The Aftermath of the Charlestown Convent Burning

Looking through my notes several days ago, I realized that I had not posted my concluding blog on the Burning of the Charlestown Convent in 1834. As you remember a mob, enraged by anti-Catholic propaganda and rumors--and the growing number of Irish Catholic immigrants and how they were undermining the employment of local Protestant workmen--sacked and burned the Ursuline Convent School in Charlestown MA in August 1834. The story concludes (but the prejudice lived on as we have seen in Philadelphia and other cities). (For details, refer to the postings of January 26 and 27.)
The morning after the convent burning the mayor of Boston Theodore Lyman, convoked a public meeting at Fanueil Hall to discuss what that happened. The meeting adopted a resolution which mandated an investigation of the riot and events leading up to it. it also named member of an investigative committee. The meeting also resolved that the Diocese of Boston should be compensated for the loss of property and offered a reward to anyone providing information about who was responsible for this event The same day the selectmen of Charlestown convoked a public meeting and passed resolutions condemning the violence and setting up a Committee of Vigilance to investigate the affair and to solicit information about the perpetrators that would lead to their arrest and prosecution. These steps were a remarkably generous response to the convent burning and show that the more responsible citizens abhorred the sort of violence that the Charlestown Convent burning represented. Indeed the whole affair, including the relationship of the nuns with the Selectmen and Mr. Curry prior to the riot show that the more responsible sectors of society were not buying into Lyman Beecher’s pulpit pyrotechnics and the anti-Catholicism they represented.
The Catholics on their part kept a cool head about the whole event. Bishop Fenwick convoked a meeting of the Catholic citizens in the area and admonished them that any acts of vengeance would be incompatible with the “religion of Jesus Christ.” On behlf of the Catholic population, the Bishop thanked the Boston and Charlestown authorities for their stand against the violence and expressed his trust that the civil authorities would offer the protection and civil order that would insure this sort of event would not reoccur.
Despite the efforts of civic leaders to defuse the situation, the mob was again on the roll. That very night a mob assembled at the arsenal and moved off in the direction of the Cathedral. Fortunately the mayor had ordered police and military guards to be stationed at the Cathedral and the Catholic church in Charlestown as well as several civic buildings. Finding the Cathedral under guard, the crowd returned to the convent grounds which, curiously, had been left unguarded. The mob destroyed the grounds—tearing down fences and walls, uprooting shrubbery, ravaging the gardens and setting bonfires wherever they could.
In the end, the investigative committee met for three weeks and finally ordered thirteen arrests, eight for burglary or arson which were capital crimes. But that is not the end of the story. The Committee, the Selectmen, the Mayor were of one sort of Bostonian, but these thirteen alleged criminals were to be tried, as law requires, by their peers. All but one were acquitted even though the evidence against them in most cases was indisputable and indeed, the ringleader had admitted out of court, that he had played a pivotal role. The one person found guilty and condemned to life at hard labor, was a sixteen year old boy who had participated in burning books the night the convent sacked. At the request of a public petition signed by Bishop Fenwick and the Superior of the Charlestown Ursuline Sisters, the governor gave the boy a pardon,
The Charlestown Convent burning was early in the revival of anti-Catholicism. The 1840’s and 1850’s would be much more turbulent. The responsible action of the “better sort” of citizenry contrasted to the working class rioters indicates that—as is typical—prejudice generally exists among the less educated and those who feel themselves increasingly emarginated from society. But it is too simple to say that prejudice is limited to the underclass. History shows us something quite different. Lyman Beecher, one of the voices in Boston that was fanning the flames of anti-Catholicism, was a highly educated man with upper-class background. While a demagogue he may have been, a more astute analysis would see him as a man ahead of his time. Two decades after the convent burning some of the best names in the American Republic would be associated with rabid anti-Catholicism. As prejudice progresses it grows in respectability. The Jews in Germany would see this same progression from demagoguery to respectability with far more tragic results. Americans today should look carefully at how totally outrageous things that would once have been said only at White Supremacist rallies or American Nazi Party gatherings are said on cable networks and mainline political gatherings. This time it isn’t the Catholics, at least qua Catholics, who are the objects of vilification—but having been the victims of it in past history we certainly need to distance ourselves from it today.

Today's image is the Revernd Lyman Beecher, a famous Boston Clergyman, who was notorious for his anti-Catholic preaching and writing that contributed to the anti-Catholicism of nineteenth century Boston.

