For Church and Confederacy: The Lynches of South Carolina

Through letters and other writings, this historical study chronicles an Irish Catholic family’s influence on mid-nineteenth–century South Carolina.

For Church and Confederacy unveils the lives of the Lynch family during the late antebellum and Civil War years. Settling in the South Carolina upcountry, Irish immigrants Conlaw and Eleanor Lynch imparted their ambitions to their children, several of whom would make exceptional marks in such areas as education, manufacturing, and religious life.

Patrick Lynch, the third Roman Catholic bishop of Charleston, developed a national reputation as a polemicist, and during the Civil War he was appointed as a Confederate special commissioner to the Papal States. Other family members, particularly Francis, whose tanneries supplied shoes to thousands of soldiers, and Ellen, whose Catholic academy became a refuge for the children of prominent Southern families, also made valuable contributions to the Confederacy. All of them considered slaveholding indispensable to achieving their position in Southern society.

Though the Lynches were on the periphery of the political turmoil that led to disunion, they became strong secessionists once the war began. By the war’s end most found themselves in the path of William T. Sherman’s avenging army and suffered great losses.

Featuring meticulous notes and commentary placing the Lynch siblings’ writings in historical context, this compelling portrait of the complex relationship among religion, slavery, and war has a sweep that carries the reader along as the war gradually overtakes the family’s privileged world and eventually brings it down.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9781643360218

Book preview

Prologue

For their Faith and Country

Catholic Ireland in the nineteenth century still could be divided into the two blocs that had constituted it since the thirteenth century: the Gaelic majority and the Old English minority. The MacMahons and the Lynches represented the finest families of the two respective communities that had joined forces in the revolution against England in 1641 and paid the terrible price in lives and land that the victorious Cromwell imposed upon them. The MacMahons were an old Gaelic family with a number of distinguished branches in the Ulster Province, one of which was the tribe of Fermanagh. Like most of the Gaelic tribes, Fermanagh had sent some of its finest young males to the continent to serve in the armies of Catholic monarchs.¹

The Lynches had come to England with William the Conqueror in 1066; one of William’s generals at the Battle of Hastings was a Lynch. Two centuries later another Lynch was among the first English transplants in Galway. Over the next four centuries the Lynches became the most powerful of the thirteen merchant families (the thirteen tribes), the oligarchy that controlled the political and economic life of the region. No fewer than eighty-four Lynches served as mayor of Galway City. All that ended with Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland and the Punic peace that he imposed, with massive land confiscations and deportations that swept up the Lynches along with the rest of the Thirteen. One of the family, Peter Lynch, was forced in the 1650s to relocate to Fermanagh, where the MacMahons had traditionally ruled. Conlaw Peter Lynch was the great-great-grandson of this internal exile. His marriage to Eleanor McMahon Neison joined the histories of these two remarkable families.

Internal evidence suggests that Ellen Baptista Lynch was the author of this family biography, written in the late 1870s, with her mother as her chief source. Eleanor Neison Lynch, following her husband’s death in 1870, spent the final seven years of her life at Valle Crucis, the Ursuline convent and academy outside of Columbia, South Carolina, where her daughter was superior. Much of the information and perspective in this essay, it would seem, could only have been provided by the mother: the pride in their storied Irish roots with the Lynch and McMahon clans, together with the deep-seated resentment of English oppression that had survived the Atlantic passage to shape the memory of a new generation of Irish exiles in America. Of note as well is the family tradition of consecrating their firstborn male to the service of the Church; both the Lynches and the McMahons boasted a long line of priests and bishops, including one who became Primate of Ireland. This tradition of church service is one that the Lynches would carry to South Carolina and beyond.

Map of Ireland, with outset of Counties Fermanagh and Monaghan depicting the town of Clones. The parish of Clones split the two counties. Map created by Lynne Parker.

Not all of the text has survived; we are not told what happened when Eleanor Lynch brought her newly baptized firstborn to her father’s house. But the foreshadowing of final rejection has been clear enough. Presumably that failure to secure a financial underpinning was a factor in setting their course for America, if not in making the decision itself, at least in confirming it.

[ELLEN BAPTISTA LYNCH], ACCOUNT OF THE LYNCH FAMILY

Mrs Eleanor McMahon lived a retired life in the town of Magheraveely Ireland—diverting herself to the care & education of her only little daughter & visiting the poor.²

She was a widow … & never ceased to mourn for her noble husband (the cousin of the present Duke of Magenta & President of France)—who had been struck down while yet in the prime of life—never did she grow weary of recounting his many noble traits of character to her little fatherless daughter, until … the child budded into woman hood possessing her father’s characteristics.

Many were the suitors who solicited the hand in marriage of Miss Sue McMahon—but most of them were parvenus & a cold refusal from the mother decided that point however rich the suitor was in this worlds goods.

[In] 1773, the memories of English protestant bigotry were too fresh & frequent for any of the noble old families of Ireland, to look with favor on the tools of a government, which had confiscated their estates & given them over to its minions, had taxed them for every luxury, aye even necessity of life, & either driven them as aliens from the native homes, or reduced them to become the hewers of wood & drawers of water for these venturers—these usurpers—Therefor a McMahon could not, would not, form an alliance which would demand a sacrifice of principle & set at naught the sufferings of ancestors for the pro aris et focis³—Sue McMahon looked with a favorable eye on a Catholic suitor who presented himself in the person of young Patrick Neillson. This young man was esteemed by all as being steady, industrious & intelligent. he was remarkable for his integrity in all business transactions—& although poor—claimed to be a descendant of the great O’Neill—.⁴

Mrs. McMahon gave her consent to the marriage of her only child Sue & moreover, out of her wealth, established her son in law in business & lived to see her daughter most happily settled in life—

Upon her death which occurred soon after[,] Mr. & Mrs P. Neillson were sole heirs to a handsome property, [from] which he was not long in turning … profits—In those days of English persecution over Irish Catholics, they could not purchase real estate, but could lease it for 99 years & a day—

An elegant property with large stone wall dwelling—several offices & every desirable improvement on the place—with larger & well built Barns & Byres for a stock farm, were offered for Lease—& taken by young Mr Neillson—Here he set up looms for spinning & weaving flax—there he started a farm dairy—soon could be seen a village of industrious laborers under his intelligent supervision—Providence seemed to smile on him & although many of his neighbors were envious of his good fortune—& some even pronounced him money loving & exacting, yet the poor, all were received kindly at his door, & often, … travellers found a comfortable nights lodging … on his premises—& early with the dawn was Mr Neillson up & saw that the weary traveller had his morning meal & gave a god speed you on your way.

