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anti-Catholicism

Fr. John Bapst Survives Tar & Feathers, Becomes 1st Boston College President

John Bapst, a Swiss Jesuit priest, arrived in New York City in 1848 just as Know Nothing bigotry gathered force in the Northeast. He spoke no English, and he was sent to the wilds of Maine to minister to Penobscot Indians, whose language he also didn’t speak. Father Bapst would survive a tar-and-feathering in Ellsworth, Maine, earn the respect of Maine Catholics and Protestants and become the first president of Boston College.

Throughout his successful career, the trauma of that night in Ellsworth never left him. In the end, it overtook him.

John Bapst

Father John Bapst

He was born Dec. 17, 1815, in Fribourg, Switzerland, and at 19 began studying to be a Jesuit priest. He was ordained a priest in 1846 at the age of 31. Two years later he left Switzerland.

When Father John Bapst set foot in New York, bigotry was rampant. Prejudice was aimed especially at Irish immigrants and Jesuit priests. The Know Nothing Party had begun to manifest itself 14 years earlier, when its members burned and pillaged an Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Mass. The Know Nothings published anti-Jesuit pamphlets and novels, including one featuring an evil order of female Jesuits and another featuring a Jesuit who kidnaps and murders an innocent woman.

Father Bapst’s superiors ordered him to Old Town to minister to the Penobscot Indians. Bapst had qualms about the assignment: He didn’t speak the Penobscot language and 10 of his predecessors had been killed. But he mastered the languages, started a temperance society and established peace between two warring parties. When a cholera epidemic broke out, he tended the sick.

His mission expanded to include the Irish and Canadian Catholics in Maine. In 1850, he moved to Eastport and in 1853 to Bangor. He preached, formed temperance societies and converted Protestants to Catholicism.

His territory included Winterport, Rockland, Thomaston, Ellsworth, Machias and Eastport.

Ellsworth

In Ellsworth, Father Bapst set up a small Catholic church and school. He also proposed that Catholic students be exempted from reading the King James Bible in school, because that wasn’t the version Catholics used. That enraged the Know Nothings.

The Know Nothings adopted a resolution in Ellsworth, Maine, on July 8, 1854, after they blew up the Catholic school with gunpowder, broken the windows of the rectory and the church, which they then tried to burn down. The resolution said, according to the U.S. Catholic Historical Society:

…if John Bapst, S.J., be found again on Ellsworth soil we will provide for him, and try on an entire suit of new clothes, such as cannot be found at the shops of any tailor, and then when thus appareled he be presented with a free ticket to leave Ellsworth upon the first railroad operation that may go into effect.

Tar and Feathers

Details vary as to what happened on Oct. 14, 1854. The Know Nothings either they found him at the home of a Catholic, a Mr. Kent, or pulled him out of the confessional. Then, according to one version,

…they carried him on a sharp rail to a lonely place, stripped him naked, bound him to a tree, having smeared him with tar and feathers. They then piled brush around him and attempted to set it afire, but their matches gave out. The sheriff finally arrived on the scene and dispersed the mob at the point of a pistol.

According to another version, they left him on the wharf. When he came to, he covered himself with matting, wandered in a daze into the center of town. Catholics found him, took him to Mr. Kent’s home and cleaned him up. He celebrated Mass the next day, his supporters guarding him with pitchforks. The day after that he returned to Bangor, where Protestants and Catholics were infuriated by his treatment. Maine’s attorney general made a half-hearted investigation, but no charges were filed.

St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church, Bangor Maine

Bapst stayed in Bangor five years. He established a new Catholic parish and in 1855 laid the cornerstone for St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church, now on the National Register of Historic Places. The Bangor Federal Credit Union was founded in the church basement in 1956.

Massachusetts

He moved to Massachusetts in 1859 to become the spiritual father of the College of Holy Cross in Worcester. A year later, he was transferred to Boston and appointed scholasticate of Boston College.

Boston College original location in Boston’s South End

He was quite popular in Boston.

