William Henry Seward and John Hughes, both of whom would puzzle over the place of religion in the nation’s schools, had little in common before 1840. Seward, who was born in 1801 and grew to adulthood as a sickly youth in upstate New York, read the law and entered politics in 1824 as an opponent of Andrew Jackson. He became a leading member of New York’s Whig Party and was elected governor of New York in 1838. In contrast, Hughes, who was four years older than Seward, emigrated at age nineteen from Ireland with his poverty-stricken family. He worked as a gardener before he was able to fulfill his aspiration of studying for the priesthood. Hughes rose rapidly to a position of influence in the American Catholic church. One year after Seward’s election to the governorship, Hughes was appointed a bishop in New York City. Despite their dissimilar backgrounds, their careers crossed paths in 1840 when a crisis in public institutions evolved that laid bare both the place of Catholicism in society and the quandaries of religious belief in public venues. Each possessed his own goals; each utilized his own strategy. Yet when the dust had settled, the fate of the public school and the place of Roman Catholics within it had been clarified.

New York City was a very different place from the American West in the early nineteenth century. Although both were evolving areas with rapidly growing populations, New York was well on its way to becoming the premier urban space in the United States. A city of just under 100,000 in 1814, it was home to more than 300,000 people in 1840. In the next fifteen years, New York’s population would double yet again. Brooklyn, a village of fewer than 4,000 people in 1814, grew to become a city of 200,000 in 1855. Many of these new residents arrived from Europe, and many of them had left regions dominated by Catholicism. In 1825, one-ninth of New York City’s population was foreign born, a proportion that would be over one-third in 1845 and more than half in 1855. Unlike the foreign-born population in the West, immigrants from Ireland dominated the city’s foreign-born population. One-quarter of the entire city in 1855 was Irish born.