Two sons & a daughter were born to these happy parents, when Mrs. Sue McMahon Neillson was sent for to visit a sick family of one of her husbands operatives—She found on entering the cottage a little boy about the age of one of her own darlings lying at the point of death—unsparing of herself—she exhausted her strength in fruitless exertion to save the life of the little person—& in doing so contracted the sickness of which the little boy died—& herself became the martyr of charity at the early age of 22—leaving her three babes motherless & her husband heartbroken—(R.I.P.)

From a bright & cheerful spirit Mr Neillson became sad, growing even morose—he endeavored to conquer grief by attending to his still prosperous business—But what was now the sound of spindle—what the dash of those monster churns, the play of whose massive beams his loving wife had so often watched with him—Her presence was missed everywhere, & the merry sound of the dear childrens voices seemed but to embitter his grief—…. Their only remembrance of their devoted mother was of the pretty lady whom they were taken to kiss in the coffin—. He could not bear of their prattle—

The same faithful family servants of Mrs McMahon took care of the little motherless ones—& good old Peggy McDonough—who had been early friend & house keeper— … She had confided to her maternal care Mr Neillsons only little daughter Eleanor.

This little old woman, with plain countenance sat beside her little Flax-wheel spinning, & with the bright little Eleanor by her side watching the motions of both foot & wheel—would recount to dear little one the many domestic virtues of her saintly Mother & grandmother—until in the mind of little Eleanor the McMahons & O’Neills were unequalled for goodness & bravery—. Time rolled on & although prosperity had ripened into great wealth, under the intelligent business management of Patrick Neillson & his Brother- in Law Mr. Patrick McMahon— …

The penal laws prohibited Catholic education—How were his children to be educated at home—True, he could send them to their relatives in France—the McMahons—or to their relatives in England the Neillsons—But he preferred to keep them near himself—they were his all—To avoid the government agents & tools, he employed a tutor for his Boys—who also took his seat at a loom to weave flax—the Boys sat near him, as if to learn the Flax & loom, on the approach of footsteps, lest some government spy or tool would betray the secret & subject the teacher to death or transportation—.⁵

Little Eleanor could not be sent with her brothers nor exposed as they—She was the pet of the household … —She was promised a grand treat—Fair-day was approaching & she who had never been to Clones was to be taken there by her father—It was a grand occasion to all the country—as well as to little Eleanor—for her Uncle Hugh McMahon was to speak.

The mighty O’Connell⁶ had not then aroused the nation & with legal skill split the hairs of persecution— … but his predecessors were agitating the subject & one of the most powerful & acceptable orators of the day was Mr Hugh McMahon—In personal appearance Mr McMahon was very imposing—tall, handsome erect, with broad & sloping shoulders he appeared a man of about 30 years of age, he possessed a clear sonorous voice & an animated countenance.

An immense crowd was assembled around & near the platform to hear his speech—& the little Eleanor upheld on the shoulders of a faithful employee enjoyed the scene vastly—As her uncle ascended the steps of the platform & his fine manly form became visible to the crowd below—shout after shout of huzzahs rent the air—

But as if in an instant & before he had opened his mouth to speak while with uplifted hand he acknowledged the triumphant welcome—a man from the crowd rushed up after him, & drove into his heart the knife of the assassin—& rushing down was lost in the crowd & confusion.

McMahon staggered & would have fallen had not a dozen brave arms supported him—& carried him at once into the nearest Hotel—surgeons declared it a mortal wound—

Then the murmur of anger & revenge stirred the crowd—the murderer was hunted in vain for what of law or justice was meted out to a Catholic—? None whatever.

Yet such was the universal respect entertained for Mr Hugh McMahon that his remains were laid out in state—his Bier decorated with (crimson) heavy rosettes & sashes of crimson & no horse was allowed the honor of drawing it—For three miles the Bier was borne by detachments of friends until they reached the family burial ground.

It was a moving spectacle to the immense crowd as they saw the crimson streamers from the Bier & arms of the Pall -bearers pass on into the chapel & rest before the altars for the rights of which, this noble young mans life had been sacrificed—. The Holy Mass was offered—the remains consigned to the tomb, amid the prayers & tears of some, & the threats & murmurs of others—Little Eleanor saw and heard all & nestled close to her uncle Patrick McMahon—(the Brother of the deceased) as if to shelter herself & at the same time soothe his great grief—

Her elder brother John & younger Brother Hugh McMahon Neillson led on by their father shared the indignation glowing in every honest breast, at the fearful deed, & that shelter provided by the minions of English Protestant Rule over Catholic Ireland—These children early learned that the enemies of the Irish were to be distrusted—They saw the precautions taken to conceal from the oppressive agents of Government all that could in any way offer them an excuse to tithe & tax & confiscate—as they prowled around day & night or hired spies to do the mean work for them—Mr Patrick Neillson saw it was to his interest to appear as neutral as possible—his wealth was too tempting a bait—, could these Valentine McClutchys⁷ by any pretext lay hold on it—His desire to save his property activated him in dissembling much that he felt—. On one occasion he heard the tramp of horses on the pavement in the court-yard & could perceive the glitter of arms—soon entrance was demanded in a loud familiar voice of the leader of a band of Orangemen—but before the door could be opened—Caesar, a splendid mastiff—paid the forfeit of his life, for defending his Masters premises—

How the master chafed with anger when on opening the door at that unseemly hour he heard the dying groans of his faithful Caesar, now lying there welling in his blood—An apparently friendly greeting passed & Mr. Neillson had a hot supper prepared for the party en route—who left apparently satisfied, though their concealed intent was to surprise Mr Neillson & his employees if possible in some act, however trivial against the government, which could be made a plea for laying hold on some of the gold which report said he had conceald—

These golden charms together with others brought many suitors for the hand of Mr Neillsons only daughter Eleanor McMahon—but so rigid had he been in rearing her, that her face was known to but few. This was of little importance however, where such marriage arrangements are perfected by parents & based on the fortune & social position of each party.

