[In the following essay, Maynard favorably assesses Brownson's career as a journalist.]

All his life long he was primarily a journalist, and of a kind that has probably never been surpassed in America and certainly never matched. That Brownson was a minister until he was forty-one was only incidental to his journalism, as was his lecturing. These tilings, indeed, were only spoken (and less effective) journalism, too. Though by practice he got rid of his early rusticity of manner, and developed a resonant voice, he was never quite at ease as a speaker. Young Isaac Hecker, who fell under his influence in 1841, noted that the tall (and as yet slim) Vermonter spoke without notes and with a logic and sincerity that appealed to those of a philosophical cast, but also noted that he came to grief when he attempted to be pathetic. It would seem that Brownson never acquired what is essential in a public speaker—the ability of getting at once into intimate touch with his audience. On the printed page everything was different; though even there he lacked (as he often acknowledged) the faculty of persuasion, he took his readers into his confidence; the editorial "we" and "us" never cloaked his burly and somewhat eccentric personality. He looked upon his readers as friends—as friends even when he was savagely fighting them. When he founded Brownson's Quarterly Review in 1844 he wrote in the first number, "This is my Review; I am its proprietor; its editor; intend to be its principal, if not its sole writer, and to make it the organ of my own view of truth." When thirty-one years later he at last gave it up, he was able to say, "Others may publish a quarterly review far more valuable than mine has ever been, but no other man can produce Brownson's Quarterly Review. . . . My Review must die when I cease to conduct it." Both statements were plain fact.

He had conducted magazines almost from the time he was ordained as a Universalist in 1826. And however much he moved from place to place or from denomination to denomination on his road to the Catholic Church, he was never long without a paper, though not until 1837 did he obtain just what he wanted in the Boston Quarterly Review, an organ in which he could fully expound his ideas. He expounded them at such length and was so very Brownsonian that when he offered his quarterly to the Transcendentalists as their medium of expression, Emerson and Margaret Fuller knew they would be swamped by him and so started the Dial instead. Upon which Theodore Parker commented, "Apropos of The Dial: to my mind it bears much the same relation to The Boston Quarterly that Antimachus does to Hercules . . . or a band of men and maidens daintily arrayed in finery . . . to a body of stout men in blue frocks, with great arms and hard hands, and legs like the Pillars of Hercules." When in 1842 he merged it with the Democratic Review, William Henry Channing declared it to have been the best journal this country has ever produced, Ripley and Bronson Alcott concurring. Fortunately Brownson lost the title by the merger; when he started again on his own, there was nothing for it but to call his magazine Brownson's Quarterly Review.

In the Boston he had printed contributions from Alcott, Ripley, Bancroft, Margaret Fuller, W. H. Channing and Albert Brisbane, the Fourierist and the father of the Hearst columnist. In Brownson's Quarterly nearly everything was Brownson. He had so much to say, and the Catholic contributors available were few. John Gilmary Shea was antagonized by having an article rejected, and the rival Catholic editors—especially McMaster and J. V. Huntington and Major—became bitter enemies. Poor Huntington was hurt by a review of one of his novels on which Brownson commented, "Every time he has occasion to introduce a woman [he stops to] give us a full-length portrait of her, the color of her hair, the form of her eyebrows, the cast of her features, the pouting or not pouting of her lips, the shape of her bust, the size of her waist, with remarks on the flexibility of her limbs, and the working of her toes." No wonder that Huntington was offended, just as McMaster did not like being told that it was no sin for a man to be unable to understand metaphysics but only a handicap when he insisted upon dealing with that subject.

Brownson did, in truth, have a wonderful faculty for treading heavily on other people's toes. The lion thought he was only playfully patting their heads when they felt that their skulls had been crushed. He did not realize his own strength, and he was completely devoid of tact. What he said about the Irish and the Jesuits was quite understandably taken by them as violent hostility.

