How Alexander Hamilton defended the rights of Catholics in a young America

[Michie]

Alexander Hamilton—the founding father of the moment thanks to the hit musical based on his life—is generally not associated with the cause of religious freedom in the United States. Among Hamilton’s contemporaries, that honor is usually reserved for one of his great rivals, Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. But it was Hamilton who vigorously defended the political rights of Catholics in New York in the face of efforts to require them to renounce their religious identity before they could be considered full citizens of the new republic.

This came in the late 1780s, at a pivotal moment in the founding of the United States. The Catholic Church in New York had been outlawed for nearly 100 years, its members denied not only religious liberties but political and civil ones as well. Catholics in the Anglo-American New World could not be trusted with essential liberties, ran the justification for these restrictions, as their primary allegiance was presumed to be to the pope, who, among other claims to power, was said to assume the authority to dispose secular rulers.

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How Alexander Hamilton defended the rights of Catholics in a young America

 

[Gnarwhal]

Hamilton's always been one of my favorite of the founding fathers, second only to Washington himself.

One unexpected consequence of the American Revolution, however, was a new acceptance of Catholicism in the emerging republic.

Likely due to the fact that Catholicism is the source from which the founders and framers borrowed their notions of liberty—from Saint Robert Bellarmine and the Salamancans.