USA > Kentucky > A history of Kentucky and Kentuckians; the leaders and representative men in commerce, industry and modern activities, Volume I > Part 66
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the excesses of the camp; they live after the strife has ceased. Men become careless of life in the midst of war and from this care- lessness grows that other and more serious carelessness which affects the soul's welfare. The long and weary struggle of the Revolu- tion, cutting off from home life and early in- fluences its participants, naturally led them to look upon the serious affairs of the present and the future with eyes which had little of seriousness in them.
The intention of the author to take no credit other than his due, for aught that appears in this volume, leads to the statement that the following article relative to the early status of the Catholic church in Kentucky. was prepared, at his request, by the Rev. Thomas J. Jenkins of New Hope, long a re- spected priest of that denomiation :
"It was Daniel Carroll, of Dudington, Maryland, of the same lineage as Charles of Carrollton, and Rev. John Carroll, future prefect-Apostolic and first bishop, who, in the debate on Articles of Confederation in the first congress, forced the hand of Virginia and other landed states 'to surrender lands ( west of the Alleghanies) to congress to become indepen- dent states and members of the Union.'
"John Fiske's 'Critical Periods of American History' asserts that, 'had it not been for the stand taken by Maryland on this question, the Union would not have been founded.' That part of old Fincastle county, Virginia, which became Kentucky county, was thus opened to settlement.
"The English stock of Catholics in Mary- land, crowded out of their native domain by repeated narrowing of state lines, had another potent reason, at the eve of the Revolution, for emigration. Religious tolerance. though granted by the Bill of Rights, 1776, 'still pro- vided, that the legislature might. at its dis- cretion, lay a general and equal tax for the support of the Christian religion.' Consider-
ing that the Anglican Established Church was the one recognized by the letter of the state law, dissenters and colonial Catholics still feared for their religious liberty. It was, in- (leed, but a few years, when the foreseeing knew that the sumptuary law was a dead letter : the colonists only breathed easily after 1791. The articles of the Kentucky consti- tution, ratified eight years later, gave Catho- lics security.
"Wm. Coomes' family and Dr. Hart, with a small contingent of Catholics, joined Har- rod's party of forty, who descended the Ken- tucky river to found Oldtown (now Har- rodsburg) in 1774. Ten years later, Coomes and Hart removed close to Bardstown 'to be near their Catholic brethren.' Concerning this date, 1784, we are justified in planting a new starting post, by the researches of John Gilmary Shea, and recent publication ( 1907) of three series of letters, principally of Father S. T. Badin and Bishop Flaget, from originals in the archives of Quebec and Baltimore.
"The late Senator B. J. Webb and Bishops Spalding, senior and junior, abide by the tra- dition that Rev. Charles Whalen and William de Rohan, both of Irish extraction, were re- spectively the first priest and the original builder of the log church at Holy Cross; that Rev. Mr. Whalen arrived in 1787. and Wil- liam de Rohan succeeded him in 1790-con- structing the first church in 1792.
"Dr. John Carroll, then ecclesiastical supe- rior of English Missions in the United States (letter to Cardinal Antonelli, February, 1785) writes: 'Before I received your Emi- nence's letter, there went to those Catholics (living in territory bordering on the river called Mississippi ) a priest, German by birth. but who comes last from France: he pro- fessed to belong to the Carmelite order; he was furnished with no sufficient testimonials that he was sent by his lawful superiors. What he is doing and what the condition of the Church in those parts, I expect soon to
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learn.' This priest is certainly identified as Rev. Paul de St. Pièrre, chaplain in Rocham- beau's army, who was in Baltimore, early in 1784, applying to Dr. Carroll for 'faculties' for the Kentucky missions. Dr. Gilmary Shea coincides that this authorization had not yet been obtained; but the impatient apostle (as Father Whalen did later ) set out from Fort Pitt ( Pittsburg) in the winter, and arrived at Shippingport ( Louisville) in Feb- ruary, 1784. He wrote to Dr. Carroll, that from his residence near one Raphael Lan- caster in Bardstown he intended to visit the Catholics in Kentucky several times a year.' We know no particulars of his stay for about a year :- he is found in the Illinois missions, 1785-7. This ex-Carmelite is known to have exercised his ministry also in Louisiana for a length of time, and was much praised. He precedes Father Charles Whalen by two and a half or three years. If neither built a church, did not the Rev. Mr. Whalen find in the fall of 1787, the one constructed of logs by William de Rohan at the foot of Rohan's Knob? To prove this date impossible, and its contradictory, 1792, nearer the probable truth, will be found a knotty problem.