Mr Neillson was very difficult to please but … Finally [he] engaged his young daughter to the son of an old friend. The young man was handsome, wealthy, sensible—but unfortunately an Orangeman—⁸

Eleanor was told of this—& when she mentioned it to her uncle McMahon, whom she loved devotedly & made the confidante of all her little secrets—she observed the rigid pressure of his lips, the cloud on his brow & his ominous silence—He paced the room after she left him—. No, said he this must not be—The daughter of Sue McMahon & the heir of my murdered Brother Hugh can never marry a Sassanach⁹ I must speak with Neillson about this matter, painful though it be. While revolving in his mind how to address one so reticent as his brother-in-law on the subject, so dear to the hearts of both—all were startled by the news of a skirmish between the crosses & orangemen in which the fiancé was accidentally killed—

Eleanor was unconcerned—The servants congratulated her on a lucky escape—& her Uncle McMahon was relieved in mind—

No one ever knew the sentiments of Mr. Neillson on the subject—but soon he proposed to his daughter a rich young Catholic—of whom she would not listen—Meantime she met at the chapel a remarkably handsome youth, a stranger from the mountain—Conlaw Peter Lynch—The young gentleman was evidently attracted to her, & on her return home she sought Uncle McMahon (to narrate all that had passed)—Oh! said he, there’s a young man I would like to see—One of the Lynches of Galway, one of Ireland’s true sons—& sons of the Faith for which they have nobly fought & suffered—Yes, they sacrificed for their Faith & Country everything they possessed of power & wealth & comforts of life—but never would they sacrifice principle & betray the Faith—They are a noble family, those Lynch’s of Galway—

Soon it reached the ears of Eleanor’s brother, that at last she was interested in a suitor for her hand—Her younger brother Hugh McMahon was a gentle blue eyed boy who so loved his bright-gay sister, as to think every thing she did perfect—but her elder brother John, a dark-eyed pale young man had mourned the death of her Orangeman lover—& now made all manner [of] threats against this poor Mercutio, as he derisively called young Conlaw Peter Lynch

Being the oldest son his influence over his father was considerable & John lost no time in misrepresenting to Mr Neillson that this poor Catholic young man was a fortune hunter, who sought more the wealth of his sister than her affection—

Mr Neillson had placed in Bank prior to his second marriage—the fortune of each of his children with the proviso that it was theirs if they married to please him—but he would cut any one off with a shilling, who would marry against his will—. John knew it would revert to him if his sister married against the will of his father, & he saw she was determined—therefore his part was to prevent her father’s consent—which was not difficult to do, given the young man was poor.—

Eleanor’s advisor & friend was Uncle McMahon—Young Mr Lynch made every honorable proposal to Mr Neillson but the old gentleman was so embittered by his son & his misrepresentations & his daughter’s silent persistence, that he was unreasonable—Finally it was arranged that on the following Sunday, May 5th 1816 Eleanor McMahon Neillson accompanied by her faithful attendant—an old family servant—woman would attend Mass at Clones Chapel—there meet young Conlaw Peter Lynch—& after Mass she would not return home but go arm in arm with him—still attended by her … woman to the house of distant relatives of her & send word to her father by a servant man—This is called a run-away match in Ireland—

Mr Neillson seeing further opposition useless, sent for the young people & for Rev. Father Firnan—They were married in the Brides father’s house & he had the relatives assembled—gave them a handsome dejeuner—the Bridal party took leave & the old gentleman & his son John never would see them after—

Eleanor’s young heart, full of love & hope expected her father to relent, & waited day after day for some indication—& she would not have waited in vain perhaps, were it not for the mercenary elder son.

Mr Conlaw Peter Lynch was the youngest of eight sons. His venerable Mother gave a loving welcome to the young bride, who had honored her boy above all other aspirants for her hand & she made her feel for the first time in her life the happiness of possessing a loving mother. The family of Lynch or as it was anciently spelt Loingseach of Galway & of Tara’s Hall, was renowned in Irish history—

It was one of those noble brave clans, whose love of the faith & country gave martyrs & heroes to old Ireland, in the days of her persecution by the English government & finally after their overthrow & the confiscation of their estates, they retreated to the mountains, where unmolested they practised the Faith & concealed their honorable poverty—The venerable widow Mrs Lynch enjoyed in the midst of her children & grand-children an undisturbed peace—she was esteemed & beloved one might say revered by every one, & the poor found in her a tender & compassionate friend—The mountain scenery was beautifully new to the young Bride—All nature was charming, in this lovely month of May—& from the eminence on which their dwelling stood could be seen the dwelling of the several sons of the old lady—to each of which she made frequent visits—Since the death of her husband, one of her sons had brought his wife & children to console his devoted Mother—now, her youngest son & the pet of the family had brought his bride—& all endeavoured to make her happy & enable her to forget her father’s stern treatment, & assure her he would relent—

Her Babies as she fondly termed Conlaw & his young wife were now her special object of affectionate solicitude—& often would she come herself to the dear child Eleanor with some tempting delicacy & kind of loving cheerfulness—to which the bright spirit of Eleanor warmly responded—The cloud above darkened ever & anon the first years of their marriage—Eleanor tried in vain to get some word from her father—She employed faithful family servants—& also relatives, but the stern relentless old gentleman admitted no approach— …

March 10th 1817 was born a son to them, according to the pious Catholic custom of the Lynch family, the first born in each family is consecrated to the service of the altar…. What a fine Boy—a splendid little fellow—God bless him—! Was the exclamation of every one as member after member of the family came to offer congratulations—And when at Mass the following Sunday the news was circulated among friends, the faithful servants came to see their young mistress & her babe—"Surely now, the old master will be proud—do send the fine looking little fellow on his first visit to his grandfather & see what he will do for him—!

