For the Union and the Catholic Church

<p> Four men joined the Catholic Church in the mid-1840s: a soldier his bishop brother a priest born a slave and an editor. For the next two decades they were in the thick of the battles of the era--Catholicism versus Know-Nothingism slavery versus abolition North versus South. Much has been written about the Catholic Church and about the Civil War. This book is the first in more than half a century to focus exclusively on the intersection of these two topics.</p>