"Doctor, now Bishop John Carroll,. con- secrated at the same period as the Episcopal bishop, Madison, in August, 1790, and re- turning home December 7th, writes shortly after: 'The Capuchin, Whalen, left his nu- merous congregation in Kentucky, composed of emigrants from Maryland, while I was in England. They are now without a priest, excepting a rambling Irish one, to whom I refused "faculties" several years ago. I am anxious to obtain a good one for the poor souls there, who are in general virtuous, and some of them eminently so.' 'Several years ago' cannot mean less than three, or the year 1787; and, unless we admit that these virtuous people, some of eminent piety, would have stooped to accept the leadership of de Rohan in building their first church, when he could not licitly administer the sacra-
ments, it seems probable that Holy Cross church must have been erected in the early half of 1787, and not five years later, (1792). This reiterated assertion of John Gilmary Shea, repeated by Bishop O'Gorman ('Amer- ican Church History,' Vol. IX, p. 285) is consistent with Father Badin's letter, in 1799. to the effect that Father Barrière had sent de Rohan a chalice and breviary. He might yet read 'Office and Mass.' Badin's diary letters, 1793 to near 1800, negatively support the above historians, by never mentioning a new Holy Cross church.
The violence of the French Revolution re- sulted in driving to American shores the real tounders of the English missions in this com- monwealth- then just admitted as a state (1792).
The estimated three hundred families in Kentucky had no permanent shepherd until Rev. Stephen Theodore Badin, the first priest ordained in the United States (May, 1793) arrived at Maysville, Kentucky, in the Advent of that year, accompanied by Rev. M. Bar- rière as vicar-general. They walked sixty- five miles to Lexington, and said their first mass at Dennis McCarthy's house-Father Badin riding to White Sulphur, sixteen more miles, the same day, to give mass to the con- gregation in Scott county. Here he re- mained eighteen months. Rev. Mr. Barrière attended the Bardstown missions, but is con- victed of serving them and helping Father Badin only four months.
"The 'league of sixty families' from Mary- land started their first quota of twenty-five families in the early spring of 1785. They marched inland from Maysville-avoiding the 'Falls of the Ohio' for fear of murderous In- dians-to Goodwin's Station, now Boston, as the nearest safe point to the first settlement on Pottinger's creek.
"Six principal settlements were thus divided: (1) Cox's Creek and Beech Fork, which took in Bardstown, Nazareth and St. Thomas: (2) Pottinger's Creek, which em-
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braces Holy Cross, New Haven, New Hope, Chicago and Gethsemane; (3) Hardin's Creek, which includes St. Charles, St. Mary's, Loretto and St. Francis Xavier's at Raywick ; (4) Cartwright's Creek, which is made up of St. Rose, St. Catherine's, St. Dominic at Springfield, and the two churches at Freder- icksburg, and Manton; (5) Rolling Fork, which covers the territory of Calvary, Holy Mary, St. Bernard in Casey county, and St. Augustine's in Lebanon; (6) Woodford, or Scott county, including Lexington and White Sulphur. The second band of immigrants came on the heels of the first, but chose the region about St. Mary's, Loretto, Raywick, and east of Kentucky river, Scott county. In 1787 more numerous accessions came to Bardstown and Springfield to join the Lan- casters, Coomes' and Harts, with a smaller contribution of some fifteen Irish families on lower Cox's creek. Ten. years later, 'many Irish families were scattered here and there in Tennessee,' as Father Badin reports. In eight following years, 1787-95, the pioneers spread over the present sites of Calvary, Le- banon, Fairfield, and Casey county ; and finally, as far inland as Hardinsburg and parts of Breckenridge county. The emigra- tion parties from St. Mary's, Prince Edward and St. Charles counties, in Maryland, and Loudon county, Virginia, kept flowing toward Kentucky almost continuously, as late as 1825-6, when they practically closed their movements. All authorities on the subject and subsequent civil records, with baptismal and marriage registers, are at one in the tes- timony that the whole body of Catholic pioneers, with the slight exceptions above noted, were of one nationality-English fused with Welsh. Their remote ancestors of the Saxon and Briton stock had kept the faith for nigh a thousand years; resisted the temp- tations and persecutions of the sixteenth ; finally fled from the Independents and Crom- wellians in the seventeenth, and, at fast, their
American sons gained complete civil and re- ligious liberty in Kentucky in the eighteenth century.
