In the late 1850s and early 1860s, the attention of the Catholic and Protes­tant religious communities around the world focused on a few small settle­ments of French-Canadian immigrants in north-central Illinois. Soon after arriv­ing in their new home, a large number of these immigrants, led by Father Charles Chiniquy, the charismatic Catholic priest who had brought them there, converted to Protestantism. In this anthropological history, Caroline B. Bretell explores how Father Chiniquy took on both the sacred and secular authority of the Catholic Church to engineer the religious schism and how the legacy of this rift affected the lives of the immigrants and their descendants for generations.

Brettell chronicles how Chiniquy came to lead approximately one thousand French-Ca­nadian families to St. Anne, Illinois in the early 1850s and how his conflict with the Catholic hierarchy led to his excommuni­cation. This intriguing study of a relatively unknown example of nineteenth-century migration of French-Canadians to the American Midwest offers an innovative perspective on the immigrant experience in America.