J. Williams Thorne (1816-1897) was an outspoken farmer who spent the first half-century of his remarkable life in Chester County, Pennsylvania, where he took part in political debates, helped fugitive slaves in the Underground Railroad and co-founded the Progressive Friends Meeting near his home in Longwood. Williams and his associates discussed vital matters of the day, from slavery to prohibition to women's rights. These issues sometimes came to Thorne's doorstep-he met with nationally prominent reformers, and thwarted kidnappers seeking to enslave one of his free black tenants. After the Civil War, Williams became a "carpetbagger," ;moving to postwar North Carolina to pursue farming and politics. An "infidel" Quaker (anti-Christian), he was opposed by Democrats who sought to keep him out of the legislature on account of his religious beliefs. Today a little-known figure in history, Williams made his mark through his outspokenness and persistent battling for what he believed.

Five men joined the Catholic Church in the mid-1840s: a soldier, his bishop brother, a priest born a slave and two editors at odds with each other. For the next two decades they were in the thick of the battles of the era-Catholicism versus Know-Nothingism, slavery versus abolition, North versus South. Much has been written about the Catholic Church and about the Civil War. This book is the first in more than half a century to focus exclusively on the intersection of these two topics.