In new book, Annapolis historian delves into rich history of St. Mary parish

As a professor and professional historian and member of St. Mary Parish in Annapolis since 1971, Robert Worden knows well the sublime joys of being an archive rat.

But for his new history of St. Mary, he also experienced the occupational hazard of going down a lot of empty rat holes.

One of these concerned a critical meeting with President Abraham Lincoln that, to the mind of the non-historian, would have lots of documentation.

Well, you’d think. It’s Lincoln, right? But no.

Worden’s new book, “Soldiers of the Cross: Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos and the Catholic Community in Annapolis During the Civil War” (Gatekeeper Press) dives into the complicated history of St. Mary’s during the Civil War.

It is his second book. His first, “Saint Mary’s Church in Annapolis, Maryland: A Sesquicentennial History, 1853-2003” only had four pages on the parish in the Civil War years.

His particular focus now, in addition to glimpses of the position of Annapolis during the war, is on the role of Blessed Seelos – a towering figure in his day renowned for his holiness – and other Redemptorist priests to keep the parish, its seminary and school out of the way of both the war and military conscription as much as possible as they also ministered to the new arrivals, sometimes with open-air Masses.  

It is a bumptious, noisy account. The Naval Academy had relocated to Newport, R.I., and federal troops moved in there at the outset of hostilities to keep the port open. They used academy buildings as billets and constructed additional fortifications there, which meant that no St. Mary’s buildings were taken over. Howitzers were installed at the town gates.

Combat was to the west and south. Soldiers usually arrived by train, but railways south were easily disrupted, so troop ships sailed to ports in Virginia and North Carolina. Jaunty military band music recognized no boundaries; Worden notes that someone wrote that “nearly all the regimental bands played ‘Dixie’ as the soldiers embarked.”

The result was about 18,000 soldiers – some 70,000 passed through during the course of the war – at a time, packed into a community of a little more than 4,000, including slaves.

Blessed Seelos, born in Germany, had been ordained a Redemptorist priest in Baltimore, and was transferred to Annapolis in 1862, where he was prefect of students at the seminary, in addition to performing parish ministry.

His sainthood cause began in 2000 when St. John Paul II beatified him. One official miracle is attributed to his intercession; other cases are still under investigation, and if a second miracle is confirmed, Blessed Seelos will be proclaimed a saint.

At one point, there were more than 80 novices, seminarians, brothers and priests living at St. Mary.

And possible conscription into the military – into Maryland militias – was feared as possibly devastating the mission. In 1863, Worden writes, “With Federal law in force, 99 (98 percent) of 101 enrolled men associated with St. Mary’s were subject to the draft.”

“It threatened to deplete the ranks of the clergy and seriously disrupt seminary training,” Worden writes. “Many Redemptorists were of European birth and, as non-US citizens, they were not liable to the draft early in the war. But their American-born confreres and the foreign-born who had become U.S. citizens were subject to mandatory draft enrollment. As draft laws evolved, those who had expressed their intention to become citizens became eligible for enrollment,” even for Blessed Seelos at age 43. Men could avoid the draft at that time by hiring a substitute, but it cost $300, putting that option out of reach for seminarians.

The solution, Blessed Seelos and others thought, was to audaciously seek a meeting with President Lincoln.

He wrote to his spiritual adviser that he was headed to Washington “to see, if possible, Father Abraham and to have a talk with him about the draft. If I do not succeed in obtaining a release from that unjust injunction, we will rather go to prison than to take up arms, and to pay for so many we are not able.”

So it came to be that Blessed Seelos and another priest took trains from Annapolis Junction to Washington, where they met with the president on either July 22 or 23, 1863, shortly after the Battle of Gettysburg, with General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in retreat.

Worden’s hope was that the meeting was documented in Lincoln’s papers, long cataloged and published, or in some other account. “Even the guy who held the door to the room where they met wrote a book,” he told the Catholic Review. But he was unable to turn up any other account.

He had to settle for some letters and scant details in the Chronica Domus, the journal of Redemptorist activities, which only noted the priests’ departure and return.

“That Lincoln found the time to meet two priests, out of all of his daily visitors, is perhaps indicative of his outgoing nature rather than any regard for institutional religion,” Worden writes. “Lincoln was a religious skeptic who, at best, believed in some unpredictable divine providence and, according to one analysis, he adhered to ‘the predestinarianism of Old School Presbyterianism.’”

In a letter written April 11, 1865, just three days before Lincoln’s assassination, Blessed Seelos noted that the president “was very friendly to me and my companion, but he did not settle anything.” Worden assumes Lincoln knew he did not have the authority to allow anyone to circumvent draft laws.

He told the Catholic Review that Lincoln was not uniformly kind to clergy.

“He kicked one Protestant clergyman out of his office,” Worden said. “Literally, with his feet.”

As it turned out, the permutations of military proscription never affected the St. Mary’s seminarians before the war ended, even though they never received official exemptions.

Blessed Seelos wrote to his sister that “whether we have settled anything, or will yet settle anything, remains God’s secret and that of the Blessed Mother.”

He was convinced, Worden writes, “that it was prejudice against Catholics and hatred of Catholic priests that motivated some Northern officials to demand that priests be drafted.”

Worden has been archivist and historian at St. Mary’s since 1982. He has a doctorate in Asian history from Georgetown University, where he taught as an adjunct professor, 1976-77 and 1983-84, and a lecturer in Asian and World Religions at the Foreign Service Institute of the State Department 1980-81.

His particular achievement with the book was keeping track, to the best of anyone’s written recollections, of St. Mary’s 1,600 parishioners during the war years, so he could write vignettes of daily life. This required patient archival research and tedious cross-referencing, and like an avid historian, he told the Catholic Review, “I had a lot more material” than what is published.

The heart of the book is drawn from 201 Seelos letters, collected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to bring his case for canonization to the Vatican. All have been cited by Seelos biographers.

But when it comes to slavery, the ugly cause of the Civil War, Blessed Seelos’ perspective, at least what he wrote down in 1863, does not travel well over the years, as he tried to explain the workings of slavery, then in place for more than two centuries, to his sister.

Under the Southern attitude, he wrote, “The blacks are happiest when they have a strict and virtuous master; when they are left to their own devices, they rot in vice and in mischief. Unfortunately, however, the Southern slaveholders were not virtuous and lived a very immoral life, and often sinned against the slaves by not giving them any education, etc.

“As far as material things are concerned, the slaves were well taken care of; they had plenty to eat and drink, and servants in Europe have it harder than slaves over here. It is entirely false if one conjures up the gruesome treatment that, for example, the ancient Romans abused their slaves with. Here the Southerners are to be blamed mostly for the immorality and the lack of education; otherwise they are entirely in the right.”

“I think his views evolved,” Worden says. “He kind of observed slavery. He once thought that the owners had a right to it. His views weren’t too harsh at the beginning.”

But later on, Blessed Seelos came to the realization “this was a bad thing. People were suffering.”

“It’s a very complex subject,” Worden acknowledged.

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