"Reverting to their sole surviving pastor and founder, Father Badin, in his three series of Archive letters, proved himself the sterling, and, if rigid, tireless missionary. A man of brains and fruitful resources, he straightened out the scattered groups of his fifteen hun- dred to sixteen hundred people in the two states of Tennessee and Kentucky, and made excursions into Indiana. The forlorn French- man, thus single-handed, from his thirty-sec- ond to thirty-sixth year, received aid at last from Mr. M. Fournier, 1797-1803, and Four- nier's friend, the brave Anthony Salmon, who perished in the cold of the winter of 1799. By this latter year, Rev. John Thayer, a convert from Boston, long heralded, came to the relief of the suffering Scott county mission. Of him, the senior Bishop Spalding records that 'though four years in Kentucky, he devoted but two to missionary labor.' What occupied the other two, Badin frankly relates : 'He intended to appropriate the church land and presbytery with two negroes for three years' service ; then (gigantic plans !) he should make them a foundation of nuns, and set the slaves at liberty. Also he ener- vates the authority of masters over the negroes ; gives vent too freely to his political opinions. This imprudence may be an ob- stacle to the success of his ministry among Protestants. I recommended trustees never to divert public property to private interests.' The 'pious and zealous' Puritan convert spent some twenty years, afterwards, in England and Ireland, especially at Limerick, whose poor he served heroically. (Letter of Rev. Simon W. G. Bruté de Rémur, 1826).
"The practical, hard-headed Badin thus eked out eleven years, with fitful assistance, until the joyous coming of his first perma- nent assistant, Rev. Mr. Chas. Nerinckx, future founder of Loretto. Meanwhile, in
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the last letter of the Archives, dated October, 1799. Father Badin broaches the foundation of a bishopric, from which 'he could see many advantages would arise to the Church. Many Catholics, even far grown in years, had never received the sacrament of Confirmation. Re- ligion would acquire more firmness and re- spectability. But,' he adds prophetically, 'he would be almost a mendicant bishop, as I have been really a mendicant priest.'
The solitary pastor's people in Kentucky had now increased to three-fold the number he had found on his arrival ten years before. Ile had thus not only forty-five hundred souls in the developing missions at home, but was compelled to attend the priestless flock in Indiana, and all Tennessee into the bargain, as we shall see him do alone and in the com- pany of Mr. Nerinckx. His habitual motto: 'I look for no repose in this life,' had more than ever a literal meaning :- he lived in the saddle. His resource for the instruction of the swarms of children and no small con- tingent of slaves, in his twenty stations, was his corps of catechist-, picked men and women in each neighborhood, who taught Christian doctrine and oral Bible history, reading the Gospel and Epistle with the mass prayers on Sundays. The negro was happy be- cause cared for, given his rights in the Chris- tian homes, and admitted to religions educa- tion on equal footing with his master's family. He has thriven, and his race is now as num- erous in the Church as Badin's whole flock.
"The Rev. Mr. Nerinckx, who had arrived in July. 1805. was another waif driven like the Kentucky Dominicans, out of the Nether- lands by the successful French. Now, in his forty-fifth year, gigantic in bodily strength and rugged in health, he joined Father Badin at St. Stephen's-no home to either, indeed. but merely a point of departure on their end- less circuit. Opportunity was now given to provide the yet churchless faithful with rnde houses of worship. Four more, besides the
log structure at Holy Cross, Marion county, came into use by the strenuous direction and labor of the Belgian pioneer, who could wield the 'handstick' against any two of the stout back-woodsmen. The five were increased to ten Catholic churches, and the last, a second Holy Cross, was actually built of brick. The wrought-iron figures, 1823. yet stand boldly out on the front of the surviving and sub- stantially sound relic. Marion county was provided with four, Breckinridge with two; and one church each in Nelson, Hardin, Mer- cer, Adair and Grayson counties in the west- ern half of the state. The congregations, generally assigned half to each priest, were supplemented by stations, 'scattered.' ( writes Bishop M. J. Spalding ) 'over the whole ex- tent of Kentucky.' Afterwards, Father Nerinckx made two charity trips to Europe. and, besides money, plate and vestments, pro- cured half of the invaluable paintings in the Bardstown and Louisville cathedrals.
