Background
Hughes was born on June 24, 1797 in Annaloghan, near Aughnacloy, in County Tyrone, part of the Province of Ulster in the north of Ireland. He was the third of seven children of Patrick and Margaret (née McKenna) Hughes.
Hughes was born on June 24, 1797 in Annaloghan, near Aughnacloy, in County Tyrone, part of the Province of Ulster in the north of Ireland. He was the third of seven children of Patrick and Margaret (née McKenna) Hughes.
Hughes was subsequently admitted as a regular student of Mount St. Mary's in September 1820.
John Hughes emigrated from Ireland to the United States in 1817. He served as that institution's gardener. As a young priest in Philadelphia, he soon was embroiled in a dispute over lay trusteeism. Hughes's newspaper debates with Protestant critics soon made him famous.
In 1838 Hughes became coadjutor bishop of New York and the following year was made administrator in his own right. Once again he was involved in an episode of anti-Catholic sentiment - the struggle over the New York City public schools.
Soon the Native American party began attacking Hughes for allegedly having driven the Bible out of the classroom. In 1850 Rome elevated New York to a province and made Hughes its first archbishop.
During the Civil War he undertook a diplomatic mission to France for President Abraham Lincoln and, in July 1863, helped New York's governor put down the draft riots. Hughes died on Jan. 3, 1864.
Hughes objected to the Protestant religious practices required of Catholic students in the supposedly nonsectarian educational system.
He opposed a bill pending in the state legislature that would prevent bishops from holding Church property in their own name; although the bill passed, the state never enforced it. He also carried the burden of defending his Church against the attacks of the Know-Nothing party, while reflecting the conservatism of New York City in his stand on slavery. He rejected abolition, fearing that African Americans would not be prepared for freedom. But when the South seceded, he remained a staunch unionist.
Hughes held a strong commitment to the cause of Irish freedom but also felt that immigrants, particularly his fellow Irish immigrants, should demonstrate their unswerving loyalty to their adopted land.
Quotes from others about the person
Historian Daniel Walker Howe is more laudatory, suggesting that Hughes "labored to bring a largely working-class Irish community into a meaningful relationship with Catholic Christianity, to conciliate middle-class Catholics and Protestant well-wishers whose financial support he needed for his amazingly ambitious program of building. "
Hughes has been described as "impetuous and authoritarian, a poor administrator and worse financial manager, indifferent to the non-Irish members of his flock, and prone to invent reality when it suited the purposes of his rhetoric. "