Yet he had the best of intentions towards them. If he pointed out what he considered their short-comings, it was all for their own good. They did not have a truer friend than himself. He could not understand that most people are inclined to avoid a too candid friend. When Newman offered him a chair in his Irish university in 1854, it was soon made clear to him that he would have to rescind his offer. Brownson chose that moment to tell the Irish that their own conduct was largely responsible for the Know-nothing movement and that when they came to America they had better become Americans. For their part, they accused him of supplying their enemies with ammunition. His retort that the attempt to make the Catholic Church the Irish Church was damaging equally to the Irish and to the Church did little to help matters. As Van Wyck Brooks put it in The Flowering of New England, Brownson was too Catholic for the Yankees and too Yankee for the Catholics. The convert thought of himself as too Catholic for the Irish and they were enraged.

His quarrel with the Jesuits, such as it was, sprang largely out of philosophical differences. Whether or not he was the ontologist he is still often accused of being is too big a question to be discussed here. All that need be said was that Brownson was contemptuous of Scholasticism—at any rate as it was taught in the 'sixties and 'seventies—and that he bluntly said so. He had his own solution of the problem of knowledge, one which he believed was the only means of preservation from pantheism. As the scholastic philosophers did not accept it, he told them that they were outmoded. And though he afterwards said he wished he could recall some of the hard things he had said about the Jesuits, he never budged from his central position.

Brownson's were at once the merits and the defects of the self-made man. In youth he had had only a year or two of formal education. Yet as a young minister he had taught himself six languages, and as soon as he had mastered enough from a dictionary and grammar, he proceeded to the reading of abstruse tomes. At Brook Farm they told a story of how he paraded his Latin, distressing Bradford and Ripley with his false quantities. Ripley, whom he tried to drag into the Church, woke one night from a horrible dream. He had become a Catholic and had been to confession to Father Brownson. At the end the priest said to his penitent, "Now you will repeat after me the fifty-eighth psalm in the Vulgate," and Ripley cried out, "O Lord, my punishment is greater than I am able to bear!"

When Brownson came into the Church in 1844, Isaac Hecker fully expected him to bring into the Church with him hundreds and perhaps thousands of his former Transcendentalist associates. His failure to do so, and his abandonment of the line of approach that had brought him into the Church, Hecker attributed to the influence of Bishop Fitzpatrick of Boston. Fitzpatrick had, in fact, insisted that Brownson use the ordinary apologetic mode, with the result that the "liberal" Christians of Boston could see no nexus between what the prophet of the "Church of the Future" had held and what the Catholic Brownson affirmed. Not until he had moved from Boston to New York and had written his autobiography was his own road to Rome defined for the public. By then it was too late; he had lost his non-Catholic following.

Hecker blamed it all on Fitzpatrick. In the first of a series of articles written for the Catholic World in 1887, he called the Bishop "the hierarchical exponent of all mat was traditional and commonplace in Catholic life." Of Brownson he said "that as a controversialist of the old school the fact that he so greatly distinguished himself only showed his versatility, and his versatility was in this his misfortune," I believe that Hecker's general apologetic method—that of building upon whatever truth a man already has instead of starting by correcting his errors—is to be preferred to the method Brownson chose to employ. But it was not versatility, or the dictation of Fitzpatrick, that determined Brownson's apologetic mode; it was his own make-up. For a while he tried to be conciliatory, as Hecker was conciliatory, and wrote in 1856 to Father Hewit, that his own method—that of logic—was the worst of all possible methods. In the abstract this may be so; as Newman once pointed out, men are not convinced merely by force of syllogism. But logic was the only method Brownson could handle. His was all the strength and all the weakness of the logician; he expected people to accept his logical demonstrations and could not understand it when they were not convinced. Perhaps they should have done so; but it does not require much knowledge of human nature to know that they rarely do so. Brownson had to give up his Protestant friends in despair and address himself to the task of strengthening Catholics in their faith.