" 'Tis a curious relic of the French origin of many of the early Kentucky missionaries, and their fellow countrymen, in Shippingport. that instead of being addressed. either orally or by writing. as 'Father', their title was a literal translation of 'Monsieur. - Mister ! Thus ' Father Badin, all through his extant correspondence, from 1793 to 1852, ( the year before his death) calls his colleagues. In the last letter of 1799 to Rt. Rev. Dr. Car- roll, then in his tenth year as bishop of Bal- timore, he sends a message sealed, to Rev. Mr. Flaget. Him Father Badin constantly thereafter, in his letters of the following cen- tury, proposed and insisted upon as the proper candidate for the bishopric of the Middle West. 'The See of Bardstown,' writes J. Gilmary Shea (Vol. II. p. 618.) 'seemed due to Father Badin, who had done so much of the pioneer work in Kentucky: but his ex- treme severity had made him unpopular :- and this the frank old hero afterwards more than half endorsed.
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"Benedict Joseph Flaget, native of Billom, quite in the centre of France, had scarcely arrived six months before in America, in com- pany with Father Badin and Rev. John B. David, when he was assigned to duty in south- ern Indiana, at Post Vincennes. Thence he wrote four days before Christmas, 1792: 'The church, I found a very poor log build- ing, open to the weather and almost tottering.' The congregation, of several hundred souls, proved indifferent to his native French ex- hortation, for he could muster 'only twelve who approached Holy Communion during the Christmas.' He toiled, as only a French mis- sionary will do at twenty-eight years of age, for the two years, 1793-4; but his health broke down, and he was recalled to aid his Sulpitian brethren, in St. Mary's Mother Sem- inary of Baltimore. Flaget's fourteen years of nearly unbroken work. in teaching candidates for the priesthood and in ministering to the simple faithful in Maryland, familiarized the future bishop with the language and disposi- tions of the very stock of people, who for thirty-five to forty years had been emigrat- ing to his prospective diocese. At the age of forty-four, and the twentieth of his ordina- tion, the mature missionary was preconized bishop of Bardstown April 8. 1808. Two years of frightened reluctance precede his consecration by Archbishop John Carroll, November 4, 1810. A perilous and toilsome journey, by land and water, from the 4th of May to June 9th, the next year, brings him first to Bardstown ; 'a town like your New Jersey,' he writes a friend, 'of 150 families, of which scarcely three are Catholics.' Post- ing on to Priestland, on the site of Loretto convent, two days later. the wearied pontiff is installed at an altar, improvised under the primeval forest, hard by St. Stephen's, surrounded by the vicar-general, Father Badin, John B. David, M. Savine, Charles Nerinckx, Mr. Guy Chabrat, a priest (?) called Chas. Herinsky, and three seminarians. Rev. Henri
Pratte, a Canadian, joined the bishop's forces some years later. The diocese of Bardstown had, with the ordination of Mr. Chabrat at St. Rose convent, six secular and four re- ligious priests-Rev. M. Savine having been set to work at Kahokia, Illinois. With the two brick churches, St. Rose, Springfield, and Danville, Kentucky, there were eleven churches and twenty-four stations, in which nearly six thousand souls were estimated as the Catholic population.
"Bishop Flaget and Father David lost no time in occupying the 400-acre farm of St. Thomas, donated, this first year, by Thomas and Ann Howard. Priests and seminarians joined in the work of erecting the primitive log seminary and the nearby first convent of Nazareth. The log was replaced by a brick seminary, adjoining the yet surviving brick church of St. Thomas, finished in 1816. Whilst David and Nerinckx were instituting their native orders of Sisterhood, Nazareth and Loretto, the Bishop busied himself in starting his subscription for the cathedral at Bardstown. Flaget's letter of January, 1812, states that Catholics had already signed $6,000, and the generous non-Catholics of his episcopal town 'subscribed almost entirely by themselves' the sum of $10,000. The cathe- (ral of St. Joseph, yet standing in pristine splendor, dates its consecration from August 15, 1819. This being followed closely by the episcopal consecration of Rt. Rev. John B. David, did not prevent the two bishops from residing in the new seminary, now transferred from St. Thomas to the town. The two in- stitutions produced under David's teaching, forty-seven priests, from first to last, half of whom were of the Maryland-Kentucky immi- grants.
"The new communities of religious women, all of the same lineage, had in 1820, eighty Sisters-Nazareth, twenty, Loretto, sixty. Do- minican Sisters formed the third community, two years later. Nineteen churches, manned
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by ten or eleven priests, serving 10,000 people in 1815, grew according to Bishop Flaget's report (January, 1826) to fourteen log and ten brick churches, with twenty-two priests and 18,000 souls. In 1821-2, two of the famous colleges of the south were founded : St. Mary's College by Rev. Byrne, and St. Joseph's, Bardstown, by Rev. Geo. A. M. Elder. Secondary education had claimed the attention of the Dominicans of Springfield as far back as 1809-the college of St. Thomas of Aquin, surviving for ten years.