Convent Burnings and Anti-Catholicism

In 1820 the Bishop of Boston, Jean-Louis Lefebvre de Cheverus invited the Ursuline nuns from Montreal to send a community of sisters to open a convent and school next to his Cathedral in Boston. The Ursulines had a fine reputation for the education of young women both in Europe and in French Canada. In fact this was there second school in the United States as they had operated an academy in New Orleans—originally French and only recently acquired for the United States—since 1727. The Boston convent and school moved to Ploughed Hill—now renamed Mount Benedict—seven years later. Most of the students came from upper class Protestant families who found the idea of sending their daughters to a “convent school” quite fashionable. (Georgetown Visitation similarly had a large population of upper class Yankee Protestant students at this same period.) All this was well and good during the lull in anti-Catholicism in the early years of the Republic but it would change as the embers of anti-Catholicism were fanned back into flame by the mass influx of Catholic immigrants in the 1830’s and 1840’s and by the anti-Catholic preaching of rabid demagogues in the pulpit, preachers like the Reverend Lyman Beecher, father of the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Beecher is probably best known for his abolitionism—his preaching and writing against slavery, but abolitionism is only a small part of a much larger picture. Abolitionism was certainly a noble cause but not all causes associated with American liberalism of the early nineteenth century were so idealistic. Yesterday we talked about the Whig party and the Whigs were the political expression of liberalism. The Whigs split, north and south, on the slavery issue but Whigism was primarily a Northern movement. The Whigs were anti-immigrant because they believed that the democratic ideals of the young nation could only be preserved by people of British ancestry since our Republic was founded to preserve the liberties granted to Englishmen going back to the time of Magna Carta. Representative Government came from the British Parliamentary heritage and while England itself still had a monarchy, its powers were severely limited by Parliament, particularly by the People’s House—the House of Commons. Whigs also saw and wished to maintain that Protestantism was rightfully seen, if somewhat unofficially, as the religion of this Republic. Catholicism was highly suspect. It owed allegiance to a foreign prince,—the Pope—who was an absolute monarch. Priests were agents of the Pope. These immigrants were coming—especially the Germans—from monarchial government. The Irish were worse. They were an inferior race, kept ignorant by their priests, and rebellious against their English masters. Nineteenth century “liberals” tended to be as prejudiced as any Grand Inquisitors of medieval Spain. The fact that most of the immigrants, and the Irish in particular, gravitated towards Jackson’s Democratic party only increased the Whig hatred of anything Immigrant, anything Irish, and anything Catholic. In addition to preachers like Beecher, and perhaps inspired by him, there was a rash of anti-Catholic literature with lurid stories about priests and nuns, vaults filled with the murdered babies of unholy liaisons, the dangers of a papal takeover of the American Republic, the suffering of Protestants in Catholic dominated lands, and other inflammatory prose.
A young Episcopalian student in the School, Rebecca Reed, converted to Catholicism and entered the Ursuline convent. It wasn’t a good fit and she was dismissed towards the end of her postulancy. Reed wrote a book Six Months in a Convent. The book was only published after the Charlestown riots, but drafts of the manuscript had circulated widely among Boston Protestants. The disgruntled would-be nun did not have a lot of good to say about her experience and her book was of a certain “escaped from the convent-genre” popular at the time for its sensationalism.
There was much social unrest in Boston and surrounding towns, especially among the laboring classes. The immigrants—in Boston mostly Irish—were cheap labor. Working class Protestants were finding it hard to compete for jobs. This added to the tension in the city.
On the evening of July 28th 1834, a distraught nun—Sr. Mary John (aka Elizabeth Harrison) knocked on the door of a Protestant Gentleman, Edward Cutter, in Charlestown and asked for help to reach an acquaintance in Cambridge. Mr. Cutter obliged. The next day Mr. Cutter went to the home of the acquaintance to inquire after the nun and was told that she had returned to the convent in the company (custody?) of her Mother Superior and the Bishop of Boston—now Benedict Joseph Fenwick. Rumors began to spread. Was Ms. Harrison being held against her will? Rebecca Reed’s monograph would certainly lead one to think this was a possibility. As the agitation spread, placards were posted around Boston declaring:
"To the Selectmen of Charlestown!! Gentlemen: It is currently reported that a mysterious affair has lately happened at the Nunnery in Charlestown, now it is your duty gentlemen to have this affair investigated immediately. If not the Truckmen of Boston will demolish the Nunnery Thursday night—August 14."

