Catholic Church in the Thirteen Colonies
Monsignor John Tracy Ellis wrote that a "universal anti-Catholic bias was brought to Jamestown in 1607 and vigorously cultivated in all the thirteen colonies from Massachusetts to Georgia.
[3] Eighty-one years before the coming of the English to Jamestown in 1607, a settlement was made in Virginia by Spaniards from San Domingo, under the leadership of Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón.
The governor issued orders to magistrates, sheriffs, constables, and people to be diligent in the apprehension and bringing to justice of all Catholic priests.
[5] However, the 1646 defeat of the Royalists in the English Civil War led to stringent laws against Catholic education and the extradition of known Jesuits from the colony, including Andrew White, and the destruction of their school at Calverton Manor.
[12] During the greater part of the Maryland colonial period, Jesuits continued to conduct Catholic schools clandestinely from their manor house in Newtowne.
In the same year the Dutch from New Amsterdam had sailed up the river and erected a trading house and fort where the city of Hartford now stands, a few miles below Windsor.
[15] Prior to 1772 no definite records are obtainable regarding any regularly established Catholic church in the present State of Delaware.
In a 1748 report from the Episcopal Mission at Dover (Kent Country) to the clergymen of the Pennsylvania province, it is stated that the "Quakers and Roman Catholics were long accustomed to bury their dead at their own plantations."
In January 1772, Father Matthew Sittensperger, a Jesuit known under the name of Manners, purchased a farm in Mill Creek Hundred which was known as Coffee Run, and here a log chapel called St. Mary's and a residence were erected.
[15] In 1663 Charles II, of Catholic sympathies, granted to Sir George Carteret and seven others a stretch of land on the Atlantic coast, lying between Virginia and Florida.
The grantees were created "absolute lords proprietors" of the province of Carolina, with full powers to make and execute such laws as they deemed proper.
[16] The Dutch Colony of the seventeenth century was officially intolerantly Protestant but was in practice tolerant and fair to people of other faiths who dwelt within New Netherland.
In 1688 the Stuart Revolution in England reversed this policy of liberality, and the province of New York immediately followed the example of the mother-country in intolerance and legal persecution of the Catholic Church and its adherents.
These planters were largely Calvinists from Presbyterian and Congregational communities, and occupied mainly land in Newark, Elizabeth, and upon the north shore of Monmouth County.
[18] The comparative liberality of the proprietary rule of Berkeley and Carteret, especially in religious matters, attracted some Catholic settlers to New Jersey.
As early as 1672 Fathers Harvey and Gage visited both Woodbridge and Elizabethtown (then the capital of New Jersey) for the purpose of ministering to the Catholics in those places.
Robert Vanquellen, a native of Caen, France, and a Catholic, lived at Woodbridge, and was surveyor general of that section of New Jersey in 1669 and 1670.
A Catholic by the name of William Douglass, when elected a representative from Bergen County, was excluded from the General Assembly of 1668 because of his religious convictions.
Lord Cornbury, when appointed governor in 1701, was instructed by Queen Anne to permit liberty of conscience to all persons except "papists".
Penn, a devout member of the Society of Friends, was impelled by desire to provide a safe home for persecuted Quakers.
Penn was far in advance of his time in his views of the capacity of mankind for democratic government, and equally so in his broad-minded toleration of differences of religious belief.
Penn's Quaker beliefs helped an attitude of toleration toward all Christian denominations spread among the population of Pennsylvania and into the colony's laws.
The Frame of Government of 1701 guaranteed liberty of conscience to all who confessed and acknowledged "one Almighty God", and made eligible for office all who believed in "Jesus Christ the Savior of the World.
In 1790, when the newly founded United States (formerly the Thirteen Colonies) counted almost four million people in the first national census, there were fewer than 65,000 Catholics (about 1.6% of the population).