The young mother’s heart beat with joy & pride, & she resolved to follow the suggestion; secretly hoping that her father would give to her eldest son the fortune he had refused to herself—Grandma dressed Babe for his Baptism & many assembled to rejoice in the event, & the child was called after his grandfather, Patrick Neillson.

A few days after with a young mother’s love & pride of her first-born Mrs Conlaw Peter Lynch placed her little Patrick Neillson in the arms of good faithful nurse—adjusted his dress with care & with a cheerful smile & loving kiss sent him to see her father. Something whispered within her—surely he will now relent, he cannot look into those eyes & not love the child of his only daughter—& he will prove his love of a father for me & mine—How her imagination pictured her Father’s pleasure in hearing the name of his only grandson—how proud he would … [text ends]

Antebellum Years

Everyone must have their own troubles.

Having failed in her attempt to reconcile with her father, Eleanor Neison Lynch and her husband, Conlaw Peter Lynch, set sail with their son, Patrick, in the late fall of 1818 for the New World. The first week of the new year, while still at sea, Eleanor gave birth to a second son whom they named John. Like so many of the Irish immigrants to America, the Lynches’ first port was a Canadian one, St. John’s, Newfoundland. From there they made a difficult, storm-filled passage down the coast of the Maritime Provinces and the eastern United States to Georgetown, South Carolina, where they intended to settle. A chance contact there quickly changed those intentions. John Lyde Wilson, a local lawyer and soon-to-be governor of the state, recommended an upcountry town, Cheraw, as the best prospect in the state for newcomers. Wilson, a native of Cheraw, was then serving on the Internal Improvements Committee of the state legislature. Aware of an ongoing project to clear silt and other debris from the Great Pee Dee River, whose navigable portion terminated at the town, Wilson had an insider’s vision of Cheraw’s ideal fall-line location for tapping the commercial opportunities of the industrial and transportation revolutions that steam power was creating in the first decades of the century.¹

Wilson’s optimistic projection of Cheraw’s future moved the Lynches to cast their fortunes with the rising town. They made the seventy-five mile trip up the Great Pee Dee on the first steamboat to ply that vital waterway. The site proved to have all the potential that Wilson had promised. Cheraw itself was one of the oldest developments in South Carolina, having by 1750 become important enough as a trading center with water mills to be among the six settlements shown on a contemporary map of the colony. In the years immediately before the Revolution, a grid of broad streets and town green had been laid out. In that civil conflict the village found itself in the midst of the savage fighting between local Patriots and Tories, which by war’s end left much of Cheraw devastated. When the Lynches arrived in 1819, the town had recovered enough to be on the cusp of a new era of development, as its legal incorporation a year later signaled. Cheraw grew rapidly as a shipping center for the various staple crops grown in the region (tobacco, rice, indigo, cotton). The town also became an important producer of leather goods, the home of a curing industry, and by the 1850s the largest market for cotton between Charleston and Wilmington. Merchants’ Bank by the 1850s was the largest one in the state outside of Charleston, a testimony to the scale of commerce in the area, which the advent of the Cheraw and Darlington Railroad in 1853 only increased.

This was the fertile environment the Lynches found upon docking in Cheraw in 1819, one in which Conlaw Lynch quickly put his artisan skills to productive use. As the economy boomed in the 1820s, Peter Lynch was among those meeting the need for both public and private structures. While practicing his trades as carpenter and millwright, Lynch was responsible for the construction of several residences, including one for his family, which by 1838 numbered thirteen. He also designed and built the Town Market Hall (1837) and St. Peter’s Catholic Church (ca. 1843). As the head of the first Catholic family in the area, Peter Lynch served as site provider, fund-raiser, architect, and builder of the church. Located on a substantial lot at High and Market Streets, diagonal to the modest, two-story upcountry farmhouse of the Lynches, St. Peter’s mirrored the earlier Lynch project, Market Hall, without the elevated first floor of the town building, and with its central tower bearing a cross rather than a weather vane.

Over the course of their first six years in Cheraw, Eleanor Lynch gave birth to four children, two boys (Francis and James) and three girls (Mary and Ellen, and Catherine). Then, in the decade of the 1830s, there were five more successful births: three boys (Conlaw, Hugh, and Bernard) and two girls (Anna and Julia). In all there were a dozen children, hardly conducive to the reacquisition of wealth and social prestige that had brought them to America. As patriarch of his ever-growing family, Peter more often than not found himself living on the edge of being able to provide for his family. In 1848 he had to pull his son Conlaw out of school in Charleston because the family needed the income the son could provide by clerking for a merchant in Cheraw. Seven years later, when his daughter Catherine wanted to enter the Carmelite order, he did not have the wherewithal to furnish an appropriate dowry for her. But if the Lynches lacked the substantial wealth to provide generously for their many children, they very effectively implanted in their children this fundamental drive to accumulate it. By the time they reached maturity, the pursuit of money as a life goal had been embedded in the cultural genes of the Lynch children. All, as Francis noted, developed a taste for business, which the males indulged, including those with professional training, be it the law, medicine, or even the ministry. Most of the younger males entered the business world by apprenticing themselves as clerks. All the Lynch men at one time or other were involved with business and investment ventures.

