August 11, 1834—A rumor that a Protestant girl was being held against her will spurred a nativist mob to go on a rampage against an Ursuline convent.
The land is now occupied by the East Branch of the Somerville Public Library, but freedom of inquiry was the last thing on the rioters’ minds—in fact, by the time they were done, burning a valuable library was one of the least of their outrages, which included destroying religious relics, ransacking the possessions of nuns and their students in the convent school, mutilating the remains of the dead in the on-site mausoleum, then torching the once-imposing building.
All of this was done with nary a move to help—even from the fire companies who’d arrived on the scene—from the crowd that watched the blaze.
The attack, part of a wave of anti-Catholic bigotry that swept the United States in the middle decades of the 19th century, also reflected the growing sense of disenfranchisement of native-born Americans who felt increasingly crowded by Irish emigrants. And this was before the great wave that came to America from the Emerald Isle following the Great Hunger of the 1840s.
The mob’s hatred also took root in class resentment and a patriarchal society’s distrust of educated women, such as the convent students and the sisters who taught them.
The event that precipitated the riot was the flight from the convent of an incoherent nun, Sister Mary John—the mother assistant—to the home of a neighbor. Before long, the convent’s mother superior, Sister Mary St. George, and Boston’s bishop, Benedict Fenwick, retrieved the exhausted nun, explaining that the recent heat wave and a heavy academic workload had induced “brain fever.”
If you know the context of American education at this time, it’s easy to see why teaching this curriculum might be a stiff challenge for Sister Mary John. The school’s students were expected to master writing, arithmetic, geometry, chemistry, botany, natural and moral philosophy, rhetoric, logic, and “use of the Globes.” Only then did they get around to learning skills that the conventional wisdom of the day felt more necessary for young women: needlework, drawing, and cookery.
Keeping students up to all these standards is difficult enough now; it was almost unheard of back then, particularly in Massachusetts, whose public schools only allowed girls to attend six months out of the year (rather than nine for boys).
So, as area residents looked up at the convent atop Mount Benedict, they wondered: why on earth are the nuns teaching these girls so much? And why on earth are so many of the students Protestants like ourselves? (No more than one-fifth of the fifty-to-sixty students were Catholic.)
The answer to these questions, in the mind of these bigots, was simple: the nuns were trying to convert the girls as a first step toward taking over Boston.
At this point, it’s necessary to mention some of the other forces whipping up the populace:
* The “pornography of the Puritan”. Historian Richard Hofstadter’s phrase was not just a nice bit of rhetoric about anti-Catholicism, but also a thrust at the peculiar predilection of descendants of Cotton Mather for lurid tales involving young Catholic women. It was a given that these novels would retail the usual charges against Catholics—the Inquisition, their allegiance to a foreign potentate (the pope), their exotic rites. But the real frisson of these horror tales was the salacious recounting of misbehavior by wanton priests and their compliant nuns. (Think what a field day these authors would have had with the Rev. Paul Shanley and Rev. John Geoghan; they wouldn’t have had to resort to fiction!) Indeed, one of these tales, involving a woman named Rebecca Theresa Reed, concerned the Ursuline convent.
* A sensational—and, of course, inaccurate—press. On August 8, the Boston Mercantile Journal ran a news item about a “mysterious lady who was being held against her will on Mt. Benedict. The item implied that she could have been tortured, even murdered. Three days later, the paper printed a small item noting that another small competitor called the story “materially inaccurate.” Obviously, someone forgot to get the message out to the rioters.
* The Rev. Lyman Beecher. Harriet Beecher Stowe sensitized Americans to the plight of slaves with the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Her father was equally adept at doing so in the antebellum period. Too bad his sympathies did not lie with the Irish. The day before the riots, he was particularly energetic, preaching anti-Catholic sermons in three different churches.
* Sister Mary St. George. Yes, the Mother Superior herself. She was not the last person to react with asperity after a day of stress and physical exhaustion. (Henry Louis Gates and Hillary Clinton can relate.) But, after a period in which the convent had been subjected to unrelenting speculation—after she had already proved the falsity of the charges, to a visiting investigating committee—she’d had enough of the scruffy mob. For a long time, I could understand why Archbishop John Hughes of New York had promised “a second Moscow” (a reference to Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign, when the Russian city burned) if any nativist mob perpetrated outrages against Catholics. But Sister Mary St. George’s words on this occasion might have pushed things too far: the bishop, she told the mob, had at his disposal “twenty thousand of the vilest Irishmen at this command.”
All of this produced a cauldron of hatred. It is fortunate that the nuns and students slipped out of the convent before the rioters burst in—who knows what they would have been subject to by the mob?
The ringleader of the mob, a big brickmaker named John R. Buzzell, was subsequently acquitted at trial. Only a youngster was ever convicted for this role, and that youth was later pardoned.
The ruins remained visible for another 40 years. The rioters expected it to force an exodus out of Boston. Instead, all they ended up doing was a more fervent embrace by Catholics of their faith—one that had already endured centuries of abuse and injustice, in the catacombs of ancient Rome down to the hedge schools of their native Ireland.
When the Irish seized political power, in Boston and in urban political machines around the country, many were disinclined to take seriously the cries of Yankee reformers. When the emigrants had been desperate to eat, the reformers had not been forthcoming. It should not have come as a shock that so many of the new bosses learned the lessons of the Ursuline convent burning only too well.