Great crowds of Protestants heard his sermons at Immaculate Conception, and he formed a friendship with Massachusetts Gov. John Andrew. Andrew later granted the charter to Boston College. In 1863, Father Bapst was named the first president of the college. He stayed until 1869.

The Trauma Returns

By 1877, he was in Providence, R.I., serving as rector of St. Joseph’s Church. The bishop hoped John Bapst would establish a college there as he had in Boston. Unfortunately, by 1879, Father Bapst began to lose his mind. His colleagues were sure his Ellsworth trauma came back to haunt him. He suffered intense nightmares and screamed his attackers were coming to get him through the window.

St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Providence

Father John Bapst died on Nov. 2, 1887, in Mount Hope, Md. One of the attendants at his deathbed wrote,

As he lay on his bed after receiving the last Sacrament, calm and apparently unconscious of everything on earth, an almost heavenly peace rested on his countenance . . .

Boston College today

Photos: “Bangor Maine” byDenis Santerre. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike CC by SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons; “St Joseph Providence” by Marc N Belanger. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.. “BC Burns Lawn Sunset” Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike CC by SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait of John Bapst, By Unknown author – Boston College Libraries, item no. 99137907079501021, CC BY 3.0 us, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=84650001. This story was updated in 2021,

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A Judge, A President, A Librarian and the Forbes Library

The town of Northampton, Mass., owes its extraordinary Forbes Library to an opinionated judge, a president of the United States and a librarian who welcomed children and let patrons browse the shelves.

Charles Ammi Cutter

The Forbes Library, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is home to the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library and Museum. It also uses the same classification system as only four other libraries – including the Library of Congress.

Its first librarian was Charles Ammi Cutter, a pioneer responsible for the modern library. His lifelong goal was to develop of a classification system that included all human knowledge yet serviceable to the general user.

His vision for the Forbes was

…a new type of public library which, speaking broadly, will lend everything to anybody in any desired quantity for any desired time.

Judge Charles Forbes

The library is named after Charles Forbes, a Northampton lawyer who accumulated a fortune through frugality and shrewd investing. He was born Aug. 25, 1795, in West Bridgewater, Mass., graduated from Brown University in Providence and went into law and state politics. In 1848, the governor of Massachusetts appointed him to the Supreme Judicial Court, but he quit within a year because he didn’t like the workload.

Forbes never married and never drank, and in his later years grew ‘peculiar to the verge of eccentricity,’ according to Cutter. He was ‘somewhat formal, kindly in voice, occasionally irascible in temper, impatient of unreasonable opposition, restrained from the exhibition of feeling by an unconquerable or at least unconquered reserve.’

For 19 years he boarded with one family. When they left town, he moved to a tavern. Finally, he started sleeping in a room next to his office above a bank, where he died Feb. 13, 1881 at the age of 85.

An Unusual Will

Though Forbes didn’t earn more than $2,000 in a year, he left an estate of $252,260. He bequeathed nearly all of it to the Town of Northampton, where he had lived for 63 years. The will made clear the library’s collection should emphasize science over religion, and that only lay people could be hired to run it. His last will and testament included a rant against religion in general and Roman Catholicism in particular.

In his will, Forbes noted there were as many as 3,000 systems of religion, ‘but as a general rule these are the inventions of cunning men or the vagaries of semi-lunatics, speaking boldly and impudently in the name of God, of whose decrees and purposes they know as little as the most ignorant of their victims.’ He continued:

The importance of the education of the people cannot be overrated. It will be found the most efficient if not the only protection against the inroads of a foreign superstition, whose swarms of priests, Jesuits, monks, ministers and agents are let loose upon us, and engaged in the unholy work of enslaving the minds of the multitude, and moulding them into instruments of priestly power, a power built up on the remains of ancient paganism, and sustained in one particular at least by gross fetishism ….

He also ordered the building be fireproof.