Peter’s Church, Cheraw. Conlaw Peter Lynch became a major builder in Cheraw, constructing its Market Hall (1837) as well as St. Peter’s Church (ca. 1843), the first building for Catholic worship in the area. Courtesy of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charleston Archives.

True to classical American expectations, the five Lynch children who escaped consumption’s grip surpassed their parents in their achievements, although only one realized the riches of family dreams and that for a very brief time. The firstborn, Patrick, had honored the family’s tradition of consecrating the firstborn to the Lord’s service by becoming a priest. John England, who had arrived in South Carolina from Ireland a year after the Lynches to become Charleston’s first Catholic bishop, regularly stayed with them when making his episcopal visits to the upcountry. Seeing in the young Lynch extraordinary intellectual and spiritual promise, England had brought him to Charleston to the classical academy/seminary he had established there, then in 1834 sent him, along with another gifted Charlestonian, James Corcoran, to the Urban College in Rome for theological studies. Ordained there in 1840, Lynch, with doctorate in hand, had returned to Charleston, where Bishop England made him his personal secretary and appointed him to the faculty at St. John’s Seminary. When England died in April 1842, Patrick Lynch became editor of the United States Catholic Miscellany and, despite his extreme youth, was one of the three names submitted to Rome by the prelates of the Province of Baltimore as candidates to succeed England.

That Patrick Lynch, at twenty-five, could have so impressed the bishops of the eastern dioceses was likely due to the learning and skills he had displayed in the polemical duel he had been waging since 1841 with James Henley Thornwell, the leading Presbyterian theologian and president of South Carolina College. For four years Thornwell and Lynch, products of upcountry Carolina (both had attended Cheraw Academy), engaged in an ongoing published exchange of letters over controversial theological issues such as papal infallibility and the canon of the scriptures. Thornwell was notorious for his slash-and-burn rhetoric. His contempt for anti- Christian popery and his dismissal of Lynch’s arguments as puerile sophisms could not have stood in sharper contrast with Lynch’s detached, scholarly defense of Catholic doctrines.² For the gatekeepers of organized intellectual life in Charleston, Lynch’s closely followed debate with Thornwell indelibly established his credentials as one of the best-educated people in Charleston, even though he was yet in his mid-twenties, and gained him a position within the circle of Charleston’s intellectual elite.³ He was John England revividus.

Patrick Lynch was a big man, over six feet in height, increasingly prone to stoutness as he aged, with the receding hairline and spectacles befitting a scholar. He carried himself with the stately air of someone descended from the highest Irish chieftains. Like his mentor, Patrick Lynch developed a reputation for preaching that reached far beyond Charleston.⁴ His multilingual fluency, rhetorical skills, and broad learning in the arts and sciences (the latter knowledge mostly self-acquired) made him the kind of polymath that knowledge societies coveted for members. By the mid-1850s Lynch held membership in virtually all of the local and national associations that defined America’s intellectual community, from the Charleston Library Society, to the Elliott Natural History Society, to the Conversation Club, to Russell’s Bookstore Club and the Philadelphia-based American Association for the Advancement of Science, to which group of the nation’s leading scientists Lynch was elected in 1849, a year after its founding.

For Lynch the informal meetings of the Bookstore Club may have been the most significant for him, owing to the contacts he was able to establish through them with the finest minds of Charleston’s intellectual cohort. None proved more productive than the relationship he struck with the club’s best-known member, the novelist and editor William Gilmore Simms. Simms was so taken with Lynch’s intellectual breadth that he made him an associate of his Southern Quarterly Review. The priest wrote several articles related to science for the journal in the late 1840s.

In 1849, when the municipal government abandoned its effort to construct artesian wells as the principal water source for the city, Lynch, who had taken a keen interest in the project from its beginnings in the early 1840s, assumed the role of public intellectual with a series of articles in the Charleston Evening News, in which he undertook to persuade Charlestonians of the need for such deep wells. Despite the daunting challenges their construction presented, Lynch showed how they could be built to ensure an adequate supply of potable water. Lynch’s newspaper lobbying proved decisive in the city’s renewing the project. The priest himself was named one of its principal managers. As such, he oversaw the collection of fossil species from the several strata uncovered by the drilling for the scientific information they contained about the corresponding geological periods. All in all, the artesian project gained Lynch a national reputation as a geologist.

John England had envisioned as his cathedral a magnificent Gothic structure whose spire would proclaim to city and state God’s glory according to the Roman Catholic tradition. He never lived to realize this grand dream, so it was fitting that Bishop Ignatius Aloysius Reynolds chose Patrick Lynch, England’s protégé, to put England’s dream into stone. Lynch chose as architect the Irish-born Patrick Charles Keely. The young Keely did not disappoint. The neo-Gothic Cathedral of St. John and St. Finbar was dedicated in 1854, the first of sixteen cathedrals that would establish Keely as the leading Catholic architect in America.

In March 1856 Ignatius Reynolds, at age fifty-six, succumbed finally to the ravages of his chronic medical disabilities. Rome appointed Patrick Lynch to administer the diocese until it named a new bishop. That fall he found himself caught up in the wave of revived nativism that had brought violence, political disruption, and anti-immigrant/anti-Catholic legislation throughout the nation in the mid-1850s. The xenophobic American Party peaked in 1856, questing for power at the municipal, state, and national levels. Charleston did not escape its reach, with American candidates in elections for sheriff and mayor. During campaigns in that year, Patrick Lynch broke his rule of skirting politics by utilizing the diocesan paper, the United States Catholic Miscellany, where James Corcoran had succeeded him as editor, to rebut nativist charges that voting abuses and other corrupt Catholic practices had produced Democratic victories. He no doubt contributed to the Irish-led counteroffensive that produced decisive Democratic triumphs at the polls.⁵ For Patrick Lynch the two campaigns marked the beginning of his involvement in the political sphere that would ultimately carry him to the highest diplomatic circles of Europe.