The land is now occupied by the East Branch of the Somerville Public Library, but freedom of inquiry was the last thing on the rioters’ minds—in fact, by the time they were done, burning a valuable library was one of the least of their outrages, which included destroying religious relics, ransacking the possessions of nuns and their students in the convent school, mutilating the remains of the dead in the on-site mausoleum, then torching the once-imposing building.
All of this was done with nary a move to help—even from the fire companies who’d arrived on the scene—from the crowd that watched the blaze.
The attack, part of a wave of anti-Catholic bigotry that swept the United States in the middle decades of the 19th century, also reflected the growing sense of disenfranchisement of native-born Americans who felt increasingly crowded by Irish emigrants. And this was before the great wave that came to America from the Emerald Isle following the Great Hunger of the 1840s.
The mob’s hatred also took root in class resentment and a patriarchal society’s distrust of educated women, such as the convent students and the sisters who taught them.
The event that precipitated the riot was the flight from the convent of an incoherent nun, Sister Mary John—the mother assistant—to the home of a neighbor. Before long, the convent’s mother superior, Sister Mary St. George, and Boston’s bishop, Benedict Fenwick, retrieved the exhausted nun, explaining that the recent heat wave and a heavy academic workload had induced “brain fever.”
If you know the context of American education at this time, it’s easy to see why teaching this curriculum might be a stiff challenge for Sister Mary John. The school’s students were expected to master writing, arithmetic, geometry, chemistry, botany, natural and moral philosophy, rhetoric, logic, and “use of the Globes.” Only then did they get around to learning skills that the conventional wisdom of the day felt more necessary for young women: needlework, drawing, and cookery.
Keeping students up to all these standards is difficult enough now; it was almost unheard of back then, particularly in Massachusetts, whose public schools only allowed girls to attend six months out of the year (rather than nine for boys).
So, as area residents looked up at the convent atop Mount Benedict, they wondered: why on earth are the nuns teaching these girls so much? And why on earth are so many of the students Protestants like ourselves? (No more than one-fifth of the fifty-to-sixty students were Catholic.)
The answer to these questions, in the mind of these bigots, was simple: the nuns were trying to convert the girls as a first step toward taking over Boston.
At this point, it’s necessary to mention some of the other forces whipping up the populace:
* The “pornography of the Puritan”. Historian Richard Hofstadter’s phrase was not just a nice bit of rhetoric about anti-Catholicism, but also a thrust at the peculiar predilection of descendants of Cotton Mather for lurid tales involving young Catholic women. It was a given that these novels would retail the usual charges against Catholics—the Inquisition, their allegiance to a foreign potentate (the pope), their exotic rites. But the real frisson of these horror tales was the salacious recounting of misbehavior by wanton priests and their compliant nuns. (Think what a field day these authors would have had with the Rev. Paul Shanley and Rev. John Geoghan; they wouldn’t have had to resort to fiction!) Indeed, one of these tales, involving a woman named Rebecca Theresa Reed, concerned the Ursuline convent.
* A sensational—and, of course, inaccurate—press. On August 8, the Boston Mercantile Journal ran a news item about a “mysterious lady who was being held against her will on Mt. Benedict. The item implied that she could have been tortured, even murdered. Three days later, the paper printed a small item noting that another small competitor called the story “materially inaccurate.” Obviously, someone forgot to get the message out to the rioters.
* The Rev. Lyman Beecher. Harriet Beecher Stowe sensitized Americans to the plight of slaves with the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Her father was equally adept at doing so in the antebellum period. Too bad his sympathies did not lie with the Irish. The day before the riots, he was particularly energetic, preaching anti-Catholic sermons in three different churches.
* Sister Mary St. George. Yes, the Mother Superior herself. She was not the last person to react with asperity after a day of stress and physical exhaustion. (Henry Louis Gates and Hillary Clinton can relate.) But, after a period in which the convent had been subjected to unrelenting speculation—after she had already proved the falsity of the charges, to a visiting investigating committee—she’d had enough of the scruffy mob. For a long time, I could understand why Archbishop John Hughes of New York had promised “a second Moscow” (a reference to Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign, when the Russian city burned) if any nativist mob perpetrated outrages against Catholics. But Sister Mary St. George’s words on this occasion might have pushed things too far: the bishop, she told the mob, had at his disposal “twenty thousand of the vilest Irishmen at this command.”
All of this produced a cauldron of hatred. It is fortunate that the nuns and students slipped out of the convent before the rioters burst in—who knows what they would have been subject to by the mob?
The ringleader of the mob, a big brickmaker named John R. Buzzell, was subsequently acquitted at trial. Only a youngster was ever convicted for this role, and that youth was later pardoned.
The ruins remained visible for another 40 years. The rioters expected it to force an exodus out of Boston. Instead, all they ended up doing was a more fervent embrace by Catholics of their faith—one that had already endured centuries of abuse and injustice, in the catacombs of ancient Rome down to the hedge schools of their native Ireland.
When the Irish seized political power, in Boston and in urban political machines around the country, many were disinclined to take seriously the cries of Yankee reformers. When the emigrants had been desperate to eat, the reformers had not been forthcoming. It should not have come as a shock that so many of the new bosses learned the lessons of the Ursuline convent burning only too well.
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