Charles Cutter

Charles Ammi Cutter was born on March 14, 1837 in Boston. His mother died a month after his birth and his father, a fish-oil merchant, remarried two years later. When his stepmother had a baby, two-year-old Charles was sent to live in West Cambridge with his grandfather and three maiden aunts.

The Forbes Library

His aunts reared him as their own son and paid his way through Harvard. One of his aunts was the town librarian, which was fortunate for the frail, nearsighted boy who preferred reading to sports. He entered Harvard at 14, graduating third in his class four years later.

His late grandfather wished Charles would attend Harvard Divinity School. He did, but he couldn’t stay out of the library. He worked in the school’s library cataloguing its holdings. In 1860, at 23, he joined the staff of Harvard College’s library, the biggest in the country. He and Dr. Ezra Abbott spent eight years creating the first card catalog.

In 1868, Cutter became librarian at the Boston Athenaeum, a job he held for 25 years. While there he invented the Cutter Expansive Classification, which is now used by the Library of Congress. He also pioneered the interlibrary loan and invented the pouch on the inside back cover to hold the loan card. By 1893 he had a falling out with the Athenaeum trustees, quit and traveled to Europe to get away from libraries.

He couldn’t quite do it. Before he left, he wrote to the Forbes’ trustees offering to buy books and artifacts for the new library. When he returned, they offered him the job.

The Forbes Library

The building opened on July 1, 1895. Architect William Brocklesby designed it in the style of Trinity Church in Boston. The building was, as Forbes demanded, fireproof. Made of stone, steel and copper, the building also had a glass mezzanine floor and arched ceilings of fireproof tile by Rafael Guastavino.

Cutter continued to innovate, welcoming children, setting up branch libraries and a traveling library system, set up an art and music room and loaned books to teachers for use in the classroom.

Young Calvin Coolidge

Like Judge Forbes, Cutter was a boarder during his time in Northampton. His wife, Sarah Fayerweather Appleton, was too much of a Bostonian to live full time in western Massachusetts.

Charles Cutter died of pneumonia on Sept. 6, 1903 at the age of 66. Shortly before his death, he and Sarah moved into 21 Massasoit St., a home that a rising young lawyer named Calvin Coolidge had lived in.

Coolidge became mayor of Northampton in 1910 and served for a term before his election to the state Legislature. By 1920 he was governor of Massachusetts and had begun donating artifacts to the Forbes Library in his old hometown. In 1956, a bequest by Grace Coolidge allowed the commonwealth to establish the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Room at the Forbes Library.

In 1883, Cutter presented a paper to the American Library Association that envisioned what a library in Buffalo, N.Y., would be like 100 years in the future. In it, he wrote,

The desks had… a little keyboard at each, connected by a wire. The reader had only to find the mark of his book in the catalog, touch a few lettered or numbered keys, and [the book] appeared after an astonishing short interval.

This story last updated in 2022.

Images: Forbes Library By Kevin Rutherford, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37006925.

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Anti-Irish Know Nothing Mob Burns a Charlestown Convent in 1834

The Know Nothing Party first manifested itself in Massachusetts in 1834 with the burning and pillaging of a convent in Charlestown. It happened well before the nativist movement reached its peak in America two decades later.

know-nothing-destruction-charlestown-nunnery

A Know Nothing mob burns the Charlestown convent.

Massachusetts had a receptive audience for the Know Nothing message. A flood of Irish-Catholic immigrants worked for low wages. And the rising tide of evangelism halted the declining membership of the Congregational Church.

For the most part, Know Nothing sentiments simmered below the surface, confined to mundane displays of anti-Catholicism and fire-breathing Sunday sermons by anti-Catholic preachers such as Lyman Beecher.

In August of 1834, however, the Know Nothing ideology took a giant step forward. The match that would touch off the fire was struck on July 28, 1834. On that day, Elizabeth Harrison, a Catholic nun known within the church as Sister Mary St. John of the Ursuline Order, had something of a crisis of faith.

Ursulines

Cambridge Ursuline Convent. (Courtesy of Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston Public Library Archives.)

