I looked up that claim since it was so surprising. Not entirely accurate, but the truth is close enough to be very surprising. The Vatican was the only CATHOLIC country to recognize the confederacy. Apparently, Jeff Davis corresponded with the pope and developed a friendship while the pope was in exile during the Garibaldi crisis (!). And, while Jeff Davis wasn’t Catholic during the Civil War, he died one and had already developed a strong affiliation to Catholic pieties.
Not strictly true. The Lateran Treaties of 1929 made the Vatican a city-state. But the Pope did have good relations with Jefferson Davis, that is true.
dangus:
As a Louisiana native and citizen, historically, the most Catholic of the Southern States, and having visited Jeff Davis’s final home on the MS Gulf Coast, I don’t think he ever became Catholic, although he embraced a “High Church Anglo-Catholic style Episcopalian faith” and was very sympathetic to Catholicism as it respected hierarchial traditions, family, etc, and say the incontrolled industrial revolutions as something that ultimately would exploit people for profit, if Christian principles were not in place to protect the weak from the powerful.
I think Davis, who was raised in Kentucky, was educated by Dominican Priests at a Catholic bording school. After the Civil War, when he was in exile, his Wife found that the only Church that would educate her kids were Catholic nuns in Savanah, GA, where she was living at the time, as Davis and his family were seen as “disgraced in the South” and most of the Southern aristocrats wanted nothing to do with Davis, as opposed to Robert E. Lee who was seen as the “Southern hero”. I think General James Longstreet, who after the war moved to New Orleans, did convert to Catholicism and it is true that Davis had Catholics and Jews in his cabinet.
As for the KKK, it was not founded until around 1870 by ex Confederate soldiers in response to reconstruction. It’s original targets were indeed Blacks and Northern Reconstructionist, but Catholics soon became a target as well. The KKK was founded more in Central Tennessee by the Confederate Calvery General Bedford Forest and quickly spread in areas of the South with few Catholics as the only areas of the South with any significant Catholic population at that time were in Louisiana and parts of Southern Georgia on the coast near Savanah and maybe Mobile Alabama, which originally was part of French Louisiana before being ceded to the Spaninish in Florida and then eventually being part of Alabama.
dangus:
Perhaps you are correct, I think he may have been received into the Catholic Church just before his death, which I think was around 1890.