The American's front page is dominated by a heated ecclesiastical and political slugfest: Rev. Hershey's third open letter to Rev. H. R. Carroll of the New York Independent, accusing Carroll of deliberately falsifying history regarding papal interference in American affairs during the Civil War. Hershey methodically dismantles Carroll's claim that the U.S. had no minister at Rome until after 1870, citing specific names and dates—Lewis Cass Jr. (1855), John P. Stockton (1858), R. M. Blotchford (1862), and Rufus King (1863)—all serving as U.S. ministers to the papal states during the war years. The heart of the dispute: whether Pope Pius IX officially recognized the Confederate States. Hershey presents eight separate pieces of evidence, including diplomatic correspondence from April 1861 ordering the U.S. minister to warn the pope against interference; Congressional testimony from Mr. Dawes of Massachusetts stating the pope "took sides with the enemies of our country"; Harper's Weekly editorials from 1867 calling the pope "the first and only authority which recognized the southern confederacy"; and most damning, an actual letter from Pope Pius IX to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, discovered in the Treasury Department's abandoned Confederate property files.

This 1896 dispute reveals the raw, unhealed wounds of Reconstruction still festering a quarter-century after Appomattox. Anti-Catholic sentiment remained a potent political force in Protestant America, particularly in the Midwest where this Omaha paper circulated. The debate over papal recognition of the Confederacy wasn't academic—it struck at fundamental questions about religious loyalty, national sovereignty, and whether the Catholic Church could be trusted to prioritize American interests. In 1896, as Bryan's populist Democrats challenged Republican orthodoxy, suspicions of foreign (especially Catholic) influence on American politics remained volatile. This wasn't a backwater squabble; Carroll edited the New York Independent, one of America's most influential religious publications, making this a battle for control of the nation's moral narrative about the war itself.

• The masthead declares The American 'Cheapest Paper in America' at five cents—positioning itself as a paper for working-class Midwesterners who might distrust Eastern establishment organs like the New York Independent.
• The paper's motto, 'AMERICA FOR AMERICANS,' explicitly targets immigrant Catholic populations, suggesting the anti-papal rhetoric served nativist political purposes beyond historical accuracy.
• Hershey references a letter from Dudley Mann, the Confederate papal agent at Rome, whose transmitting note claimed the pope's recognition would 'live forever in story as the production of the first potentate who formally recognized your official position'—suggesting the Confederacy itself understood the diplomatic significance of the pontiff's acknowledgment.
• The dispute hinges on a Methodist minister being expelled from Rome by papal order for conducting Protestant services at the U.S. legation—a personal religious humiliation that apparently sparked the decision to defund the entire Roman mission, showing how religious tensions directly shaped diplomatic policy.
• Hershey cites Jefferson Davis's own memoir, 'Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government,' where Davis explicitly states 'Napoleon and the pope were both anxious to do more than recognize the southern confederacy'—the ultimate insider testimony that Hershey weaponizes against Carroll's denials.

• Rev. Hershey mentions sending his evidence to the 'Methodist Book concern'—the Methodist Publishing House—and ominously warns that if Carroll gets a position there, he'll 'poison that as quickly as you have the Independent,' showing how religious denominational politics were weaponized in media during this era.
• The letter references Lord Acton's famous dictum that 'History must stand on documents, not on opinions'—Acton, the great Catholic historian, being invoked by a Protestant minister to shame a fellow Protestant for defending the pope, illustrates the complex intellectual currents of 1890s religious debates.
• Hershey cites Harper's Weekly (then far more prestigious than the Independent) multiple times, suggesting a hierarchy of journalistic authority where different outlets had different credibility ratings—presaging modern debates about which news sources Americans should trust.
• The cartoon at bottom shows Uncle Sam and Columbia discussing a pest infestation, with a caption about 'critters' owning the country and 'the spirit of Seventy-six'—a reference to the American Revolution that suggests Hershey's anti-Catholic arguments were framed as defending the revolutionary principles of 1776 against foreign despotism.
• Archbishop Lynch served as the Confederacy's diplomatic agent in Rome, yet Hershey argues priests could never shed their denominational loyalties in political work—a claim that, ironically, proved true when Lynch's papal connections made him an ineffective diplomat precisely because the North viewed him as Rome's agent first, Confederate agent second.