The Ursuline Order, named for St. Ursula, has a 500-year history of pursuing its mission of educating girls. The Ursulines established their convent and school in Charlestown (now part of Somerville) in 1819 on a 27-acre estate.

They renamed the site Mount Benedict, after the bishop. Then they converted the property from scrub land into a marvel of manicured gardens and handsome brick structures.

But the Ursuline convent also had a strict, demanding environment. The mother superior required much deprivation of the sisters in the course of their worship.

Elizabeth Harrison disliked the convent and girls boarding school she had called home for 13 years. She decided to leave. For 24 hours, she stepped outside the reclusive life of the convent and went to visit the parents of one of her students in West Cambridge.

She left on Monday and returned the next day, persuaded by Bishop Benedict Joseph Fenwick and her brother to return to the Order. Her decision to leave, she said, result from a temporary bout of insanity that drove her to the outside world.

There was nothing terribly unusual about Elizabeth Harrison, a music teacher who managed a heavy workload at the school.

Bishop Joseph Fenwick

Know Nothing Suspicions Aroused

Her departure from and return to the school incited gossip among Know Nothing sympathizers, however. Suspicions and dislike of Irish Catholics were already well established. Anti-Catholic tales included a rumor that the nuns were actually enslaved in their convents..

Rebecca Theresa Reed had written a tell-all about six months she spent at the Charlestown convent, Six Months in a Convent. The book highlighted the nuns’ unusual practices, such as punishing themselves with corsets, placing stones in their shoes and eating meager rations in poorly heated quarters.

Reed fled, she wrote, when she learned of a plot to kidnap her and ship her to a convent in Canada. Though it wasn’t published until after the fire, the story circulated in Boston in 1834.

The book also spawned a raft of copycats, including the notorious Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed. Monk fabricated an account of a Montreal convent whose sisters were forced into sex slavery with priests from the neighboring monastery.

In this overheated environment, Catholic-haters took note of anything they considered suspicious, such as Harrison’s departure and return to the convent. They suspected the nuns held her against her will, or even killed her.

The Truckmen

The Boston Truckmen, a quasi-police organization, posted a flyer directed at 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 notice did not fall on deaf ears. The Charlestown selectmen sent a delegation to the convent to investigate on August 11. They insisted on seeing Harrison, and then accompanied her on a tour of the grounds. They even inspected the mausoleum to ensure no one had died recently or suspiciously.

Satisfied that Harrison remained at the convent of her own free will, the selectmen left. But it wouldn’t satisfy the anger building among the Know Nothing Party.

At 9 o’clock on the night of August 11, Mother Superior Mary Ann Ursula Moffatt confronted a small group of men who approached the convent demanding to see Harrison. She told them about the selectmen’s inspection and sent them away. Perhaps she didn’t seem too concerned because many of her students belonged to Protestant religions.

The Mob Returns

Around midnight, however, the mob, grown larger, returned. With its leaders shouting “Down with the convent” and “Down with the nunnery,” the mob grew more violent. One of the selectmen turned up. At the mother superior’s urging, he tried to dissuade the crowd from attacking, but failed.

Soon, the crowd had built a bonfire outside and started to force its way into the convent. With hundreds in the menacing crowd, eight nuns and 47 girl students evacuated the building and gathered in one corner of the property to watch.

John Buzzell

Fifty-three years after the event, one of the leaders of the mob told what happened next. John Buzzell, a New Hampshire-born brickmaker, said:

The first thing that was done, after getting in, was to throw the pianos, of which nine were found, out of the windows. The mob crowded in in such numbers that it was with great difficulty that I got upstairs to the chapel, which was located on the second floor. When I finally succeeded in forcing my way into the chapel I found a fire about the size of a bushel-basket blazing merrily in the middle of the floor. It was made of paper, old books, and such other inflammable stuff as they could lay their hands on, and soon spread in all directions. When the main building was enveloped in flames we went for the cook-house and ice-house, which were separate buildings, and set them on fire.