The nuns and the bishop did the utmost to head off trouble. Mr. Cutter and the Charlestown selectmen (town council members) were allowed to come to the convent and interview Sister Mary John, the sister whose flight to Mr. Cutter’s home had started the incident. The nun said that she was free to leave the convent at any time of her choice; she was not being held against her will. A few days later the selectmen were admitted to the convent and Sr. Mary John—not the superior, but again the nun whose notoriety had brought attention to the convent—gave them a thorough tour of the buildings. The Selectmen released a statement to be published in the press that Sr. Mary John was in good health, she was not being held against her will, and that the convent was in every respect a fit place for nuns and students.
That very same night, however, August 11, 1834, a mob of Protestants gathered outside the convent door, calling for the release of any being held there against their will. When a nun came to the window and asked them to disperse, declaring that the nuns and children had all retired for the night, the mob offered her “protection” if she wanted to flee. The Superior, Mother St. George, appeared and made what was probably the greatest mistake in the event, declaring “the Bishop has twenty-thousand of the most vile Irishmen at his command and you may read your riot act till your throats are sore, but you’ll not quell them.” This did not intimidate the mob in the slightest; it served only as a challenge. They dispersed only to come back about two hours later and about two thousand strong. The ringleaders set fire to barrels of pitch on the convent grounds. Fire companies came, but the firemen only joined the crowd. The mob, growing restless, broke into the convent through battered doors and shattered windows ransacking the place. The nuns and students fled to the gardens behind the school through back doors. The mob then torched the building. More to come