For this reason most of his controversies were with Catholics. Those who imagined that he had entered the Church as a safe refuge from the storms of which he was tired, were as wide of the mark as those who imagined that, because he had belonged to several sects on the road to Rome, he would soon embrace Mohammedanism. He had to fight every inch of the way. The difference was that, whereas in the past he had fought to find truth, he now fought to uphold it. Wrong-headed he often was, though always worth listening to; yet on the main issues he is now seen to be right when the majority of the American Catholics were wrong. When he insisted on the indirect deposing power of the Pope, he alarmed many of the American bishops, who feared that his utterances would be quoted by the Church's enemies to prove that Catholics had a divided political loyalty. This, however, was hardly more than an academic point; what Brownson was really affirming was that the spiritual must be superior to the temporal, and that the sovereign people were not sovereign in an absolute sense but were in all things subject to God. As politics could not be divorced from morals, he did not shrink from the logic that maintained that it was for the Church to decide in moral issues. The mere affirmation of a "higher law," as in the case of the Abolitionists he loathed, set up a capricious private judgment in politics as well as religion and virtually abolished the force of the American constitution.

In this he was misunderstood inside the Church, as well as outside. Nevertheless he did a great deal to destroy the Gallican spirit at that time rampant in America, as it was also rampant elsewhere. Like Montalembert, a close friend by correspondence, he warned people against trusting Napoleon III. Most of the American bishops followed the lead of Veuillot in regarding the Emperor as a "second Saint Louis," where Brownson saw that the imperial protection of the Church involved its subjection to imperial domination. At the same time he began to suggest that, as the temporal power of the Pope was not essential to his spiritual sovereignty, it might be advisable for him voluntarily to forego what had become an anachronism in the modern world. That, too, of course got him into furious controversy, especially as he had an over-emphatic way of stating any case.

In 1855 he left Boston for New York, where he promptly got at loggerheads with Archbishop Hughes. While under Fitzpatrick he had submitted to Fitzpatrick's censorship. He had no intention of allowing Hughes to exercise the same control. As he wrote to Bishop Elder of Natchez, "I cannot accept the Archbishop of New York as my consultor. His advice I cannot respect, and I am not under his jurisdiction." To escape that jurisdiction he had transferred himself and his Review to Elizabeth, New Jersey, where Bishop Bayley—without always agreeing with him—allowed Ursa Major, as he called him, to have his say. From the other side of the Hudson, he fired his big guns at Hughes himself.

When the Civil War broke out, Hughes and Brownson found themselves in a new controversy. Hughes, knowing that the Irish were not at all enthusiastic about the liberation of the slaves, and fearing that they would not enlist in the defense of the Union if they came to believe that this was the object of the war, went so far as to offer a hypothetical case justifying even the slave trade. At once Brownson pounced on him: this was rank heresy; by flouting Gregory XVI's letter on slavery, the Archbishop had incurred the penalty of excommunication. Then with grimly humorous charity, he absolved Hughes; the Archbishop could not have meant what he had said. When next the two men met Hughes told him, "I will never write another word against you again."

Others did, however. Bishop Whelan of Wheeling cancelled his subscription to a review conducted by a "red Marat Republican." Brownson complained to Bishop Elder of Natchez that some members of the hierarchy, instead of making their representations to him direct, used their diocesan organs to rebuke him. "You may kill my Review," he added hotly, "but you cannot manage me through newspapers." On the other hand, he fiercely attacked the Catholic papers because of their disloyalty to the Union. Only two, he said in his Review for October, 1861, were decidedly loyal; two others were occasionally loyal; one was trying to straddle; all the others, whether avowedly or not, were Confederate. As his opponents were trying to silence him politically, by discrediting him philosophically, he announced in 1863 that he would prescind from the discussion of philosophy and theology to confine himself to public affairs.

Long before this he had lost all his subscribers in the South, and many that he had had in the North. Then by backing Fremont for the presidency—he had a low opinion of Lincoln—he was left without a party when Frémont withdrew. At the end of 1864 he ceased publishing his Review. It was his intention to devote the rest of his life to writing books. He listed them in a letter to Senator Summer, now his political bedfellow: the projected works were to be on the American Constitution, "to be followed by a work on Philosophy, another on Theology, another on the Church, and another on the Catholic and Protestant Controversy." Of these only his masterpiece, The American Republic, ever got written; and that was largely a revamping of former articles, some of them going back as far as 1843. This, like everything else that Brownson wrote, was really journalism—journalism of a superb kind.

