Henry Knox became Washington's minister of war, and Anthony Wayne, Adams' commander-in-chief of the army. Governorships, embassies, and judgeships, were chiefly (and properly) bestowed on these venerable men.

The first governor of Pennsylvania, after the adoption of the Federal Constitution, was George Bryan, a native of Dublin. In 1789 and 1790, he was mainly instrumental in procuring the passage of a law for the gradual abolition of slavery in his adopted state. He died in January, 1791, at an advanced age.

Among the senators of the first Congress were Charles Carroll, and Thomas Fitzsimmon; and among the representatives John Sullivan and George Read. The latter retired from the Legislature, to be chief justice of his own state, and the other three to enjoy the repose of private life.

In New Hampshire, the Hon. Mathew Patten, born in Ireland, May 19th, 1719, was "the first judge of probate after the Revolution." He was appointed in 1776, and continued to hold that and other judicial offices until his death, August 27th, 1795. The Hon. John Orr, of the same state, who died in 1823, was for many years a state senator, and the oldest magistrate of Hillsborough county. After the war of Independence, General Sullivan was elected senator to Congress, and remained two sessions. From 1786 to 1789, he was president (that is, "governor') of the state, which he resigned, to accept the office of judge of the Federal Court. In this situation he died in 1795, in the 54th year of his age.

Even Massachusetts partially forgot its ancient prejudices against the Irish race, and, in 1788, sent James Sullivan, the second son of the Limerick schoolmaster, as one of its representatives to Congress. In 1790, he was made attorney general of the state, about which time he projected the Middlesex Canal, and aided in forming the State Historical Society; in 1794, the Legislature ordered his "History of the District of Maine" to be published; in 1807, he was elected governor, and re-elected in 1808. He died in the latter year, after having assisted in the

settlement of Maine and written its history; after governing Massachusetts and defining its boundaries; after having studied under the British officials, and beat them with their own weapons. The son of this eminent statesman was the Hon. Willian Sullivan, for many years a state senator and United States representative for Boston, whose biography has already fallen into very competent hands.*

Other states, unconscious of minor distinctions, were equally anxious to reward past services, and employ the best talents of all classes of men in the public service.

* Public Men of the Revolution, by the Hon. Wm. Sullivan, LL. D. (Sketch of the author, by John T. S. Sullivan.) Philadelpha: Carey & Hart, 1847.

CHAPTER X.

COLONIAL PENAL LAWS RISE OF CATHOLIC MISSIONS— WASHINGTON'S REPLY TO THE CATHOLIC ADDRESS-ST. MARY'S COLLEGE.

THE successful assertion of American Independence drew large numbers of emigrants from Europe. From Ireland, in the first decade, the increase was not very visible, as that nation enjoyed comparative freedom towards the end of the century, and, with freedom, a larger share of prosperity than had previously fallen to its lot. But the breaking out of the French War, in 1793, the failure of the rising of 1798, and the degrading legislative Union of 1800, had deprived many of bread, and all of liberty at home, and made the mechanical as well as the agricultural class embark in multitudes to cross the Atlantic.

Hitherto the Irish had colonized, sowed, and reaped, fought, spoke, and legislated in the New World; if not always in proportion to their numbers, yet always to the measure of their educational resources. Now, they are about to plant a new emblem-the Cross, and a new institution - the Church, throughout the American continent; for the faith of their fathers they do not leave after them; nay, rather, wheresoever six Irish roof-trees rise, there will you find the Cross of Christ, reared over all, and Celtic piety and Celtic enthusiasm, all tears and sighs, kneeling before it.

Whatever thou art, oh reader! do not despise the institution, or the emblem, or the agent. If the creed is not yours, it was Christopher Columbus', Calvert's, and Charles Carroll's. Nor wonder that we, who regard the Church Catholic as the pillar and ground of all truth, should think its plantation in America the greatest labor of the Irish Hercules. We can sympathize with a Rut

ledge and a Carroll, in council; with Sullivan and Wayne, upon the field; with Barry and McDonough, on the quarter-deck; but even more, and more proudly, do we sympathize with the laborious layman and the poor priest, coming together in the backwoods, to offer to God the ancient sacrifice, where the interwoven foliage is the rude screen, the rock the altar, the soaring pine the tower of the holy place, and the wayside well the fountain of salvation.

The first Catholic missions had been those of the Jesuits among the red men. Marquette, Joliet, Brebeuf, Lallemand, Rasles, and Marest, all Frenchmen, and all Jesuits, were the first standard bearers of the Cross, over the blue breadth of the great lakes, down the yellow torrent of the Mississippi, among the homes of all the Indian race, from the Algonquins of Quebec to the Cherokees of the Ozark mountains. But these missions and their missionaries had passed away; and, though the Holy Cross still gleamed upon the frontier of population, its shadow fell on no village square, but, rather, its arms, on either side, but pointed to desolation.

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The English and Dutch colonies, planted in the very noon-day of the Reformation," inherited all its virulence against priests and Jesuits. The so-called freemen of New England sought Rasle in his chapel by the Norridgewock, and slew him on its threshold. Penn forbade Mass to be celebrated in his Sylvania, and, in 1741, a Catholic clergyman was hanged in New York for entering that province contrary to law. The French and German emigrants, of the midland and southern states, did sometimes keep a concealed priest among them; but, under God, it was Irish emigration which, overcoming the malice of the bigot and the injustice of the laws, gave freedom to the altar and security to its ministers.

The earliest notices of Irish Catholics in America that we have found, were those of Maryland and Pennsylvania. The Carroll family emigrated before the year 1700, and settled in Prince George's county. As, at the revolution of 1688, Catholics were disfranchised, and their

religious rites proscribed, clergymen could only officiate in private houses, and the fathers of the Carrolls had chapels under their own roofs. In such a chapel-house was born John Carroll, the first bishop and archbishop of the United States, on the 8th of January, 1735. The first Catholic church that we find in Pennsylvania, after Penn's suppression of them in 1708, "was connected with the house of a Miss Elizabeth McGawley, an Irish lady, who, with several of her tenantry, settled on land on the road leading from Nicetown to Frankfort." Near the site of this ancient sanctuary stood a tomb inscribed, "John Michael Brown, ob. 15 Dec. A. D. 1750. R.I. P." He had been a priest residing there incognito. In 1734, Governor Gordon and council prohibited the erection of a Catholic church in Walnut street; and, in 1736, a private house having been taken at the corner of Second and Chestnut streets, for the same object, it was again prohibited. Saint Joseph's chapel had, however, been opened in a more retired position, in 1733; and, in 1763, Saint Mary's church was erected. About this time, Protestant prejudice began to abate in Pennsylvania, as well it might, when the Catholics could reckon the Moylans, Barrys, Meases, and Fitzsimons, among their congregation.

In 1756, by a special act, the Catholics of Maryland were assessed for tithes to support the pastors of the Protestant denominations; while, in the very same session, an act was introduced to prevent Catholic clergymen holding lands for church purposes. The latter, however, was rejected. In 1770, Saint Peter's church, in Baltimore, was founded, and, in 1774, there were but nineteen clergymen in Maryland, all of whom were Jesuits. In 1784, Father John Carroll, of the same order, was made first Bishop of the United States, (the colonies had been attached to the Apostolic Vicarate of London,) and "administered the sacrament of confirmation for the first time," in free America.* In 1785, he estimated the Catholic population of the republic, -"in Maryland

* Campbell's Life of Archbishop Carroll.