The image today is a sketch of the ruins of the Charlestown Convent

The progress of Anti-Catholicism, an ongoing saga

Well, let’s come back to the story of anti-Catholicism in America. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, Catholicism did its best in the new American Republic to “fit in.” By tradition American Catholicism was rooted in the recusant Catholicism of the English and Anglo-Irish gentry who settled Maryland and there was very little foreign about it. The churches were plain—the Cathedral in Baltimore didn’t even have any statues. The clergy and religious dressed simply but without distinguishing features. (The Carmelite nuns who came to Southern Maryland from what is today Belgium traveled from Europe to their new Maryland home in lay clothes and under the titles Miss or Missus, depending on their age. Saint Rose Philippine Duchesne and the “Madames” of the Sacred Heart who accompanied her from France, also travelled in secular dress coming to make their foundation in America.) While mass remained in Latin—despite Bishop Carroll and other clergy talking of a vernacular liturgy—baptism, marriage, and funeral rites (other than the mass itself, of course) were translated (without permission of Rome) into the vernacular. There were no public processions in the streets or other displays more common to Continental Catholicism; discretion ruled the day and it seemed very natural to these Marylanders because it was their heritage from England and the Irish Pale.
The waves of immigrants that came in the 1830’s and 1840’s changed that. The Germans, and smaller numbers of French and Italians, brought the more vibrant Catholicism of their homelands. They were used to public processions, religious garb, more elaborate churches and worship, more emotional display of religion. The Germans and Italians were also particularly interested in preserving their language and culture and wanted alternatives to public education where they could educate their children in the language and customs of their homelands. The German and French immigrants were, by and large, more educated than the Italians and the Irish. The Irish (along with the Germans, the biggest group of immigrants) were—unlike the Germans and unlike earlier Irish immigrants—poorly educated, many practically illiterate. They came fleeing hunger during the Great Famine.
The established American citizenry—though descendents of immigrants themselves—looked down on these immigrants and had a grave distrust of how they would adapt themselves to life in the American Republic. They were, well so un-American. They didn’t speak English—except for the Irish who often spoke it poorly and many of whom were in fact native Irish speakers. Their religion was strange, exotic with Latin prayers and songs, and clergy in strange garb. Their priests seem to have too much influence over them—they weren’t independent minded as were Americans. (Get three Congregationalists together and you have four opinions.) And they weren’t republicans. (Not in our terms of Republicans/Democrats, but in believing in the political philosophy of republican government.) Indeed the French and the Germans in particular tended to monarchy as the preferred form of government. The French remembered the travesty of their Revolution which simply replaced one despot with another and did great harm to both the social order and the Church in the process. The Germans too were coming from the network of principalities, kingdoms and duchies that would be united into modern Germany in 1870 and were not used to democratic thought.
In addition to not being experienced in (or possibly convinced of) a republican form of government, the immigrants had little use for Protestantism. To the French and the Italians, Protestants were a pretty much unknown element. (There were some French Protestants but after the Wars of Religion in the 17th century they were a definite minority, most having fled to the Netherlands or England and from these refuges many going on to the English colonies in North America.) The Germans, coming from Catholic principalities along the Rhine or Bavaria understood Protestants to be the “enemy” from the Protestant German States, most notably Prussia and the northern German regions. As for the Irish—well to them “Protestants” were the bastards that had let them starve, taking what few crops survived the famine and shipping them off to England to sell there while forcing the impoverished tenant farmers off their lands and leaving them destitute. No, this was not a happy arrangement to have these “foreigners” sweep onto our shores.
The Irish in particular had great resentment. During the famine not only had their Protestant landlords let them starve but Presbyterian and Anglican “angels of mercy” had opened soup-kitchens to feed the starving and now dispossessed masses. All one had to do was renounce the Catholic faith, join the sponsoring Denomination, and dinner was free. Catholics who “took the soup” found themselves shunned by those who preferred hunger to religious blackmail. Their neighbors and relatives would drop the “O’” or the “Mc” in front of the apostate’s name as a sign of their contempt. So if your name is Connell, or Sweeney, or Loughlin—or some other name that might normally begin with an Irish prefix—one of your ancestors may well have “taken the soup.”
On the other hand, the contempt was not one–sided. The Irish immigrants found a particularly bitter resentment on the part of the old Yankees. The East-Coast American Establishment were strong Anglophiles for whom everything British was to be admired and copied. They shared the English bias against the Irish that was as racist as any prejudice against people of color. “No Irish,” and “Irish need not apply” signs appeared at factory gates and tenement doors.
As I had mentioned in an earlier blog, in the first years of the Republic, Catholics had tended to favor the Federalist cause rather than Jefferson’s Republicans (who are today’s Democrats, or at least the forebearers of the modern Democrat Party). But as the Federalist party faded from the scene, a new party rose up called the Whigs. The Whigs saw a huge threat in the presidency of Andrew Jackson. Jackson was a military man, a famous general, and he had no patience for the slow deliberations of politics. The presidency changed drastically under Jackson, growing stronger in power at the cost of Congress’ prerogatives, Jackson didn’t pull a coup-d’état or anything like that. It was all done through his allies in the Congress; and he was an immensely popular president who had the electorate behind him, especially the lower classes and the frontiersmen on the western edge of the young country.
Whigs were not only concerned about Jackson’s threat to the Republic, they were concerned about this wave of immigrants and how they would fit into the American Republic. The Whigs were not anti-immigrant per se; it was more what they were for rather than what they were against. The Whigs believed in a universal public school system. There was an advantage to this as until this point public schools were sporadically placed leaving many children, especially in the South and in rural areas without an opportunity for education. The problem is that the Whigs wanted there to be no more than one system of education which would teach English only and would stress Protestant religion with daily bible reading and other practices to which Catholics objected. (One reason they objected, of course, is that the Bible to be read was the King James "Protestant Bible.") The Catholics, though traditionally opponents of Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans, now felt them less a threat than the Whigs. As Catholics began to shift towards the Democratic-Republicans, the Whig’s fear of these immigrants with their foreign religion only increased.
The Whigs had moderate luck in obtaining elected office for their candidates. They lost presidential elections in 1836, 1844, 1852, 1856, and 1860—by which time they faded out of existence This means that in 1840 and 1848 their candidates were elected. A major reason for their lack of success was that the Catholic and immigrant population—a swelling percentage of the population as a whole, was joining what is now called the Democratic party. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
One of the first signs of anti-Catholicism was the Charlestown Convent Burning of 1834. We will do a blog on this event to give a fuller detail. Suffice it to say that the Ursuline nuns from French Canada had established a convent and school in the Boston suburb of Charlestown. The short version of the story is that one of the nuns had run away and sought refuge in the home of a friend. The next morning the local gentleman, a Mr. Cutter, who had taken her there inquired about her welfare, only to be told that she had returned to the convent in the company of her Mother Superior and the Bishop. This fueled rumors that women were being held against their will in the convent. An inquiry was held by the local selectmen who visited the convent and inspected it and assured the populace that the sisters were there voluntarily. However a large mob gathered outside the convent on the night of August 11, 1834 and set fire to barrels of tar on the grounds. The fire spread. The local fire brigade arrived on the scene but did not do anything to put the fire out. The placards and speeches provide a direct link between the mob and the rising Catholic population, mostly Irish laborers, in Boston. In the subsequent trial twelve of the thirteen ringleaders were acquitted, despite some of them admitting to the crime. The one found guilty was a sixteen-year old boy who was pardoned by the governor at the request of, among others, the Superior of the Ursulines and the Bishop. More on this in a future blog—and in our next blog on anti-Catholicism we look at the “Know-Nothing” party
today's image is a 19th century print of the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown MA, site of famous 1834 Convent Burning.