Patrick’s siblings were sure that his appointment as administrator of the diocese was prelude to his consecration as Charleston’s next bishop. Then came reports that Rome had appointed John McCaffrey, the president of Mount St. Mary’s College and Seminary in Maryland. Throughout 1857 Patrick Lynch continued to govern the diocese, all the while awaiting the official notice of Bishop McCaffrey’s appointment.

The Lynches’ second oldest brother, John, graduated from the Medical College of Charleston and took up practice in Cheraw. In September 1842 he married Elizabeth Steele Macnamara of Salisbury, North Carolina, the daughter of a prosperous, well-connected Irish Catholic merchant, and the descendant, on her mother’s side, of one of North Carolina’s first families.⁶ The marriage dramatically enhanced John’s social credentials, and by extension his family’s, within Carolina society. Whether status and/or monetary concerns entered into Lynch’s marital choice we do not know, although such concerns were clearly at play in the courtship a younger Lynch conducted a decade later. We do know that, in the practice of medicine, John Lynch always had an eye out for anything that would give him an edge. In 1842 it was phrenology to which he was strongly drawn as a scientific means of gauging human character. Six years later animal magnetism was the latest obsession to which he admitted to Patrick he had become a full convert, with its potential for curing psychosomatic illnesses.⁷ When smallpox struck Cheraw in the winter of 1854, he had Patrick secure some genuine and fresh vaccine in Charleston so that he could be the first physician in Cheraw with the antidote and hold the trump cards in establishing his reputation.⁸

Despite a constant search for medical innovations that would enable him to stand out among local doctors, John’s practice never came close to producing the lucrative revenue he described as one of his grand objects when he was starting his medical career in the early 1840s.⁹ Adventures into real estate to get out from under his mounting debts went nowhere. He continued to struggle to build up a practice sufficiently remunerative to support his ever-growing family, including eight children of his own, as well as an illegitimate son of his wife’s deceased brother. Compounding John’s predicament was the sectarianism in the area that moved persons to select physicians of their own faith. There were simply too few Catholics in Cheraw to constitute a strong cohort of clients for a doctor. His mounting debts led to severe economic pressures, which his significant real estate ventures failed to reduce. By 1849 he was contemplating a move out of Cheraw to an area with more promising economic prospects. Charleston was his first choice, with its diverse population, opportunities for engaging in a joint practice, and the rising image of Catholicism, thanks in no small part to the status his brother has achieved there. That rising reputation was another asset that John hoped to tap in securing patients in Charleston.

For most of the next decade John Lynch soldiered on in Cheraw, never shaking the economic burdens of overextended borrowing and lending, as well as a growing mass of uncollected medical fees (dunning patients for payment not being in John’s character). His brother Patrick’s financial assistance provided some relief, but the unpromising situation in Cheraw revived, at the prodding of his wife, his plans to move family and practice to a more favorable location. In the end John stayed in the upcountry but relocated in late 1856 to the more highly populated Columbia, the state capital as well as the site of a medical school and asylum for the insane. He failed, initially, to secure a position at either of these institutions but managed through a closely managed practice to do better than just earn a living. In the fall of 1857 his oldest child, Robert, upholding the family’s Irish tradition, began studies for the priesthood at the Sulpicians’ minor seminary in Maryland.

The third brother, Francis, had read law in Charleston but chose to go into business as a tanner in Cheraw. Francis, ever seeking to improve his tanyard and dry-goods operations through innovative technology and efficient management, enjoyed early success in building up his business but in the process accrued a heavy debt, which he struggled to keep from dragging him into bankruptcy. To escape his bondage to creditors, Francis resorted to various schemes, from speculating in the California gold fields to investing in local coal mines. But his boldest plan to get out from under his financial albatross was to gain solvency by securing tanning supplies himself, thus eliminating middlemen.

Francis gradually concentrated his tanyard on the production of shoes. To publicize his products, he entered some models in the annual Charleston Fair where he hoped a ribbon or two would bring the recognition that would elevate him to the top tier of shoe manufacturers in South Carolina. To prepare for the expanded production that such a prestigious position would necessitate, Francis went on a recruiting trip to New York and New England, where the skilled shoemakers were.

While Francis was making his debut as a mass producer of shoes, he married, at the rather advanced age of thirty-four, Henrietta Blain, the daughter of a Charleston widow. To Francis’s dismay, Henrietta, for unknown reasons, a few months into their marriage returned to her mother’s home. With Patrick’s aid, Francis managed to persuade his bride to resume her married life in Cheraw with her husband. She apparently never regretted her return. Over the next decade they had five children. That steady increase in Francis’s household only made his precarious financial condition more of a threat to take down his burgeoning business in the latter fifties. His not-so-adroit juggling of debts and revenues eventually made banks wary of continuing to treat him as a dependable investment. As with John, Patrick proved to be his savior as the priest’s voucher and loans enabled Francis not only to keep his debts under control but finally to turn some profit.

The oldest daughter, Mary, at nineteen had married Charles Spann, a struggling farmer with a controlling mother in Sumter County, about forty-five miles due east of Columbia. In 1847 Spann sought to better his fortunes in Galveston, the Gulf port city of the recently annexed state of Texas on the frontier of the still rapidly expanding cotton kingdom. In that hub of east Texas’s cotton trade, Spann saw opportunity, not in raising cotton but in practicing the law in which he had trained. So he struck out for Texas in the midst of the war the United States was waging with Mexico to prepare the way for his family’s removal there. (If Charles had hoped to get out from under his mother by migrating to Texas, he failed. She moved there as well.) A sluggish economy and the high cost of living in Galveston forced Spann, less than two years after relocating, to move once again. They purchased land in Washington County in the upcountry of East Texas. [O]ur home is better than the generality of country houses, Mary wrote her siblings in September 1847. The logs are of cedar and hewed squares[;] between the log is plastered as it belonged to a Baptist preacher [so] of course it is somewhat aristocratic[.]¹⁰ Once more Spann worked the land for his living, this time with corn and cotton, which proved much more productive than any of the staples he had planted in Sumter County. Mary returned home by herself to Cheraw in May 1854 for an extended stay; her parents cajoled her into lengthening it until the beginning of the new year. It was the last time she saw them, as well as most of her siblings. By 1857 Mary and John Spann had nine children.

