James McMaster (born MacMaster; April 1, 1820 – December 29, 1886) was a 19th-century American Roman Catholic newspaper editor and activist known for his conservative political views and ultramontane religious values.
In July 1856, Hughes decided to break with the paper, informing McMaster that he must make clear to his readers that his columns were not to be taken as representing the official archdiocesan view on anything.
[5] Any number of articles from that period might have offended Hughes, but McMaster crossed a line in a May 31 editorial about the Bleeding Kansas controversy when he offered the view that if someone took a gun to abolitionists Horace Greeley, Theodore Parker, and William Lloyd Garrison, a "great relief" would be felt across the nation.
"[4] In 1860, he urged Southerners "not to throw away their future, and all the bright aspirations of American liberty, for the sake of four million black slaves.
"[3] The Times also asserted that he was regarded by Americans as "chief" in a "bold scheme to make Rome the director of the United States".
One of his editors remarked that no one stood a chance at McMaster's newspaper, despite the man's absolute fidelity to the Church, "if he was too fully saturated with the gifts of the Holy Ghost.
Mencken of his day, the publisher of the Freeman's Journal made clear when hiring anyone that he wanted writers with a fluent pen, a disregard for consequences, and a large capacity for malice.
He expected his underlings to share his many prejudices (e.g., a belief in states' rights, a hatred of abolitionists, a lifelong suspicion of the Jesuits) and said that he wrote "to edify such good people as are not overstocked with brains or at least not trained to follow theological discussions.
"[8] According to the Times, McMaster's advocacy of the idea that Catholics should be exempt from paying taxes to support public schools because "their articles of faith were not taught in them" and Catholic students were forced to read from the Protestant King James Bible made him the most "assailed" man in America, excepting only his equally controversial patron, Archbishop Hughes.
[9] McMaster was jailed at Fort Lafayette and his newspaper shut down during President Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus at the start of the American Civil War.