 Despite Bishop Lynch's mission, and an earlier mission by A. Dudley Mann, the Vatican never recognized the Confederacy, and the Pope received Bishop Lynch only his ecclesiastical capacity.William T. Sherman, a prominent Union General during the Civil War, was a baptized Catholic whose son became a priest, but who disavowed Catholicism after the war ended.Sherman's military campaigns of 1864 and 1865 freed many enslaved people, who joined his marches through Georgia and the Carolinas by the tens of thousands, although his personal views on the rights of African Americans and the morality of slavery appear to have been somewhat more nuanced.