Ellen, the second-oldest daughter, had long desired to follow Patrick in embracing the religious life. In Charleston in the early 1840s there were two possibilities for women: the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy and the Ursulines. The former was a diocesan community that Bishop England had founded in 1829 when he invited three Irish immigrants living in Baltimore to establish a religious group in his see city and to conduct both a school and an orphanage. Five years later the bishop extended an invitation to another group of Irish women to establish an academy for the higher education of young women in Charleston. This group, however, were already members of a well-established religious order, the Ursulines. It was to their Broad Street institution that Ellen Lynch had come down from Cheraw for her higher education. Returning to Cheraw as a graduate of the Ursuline Academy, in mid-1845 Ellen applied to enter the community as a postulant. The mother superior kept putting off her entrance, only finally to confess that affairs of great consequence to the community must be first resolved before the nuns could receive any further women for the novitiate. This was an apparent reference to their ambivalent relationship with Bishop England’s successor, Ignatius Reynolds. The bishop had evidently asked the nuns, in light of their declining numbers, to exchange their current convent for a smaller facility. To the nuns this request simply confirmed their long-standing suspicion that Reynolds did not accord them the same preference over the Sisters of Mercy that his predecessor, John England had, despite England’s special relationship to the Mercy community. In December 1845 the Ursuline superior in Charleston privately informed the bishop that they had decided to relocate their academy in another diocese.¹¹ For the next year and a half, the Ursulines sought a bishop who would receive them. John Purcell, the Irish-born bishop of Cincinnati, finally agreed in the spring of 1847 to have them open an academy. All this time, Ellen Lynch was becoming increasingly frustrated by the Ursulines’ opacity, particularly since she had made quite public her intention to become a nun and feared raising the impression, by remaining at home, that she had somehow been rejected by the order.

At some point in the spring or early summer of 1847, Ellen Lynch entered the community of the Sisters of Mercy in Charleston. She apparently had acted only after learning from the Ursuline superior that she and her fellow nuns were leaving Charleston. It is probable that Mother Borgia had advised her that, given their unsettled situation, it was best that Ellen join the sole remaining Catholic religious community for women in South Carolina. Whatever brought her to the Mercy Community, Ellen Lynch’s stay there proved a short one. Within the year she journeyed west, across the Alleghenies to northern Kentucky where the former Charleston Ursulines had relocated in the Ohio River city of Covington. Her parting from the Sisters of Mercy was, by all signs, an amicable one. One can only surmise that, upon the extended self-reflection that novitiates promote, Ellen had second thoughts about her decision to make her religious life with the Sisters of Mercy, rather than the Ursulines, her former teachers and the community she had originally intended to enter. She reached Covington in June 1848 and entered the novitiate, where a fellow Charleston alumna, Mary Maloney, and Nora England, the Irish-born niece of the late bishop, were preparing for their professions. She had barely settled in when she learned that the community was moving across the river to Bank Street in Cincinnati, a much better location for their academy. In the new convent that October, she made her own profession, taking the religious name of Baptista.

The following year proved to be especially challenging. Sister Baptista managed to avoid the cholera and other summer plagues that struck Cincinnati but had her own spiritual demons to wrestle with, triggered by the decision of the founding group of nuns to return to Ireland. That loss left the remaining community in a kind of limbo that Baptista at least experienced as a profound spiritual depression. The remnant of the former Charleston Ursulines painfully concluded that they could continue no longer as a separate community. Debts—the result of a mortgaged academy building, an inability to manage their financial affairs, and stagnant enrollment—were one pressure on them to disband. A greater one was the failure of the individual nuns to blend as a community, something Archbishop Purcell recognized as the root cause of their disbanding. When the nuns accepted his offer to merge with the Ursulines of Brown County, Purcell excluded from the merger several Bank Street Ursulines, including Nora England, now Sister Augustine.

In August 1854 the chosen Ursulines traveled the forty miles northeast from Cincinnati to Brown County to spend a week at their future home and work out plans for their union. It all went badly. Differences arose during the discussions that many of the Bank Street Ursulines judged irreconcilable. The result: those Irish-born members who had chosen not to join their countrywomen in returning to Black Rock in Ireland now did so. Others, including Baptista, chose to go to the oldest Ursuline community in the United States, that in New Orleans. The upshot was yet another change in community for Baptista Lynch, her fourth in seven years.

It took Baptista Lynch a very short time to discover that the New Orleans Ursuline community was far from what she had anticipated. The rules and customs seemed totally different from what she had known in South Carolina and Ohio. Particularly bothersome were the grates that separated the members of the community from the outside world, an ancient tradition that she deemed much too confining and isolating for nineteenth-century American women. Then there was the non-French-speaking Baptista’s jarring realization that French was still the language of the community and classroom, even though New Orleans had been part of the United States for nearly a half century. With the local superior’s encouragement, Baptista approached the Brown County community, which to her surprised delight, welcomed her to make her life with them. Returning up the Mississippi, she found the riverboat awash with gamblers, rogues &c &c … I was obliged to keep my room almost altogether, particularly since she had decided to pack her habit in her trunk and pass as a civilian.¹² That unpleasant voyage made all the sweeter the warm welcome she received from the Brown County Ursulines upon her arrival in April 1855. And topping her joy was the discovery that Mother Joseph and her companions were back from Ireland as well, having reconciled with their Ursuline hosts.