He had had the reputation of being a very wild radical. Actually his basic political ideas were, from the start, far more conservative than those whom he startled supposed. Nor did he really change his social ideas, and here he was not so much a forerunner of Marx, as Mr. Schlesinger suggests, but a forerunner of the Papal encyclicals on labor. But when he gave up his postulation of the class war, as the only means of getting rid of capitalism, he could think of no other way of effectuating the deliverance of the working-man. Having no lead from the Church—the Rerum Novarum was still a long way off—he despairingly concluded that nothing much could be done. He did not abandon his hatred of industrialism.

The Catholic World, the Ave Maria, and the New York Tablet set him to the busy production of articles. With from four to six columns of copy to turn out every week—on top of his frequent lecturing—he had no time to spare for the books he wished to write. Much of his best work was done during this period, despite the gout in his hands and feet; but he did not feel happy without his own Review. As he was usually not allowed to sign his articles, few people knew their authorship. Those who did not, and were vaguely aware that Brownson was under some sort of a cloud, began to suppose that he had ceased to defend the Catholic cause; some of them even supposed that he had ceased to practice his religion.

He had several times thought of reviving his Review, if for no other purpose than that of clearing his name and of publicly repudiating the "liberalism" into which he had fallen. When his wife was on her death-bed in 1872 she urged him to do this, if only for a year. At the beginning of 1873 Brownson's Quarterly Review reappeared and continued until the end of 1875. In it he returned to all the most uncompromising positions he had once maintained; the world should not be left in any doubt as to his belligerent orthodoxy. If for several years he had tried to make Catholicism more palatable by softening it and toning it down, he now seemed to glory in stating it in the harshest possible terms. In particular he rammed down his interpretation of the doctrine mat outside the Church there was no salvation. Give non-Catholics, he said, the slightest ground for hoping that they might obtain salvation, and none of them would ever become Catholics. Not even invincible ignorance would he admit as a valid plea. With the rigor that was a carry-over from his Puritan days, he tried to drive men to heaven with a pitchfork red-hot from hell.

In so far as the "Last Series" of his Review was intended to make his position clear, it amply succeeded. And there was little noticeable falling-off in power—none at all in logical power. But he began it when he was ill and he steadily grew more ill, until it was at last impossible for him to continue. In the issue for October, 1875, he wrote a moving valedictory. "Much of the time for the present year," he told his audience—his friends—"I have been unable to hold a pen in my hand." He had no secretary, and had written the whole of that last issue himself. Those familiar with his handwriting during those years must wonder how any compositor ever managed to read his manuscripts. He acknowledged that his memory was not what it had been, as he acknowledged again that he had never been able to realize his idea of what a Catholic review should be. "But I have done the best, being what I am, that I could." Others might have done better; editors of greater ability and prudence may arise. "Yet none will be found more sincerely Catholic, or more earnestly devoted to Catholic interests." He admits he has never been popular among some Catholics, but as he had never sought popularity that does not trouble him. As for wealth, "Why, what could I do with it, if I had it, standing on the brink of the grave?" In farewell to his readers, he asks their prayers, and concludes, "I have and desire to have, no home out of the Catholic Church. . . . My only ambition is to live and die in her communion."

A few months later he was dead. But before he died, the son who was to be his biographer and to edit his works in twenty volumes took him to his home in Detroit. There Brownson gathered notes for an autobiography he still hoped to write. But he was too worn out for that. All that he produced was a single article for the newly-established American Catholic Quarterly Review. He was never too tired, however, for an argument. On Holy Saturday he and his son had a long theological debate. When he had gone to his room and his daughter-in-law came up with his tray, he answered her knock with, "If that is Henry, I'm too tired to make it any plainer tonight." The next day, Easter Sunday, he was anointed. The following day, April 17, 1876, he died. Now thousands of young men every year pass over his body as it lies in the crypt of the church at Notre Dame University as they go to receive Holy Communion. It is a fitting place for him to rest.