
regardless of race and previous condition of servitude.
He was a rationalist and wished to do as little as possible
to help organized religion. The poor little immigrant boy
from Boston had gone straight through Quakerism
into deism and enlightened rationalism, and
become an all-around big man in history.
After asking oneself the question, one may ask it of Franklin:
In a continuous effort to be good and effective in the world,
how many close moral shaves and bloody cuts
can be tolerated, and
how may their number be minimized?



Impinging upon Pennsylvania to the Southeast and
influenced heavily by its people and ideas for much of
the time was the colony of Maryland.
Maryland stands unique among the colonies for its original
attachment to Roman Catholicism. A Sir George Calvert
bought from another cavalier adventurer in
1620 a patent or rights to a part of Newfoundland.
Although Minister of State to King James, he attached
himself to Catholicism, and was forced to resign.

Failing to discover upon a visit to Newfoundland any large
promise for settlement, he sailed for Chesapeake Bay and,
with backing from England, secured a concession from
Virginia of the Northern section of the Bay region.
He became Lord Baltimore and was made Proprietor
in 1632, or, more accurately,
inasmuch as he died, his son,
Cecilius, signed the charter papers as Proprietor.
The new Lord Baltimore sent a group of Catholic
gentlemen and 200 Protestant laborers to
found St. Mary's in the following year.
Religious toleration was extended to all sects.

The Catholics, however, were swamped by their own Protestant
work force and by hostile migrants from adjoining Virginia and
Pennsylvania. These took the first opportunity,
after Lord Baltimore's patron, Charles I,
was beheaded, to call in friendly forces from
Virginia to overthrow the government, summon a
stacked Assembly, and exclude all Catholics from office.
Priests and congregations went
underground for awhile.

Calvert-Baltimore, however, made a deal with
Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector, who repealed the
laws of the Maryland rebels, reinstituted
the Act of Toleration, and reconfirmed
Baltimore as Proprietor. He died in 1675, and
his co-religionists suffered persecution off and on
from their Protestant neighbors.

Maryland imported slaves and became part of the
slave culture with some strong dissident elements who
came to the fore in 1860.
(Delaware, now in British hands, also developed a
prominent slave culture overspreading the flatlands
between Chesapeake and Delaware Bays.)

Few Catholics entered Maryland afterwards for three
mnemonic generations. In 1756, there were
approximately 5,000 Catholics in Maryland and 2,000 in
Pennsylvania nearby. The Sulspician Order
settled in with a monastery. Even by 1790
there were only 35,000 Catholics in all of the United States,
guided by a mere 34 priests, who administered an
average of 12,270 miles of parish territory.
That is, one per cent of the American population was
Catholic; adding New Orleans, the Southwest and Puerto Rico
would bring the number up to a quarter of a million,
about 8%. A large but unknown number of
Catholics got to America unrecognized, and abandoned
any hope of pursuing their faith, so joined
another sect perforce, or merged with the
irreligious multitude.