"Bishop David, sixty-five years old, had been partly relieved as pastor and professor by the Propaganda scholar, Dr. F. P. Ken- drick, some five years before the young Mar- tin J. Spalding entered the seminary in 1826. The bright Kentuckian, Spalding, admired his elder compeer, Rev. Robt. A. Abell, whose fame as an orator had spread east and west. Hon. B. J. Webb never wearied in recounting the doughty deeds of this Father Abell, 'Uncle Bob,' who became the first resident pastor of Louisville, building the second St. Louis church in 1830, to accommodate numerous accessions to his people, 'almost wholly of Irish immigrants.' At just the date of Dr. Martin Spalding's return from Rome, 1833-4, an interchange of positions between Bishops Flaget and David caused the appointment of
Rt. Rev. Guy Chabrat as coadjutor. In Bishop Flaget's absence of four years, Chab- rat blessed old St. Boniface as the first Ger- man church in the city, of a congregation formed in 1836. The year 1841 was the last of good David's eighty fruitful years. Bishop Chabrat was simply a 'misfit'; and on his retirement to France a few years later, Father Spalding, risen to vicar-general, took over the administration of the diocese. Mean- while, on Father William Byrne's death, in 1833, the Jesuits were settled at St. Mary's College, where they remained for thirteen years; taking up, two years later (1848), under Bishop Spalding, St. Joseph's College. Senator Ben. J. Webb founded the Catholic Advocate in 1835. and was connected with that periodical and The Guardian for forty or more years.
"The history of the further development of the See of Louisville, made possible by the later immigration of the present great major- ity of the members of the Church, the Ger- mans and the Irish, belongs but slightly to the story of the See of Bardstown. Bishop Mar- tin John Spalding's consecration in 1848 closed one period and opened another, with a Catholic population of 30,000 souls served by forty priests in fifty-three churches and chapels."
CHAPTER LIX.
PRIOR TO THE 1890-I CONVENTION-CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION PROCEEDINGS-CONSTITU- TION OF KENTUCKY.
When the constitution of Kentucky, adopted in 1849, was made, it contained an article de- signedly intended to render difficult any effort to amend or change that instrument. At that period the slavery question was in an acute stage; delegates to the constitutional conven- tion had advocated the abolition of slavery ; Cassius M. Clay was thundering against it and was by no means without a following which, though small in numbers, was wholly in earnest. Henry Clay's efforts in congress which resulted in the Compromise measure of 1850, following the adoption of the new con- stitution, served to stay for a short time only the gathering storm which his militant name- sake foresaw and welcomed. The new con- stitution fixed slavery upon the state irrev- ocably, as the mistaken men who formed it vainly thought. There was a force greater than constitution-makers coming in the near future which was to be a constitution breaker, in a sense, and not all the cunning schemes of statesmen could for a moment withstand the men behind the guns. When the war had closed and slavery had died, men of reason and a sense of justice saw the necessity for a change in the organic laws of the state recog- nizing the new era which, whatever their views of its propriety might be, was fixed and irrevocable.
The legislature of 1871-2 passed a strin- gent law against the confederating of two or more persons to injure the person or prop- erty of another. This was generally known
as the anti-Kuklux law, though, as a matter of fact, that organization never had a foothold in Kentucky where there was no need for its peculiar operations, whatever may have been the necessities of the States further south. The few outrages occurring in Kentucky were the result of a desire for private ven- geance on the part of men of neither personal standing nor responsibility. As has been stated elsewhere, the first men indicted under this new statute were convicted and sent to prison and since that time, it has been seldom that the officers of the law have been called upon to enforce the penalties of the statute.
In the days of slavery, neither a slave nor a free colored person was a competent wit- ness in a Kentucky court of justice. The same legislature which enacted the anti-Ku- klux law repealed the prohibitory statute as to negro testimony, and since that time negroes have been accepted as witnesses without restriction. In numerous instances they have served as grand and petit jurors. Notwithstanding these facts, it was unlawful, contrary to the constitution, for a negro to cross the line from another state into Ken- tucky, and there were other archaic provi- sions in that instrument which it was desir- able should be revised or eliminated. The best-informed people saw this plainly, but the constitutional barrier against a change was so strong that repeated efforts to assemble a constitutional convention, failed to receive a convincing vote. Finally a vote favorable
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