Background
James Alphonsus McMaster was the son of the Rev. Gilbert and Jane (Brown) McMaster. He was born in Duanesburg, New York.
James Alphonsus McMaster was the son of the Rev. Gilbert and Jane (Brown) McMaster. He was born in Duanesburg, New York.
McMaster's strict covenanting Scotch father forced him at an early age to study the classics and Scripture in preparation for the ministry, into which two of his brothers entered. On leaving Union College, 1839, he studied law and commenced its practice.
Presumably McMaster preached from a Reformed Presbyterian pulpit and attended the Union Theological Seminary, where he was associated with Isaac Hecker and Clarence Walworth before being received into the Roman Catholic Church by Father Rumpler in 1845. Thereupon, McMaster accompanied Hecker and Walworth to the Redemptorist College at Louvain, Belgium, on the way paying a visit to Newman at Littlemore, England. Here he acquired his vaunted knowledge of Catholic theology, though he agreed with his superiors that he lacked a religious vocation. Returning to New York, he entered journalism as a writer for the New York Tribune and the New York Freeman's Journal. In 1847 he borrowed enough money from George V. Hecker to buy Bishop Hughes's interest in the Freeman's Journal, which he edited until his death. As an editor, McMaster was honest, able, courageous, and annoyingly frank. Indeed he was a stormy petrel in Catholic circles. A stout supporter of Hughes in the school fight, he so frequently took issue with him that at times the bishop repented of ever selling the journal, though at other times he keenly appreciated McMaster's picturesque service to the Church. At times his lack of interest in Irish affairs annoyed extremists, but he made the Freeman's Journal the outstanding Catholic organ, which challenged the respect of churchmen and politicians. Criticism of the administration closed the mails to the Freeman's Journal and brought about McMaster's arbitrary arrest without warrant or indictment. Imprisoned in Fort Lafayette on August 24, 1861, he was finally freed without trial and resumed the publication of his paper without amending its editorial policy. McMaster to the end gloried in his martyrdom for freedom of the press in war time. After the war, he paid his compliments to Reconstruction measures, the "godless" schools as he described public schools without training in religion and morals, and to the bishops whose attitude on infallibility he questioned. His journalistic model was Louis Veuillot of L'Univers Religieux.
Without political ambition, and above either flattery or bribery, McMaster was a power in the Democratic party on the side of state rights and against abolition. Even regardless of its nativist associations, Whiggery was detestable to him. While he denounced the South and refuted such clerical "rebels" as Patrick Neeson Lynch and Napoleon Joseph Perché, he had little confidence in Lincoln's policies.
A stanch friend of the Redemptorists and Paulists, McMaster was amusingly suspicious of the Jesuits and on occasion violently critical of journalists like Orestes A. Brownson, Denis Sadlier, of the Tablet, and Thomas D'Arcy McGee, who became a cabinet minister in Canada, and of prelates like Kenrick and Purcell.
McMaster was a stout advocate of the temporal power and a lover of the Eternal City, and he prided himself on his precise Latin and his inauguration of the first American pilgrimage. Archbishop Corrigan he loved; this explained his vicious attacks on Edward McGlynn. He was well characterized by Archbishop Ryan of Philadelphia as "a Scotch Highlander with a touch of Calvinism not yet sponged out of him. " Toward the end the Freeman's Journal lost influence as more diocesan organs were founded, but its editorials challenged attention even during the last six years when McMaster's fiery rhetoric was toned down by the genial Maurice Francis Egan. Bitter in prejudices, stubborn in support of principles, firm in friendship, and aggressive in religious beliefs, McMaster was a picturesque character. Not until he died was it learned that he had long worn a hair-shirt in mortification.
In 1850 McMaster married a Miss Fetterman of Pennsylvania by whom he had four children: Alphonsus, who tried out a vocation at Ilchester, England, and became a New York journalist; and three daughters who entered convents, thus leaving a proud but lonely widowed father to fend for himself.
