view that if someone took a gun to abolitionists Horace Greeley, Theodore Parker, and William Lloyd Garrison, a "great relief" would be felt across the nation. That was not a sentiment that the archbishop shared or could afford to be associated with. McMaster strongly opposed sending Catholic children to public schools. He supported slavery and the secession. He opposed the Wilmot Proviso, advocating the right of Americans to hold slaves in every state. He wrote, "There has never been a day in which Catholics in the community of the Church and uncensored by her, have not held slaves." In 1860, he urged Southerners "not to throw away their future, and all the bright aspirations of American liberty, for the sake of four million black slaves." He was also outspoken in his support of the papacy and the doctrine of papal infallibility and in his attacks on anti-Catholic nativists and the Know Nothing Party. According to the New York Times, "He had bold things to say and he said them without fear." The Times also asserted that he was regarded by Americans as "chief" in a "bold scheme to make Rome the director of the United States". Writers who worked with McMaster remembered him as a demanding and highly opinionated boss. One of his editors remarked that no one stood a chance at McMaster's newspaper, despite the man's absolute fidelity to the Church, "if he was too fully saturated with the gifts of the Holy Ghost." Meekness and generosity held no appeal for McMaster. The H.L. Mencken of his day, the publisher of the Freeman's Journal made clear when hiring anyone that he wanted writers with a fluent pen, a disregard for consequences, and a large capacity for malice. He expected his underlings to share his many prejudices (e.g., a belief in states' rights, a hatred of abolitionists, a lifelong suspicion of the Jesuits) and said that he wrote "to edify such good people as are not overstocked with brains or at least not trained to follow theological discussions." According to the Times, McMaster's advocacy of the idea that Catholics should be exempt from paying taxes to support public schools because "their articles of faith were not taught in them" and Catholic students were forced to read from the Protestant King James Bible made him the most "assailed" man in America, excepting only his equally controversial patron, Archbishop Hughes. Under McMaster