Baptista Lynch early on had a particularly keen eye for potential candidates for a school or vocation to the religious life or both, even within one’s family. In 1857 she lobbied her sister Mary in Texas to enroll her oldest girl Ellen in the Ursuline Academy in Brown County, but found that water can be thicker than blood when accessibility became the chief consideration in her sister’s family choosing the Mercy Sisters’ school in Charleston over the Ursuline academy in rural Ohio.

In 1853 Ellen’s younger sister Catherine startled her by expressing her intention of joining the Baltimore Carmel. The stay-at-home sibling who had effectively taken on the responsibility of caring for their parents had finally sought her own path for the spiritual vocation she had long harbored. Two obstacles stood in her way: the Carmel had the maximum twelve nuns that their rule allowed, and her family lacked the means to provide an appropriate dowry. Once again Patrick saved the day for a sibling but only after occasioning some extreme frustration in his sister. Catherine, hearing nothing from her brother, after having sought his aid in securing entry into the Carmelites, attributed Patrick’s inaction to his congenital procrastination. In reality, her brother, unbeknownst to Catherine, had persuaded the superior of the Baltimore Carmel to admit his sister. In lieu of a dowry, Patrick had agreed to pay a substantial interest rate semiannually for a loan to be redeemed within a relatively short period.¹³

Catherine, while overjoyed with the unexpected acceptance she finally heard about in December, could not abandon her parents until her younger sisters returned from the Mercy Sisters’ school in Charleston in July to relieve her. She made the mistake of asking her brother to respond in her behalf, explaining her inability to take up the offer until sometime late in the summer of 1854. May came and Catherine had heard nothing from Baltimore. Finally in June she awkwardly wrote the mother superior to inquire whether her offer still stood and to assure her of her continuing desire to join them as early as that summer. Delay, however, begot delay. A year and a half passed before Catherine received a second offer from the Baltimore Carmel. This time she herself accepted the invitation and made the difficult arrangements of leaving the homestead she had been responsible for managing for so long. In the spring Patrick accompanied his twenty-seven-year-old sister to Baltimore. She brought with her a token dowry of sixteen dollars, but her brother’s loan arrangement with Mother Superior Teresa had already ensured an appropriate level of revenue that the community could expect to receive with Catherine’s entrance.¹⁴ In light of the extraordinarily protracted process, the community waived the usual postulancy period. Catherine immediately donned the novice’s habit of the order. Less than a year later, on the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25, 1857, she was professed as a choir member of the Baltimore Carmel, with the given name of Antonia of the Purification.

Navigating the perilous economic waters of the late antebellum period was a challenge for all the Lynches. As Catherine Lynch confessed to her brother, Patrick, the great object of our family at present is money. That need impelled Conlaw Peter to recall his fifteen-year-old son, Hugh, from school in Charleston to secure his income as a clerk for a local merchant. For the Lynches, money, or its prospect, affected not only schooling but virtually everything, including courtship. Catherine’s remark about the great object of our family was in reference to James Lynch’s pursuit of the daughter of a Charleston merchant.

It was, in fact, a perennial concern for the Lynches, one that peaked in 1857. In late August the New York Branch of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company collapsed, setting off a chain of failures of thousands of banks and businesses that wreaked havoc with the economy across the country, its rippling effects reaching the South after it had devastated the financial and commercial infrastructure of the northeast. The hard times of the Panic of 1857, as it subsequently became known, persisted for two years, the very time when the younger Lynch males—James, Conlaw, Hugh—were all following their brother Francis into the business world. James, perhaps because of his precarious health, was a restless young man who abandoned his position as a clerk for the Cheraw Post Office because he found it too confining. In its stead James concocted various ventures—operating a sawmill, running a store on the Texas frontier—before he cut his entrepreneurial teeth, too cautiously in the eyes of Francis, as a merchant and speculator in cotton. Conlaw, at twenty, clerked for a merchant, as did his younger sibling, Hugh, in whom his nun sister, Ellen, had not yet given up hope of nurturing a religious vocation.

Poor health continued to stalk the younger siblings. Conlaw and Anna both showed disturbing symptoms of consumption, as tuberculosis was then called. Conlaw by the beginning of 1856 had become so enfeebled that Patrick took his brother to a spa in Orange Springs, Florida, with the hope that the milder winter climate and the greater opportunity for exercise would improve his health, if not restore it. It proved to be an unusually wet winter in central Florida, which Conlaw experienced as a kind of drop-by-drop poisoning. Neither body nor soul seemed to benefit from the semitropical venue. After two months, Conlaw had had enough. Patrick, along with John, returned to Florida to escort him home to Cheraw, where his doctor brother took charge of his care, relying mainly on massages of several hours a day. I feel quite confident now, Baptista wrote Patrick in late April, that he will soon be much better, & that home nursing will quite restore him, as it did Brothers John & James. That plus the prayers and communions she had been steadily offering for his recovery.¹⁵ Despite John’s efforts and Baptista’s prayers, Conlaw died two weeks later of tuberculosis. He was twenty-six.

The Lynches, proud of their distinguished Irish past, understandably had high social aspirations in South Carolina, despite being relative newcomers and Catholics. The scarcity of Catholics in Cheraw made certain that their social network there would not be confined by religion. Statewide their social network consisted primarily of non-Irish Catholics. The schooling of the Lynch daughters in Charleston, first with the Ursulines, then with the Sisters of Mercy, provided a venue for the Lynches, through their daughters, to form friendships and eventually alliances with their Catholic peers, who in fact were mostly converts, especially from the Episcopal Church: the Pinckneys, Bellingers, Blaines, Spanns, Rices, and so on. Mary, Francis, James, and Julie all married within this circle. The exception was Hugh Lynch, the only one to have an endogamous wedding. When he announced his engagement to Cornelia Reilly, the daughter of a ne’er-do-well father and a mother whose legitimacy of birth was in question, he occasioned bitter opposition within his extended family. Eliza Macnamara Lynch, with her privileged background, found such a proposed alliance threatening the Lynches’ social