At a little distance from the main building stood what was called the Bishop’s lodge, where he had a library, and where he used to keep his robes, etc. … getting out the Bishop’s robe, [I] put it on in a spirit of deviltry. The others stripped it off my back, and winding the remnants around poles, used them as torches, lighting them at the main building and firing the lodge with them. The farm-house and barn were burned next, after which the tomb was visited to see if the body of the music teacher Mary St. John was there.

Liar

Buzzell then told a whopper of a lie:

The door of the tomb was broken open, and within was the body of a young girl who had evidently been dead but a day or two at most, and whom I religiously believe to this day to have been Mary St. John, although I had no positive proof of her identity. This finished the events on the hill, and after’ watching the flames for a while, the immense mob slowly dispersed.

Buzzell certainly knew he lied, since Sister Mary St. John testified against him – to his face – in court.

Day Two

View of the City of Somerville in 1854 from the site of the Charlestown Convent ruins (seen on left). (Courtesy of Mr. Paul Swan, Boston Public Library Archives.)

The rioting continued the following day, with an armed Know Nothing mob advancing on Faneuil Hall and the Catholic Church in Charlestown. In both cases local militia prevented the rioters from causing damage. The mob revisited the scene of its work from the night before, and burned a dwelling that housed Irish-American workers. After that, its energy was spent.

In the immediate aftermath of the fire and riot, officials made the expected response. The mayor of Boston condemned the incident. Officials in Charlestown tried to deflect blame on the neighboring city of Boston, whose inhabitants had certainly taken part in the rampage. Massachusetts Gov. John Davis offered up a $500 reward for information leading to the conviction of the rioters.

And the finger pointing began. Why had the firefighters not aggressively put it out? Did they fear the violent Know Nothing mob flinging furniture out of windows at anyone below? Or had firefighters actually participated in sacking the convent, as many said? Why had the selectmen not done more to extinguish the rumors? And why did the Know Nothing rioters freely parade the day after the fire in celebration of their actions?

With such an open and well-attended crime, police soon arrested eight men. The defendants came from Charlestown, Boston and Cambridge. John Buzzell was the lead defendant.

Trial

The trial brought to the surface the Know Nothing sentiments — for and against — of the time.

For example, when selectmen warned the pugnacious mother superior of the danger to her property, she retorted with a threat. The bishop, she said, had 10,000 Irish at his command, and they would avenge anyone who damaged the convent.

Mother Superior Moffatt repeatedly tried to avoid testifying because she didn’t want the nuns involved in the case for fear of reprisal.

The trial judge allowed extensive questioning about the religious practices within the convent. He dwelt at times on the relationship between the bishop and the nuns, and focused on the nuns’ happiness and role within the church.

Rebecca Reed gave some brief testimony about her negative experiences in the convent, featured in her book, until the judge finally ruled them irrelevant.

And the court heard testimony that, as Buzzell tore into the building, he shouted: “If the Catholics get the upper hand of us, they will crush us into the earth.”

At the conclusion of the trial, Buzzell went free and continued in his Know Nothing beliefs. Despite what he himself described as overwhelming evidence against him, various witnesses placed him elsewhere during the attack. Others questioned about the identification of him based on descriptions of the length of his beard.

The testimony muddied the waters enough to let the jury acquit.

Aftermath

The Ursulines never rebuilt Charlestown convent. Bishop Fenwick maintained the property for many years. Eventually the soil from Mt. Benedict filled in the Middlesex Canal. The Ursulines returned to Boston in 1946 when they founded the Ursuline Academy, at that time on Arlington Street.

Mother Superior Moffatt then returned to Quebec, frustrated and exasperated by the destruction of her life’s work and her failure to restart the convent. She later received permission to join the Ursuline convent in New Orleans. It seems likely, though, she left the church instead.

Rebecca Reed, whose bestselling book fueled Know Nothing sentiment, died of tuberculosis shortly after publication.

Know Nothing Joseph Buzzell returned to live out his days in New Hampshire. Only one man, Marvin Marcy of Cambridge, went to jail for his part in the burning of the convent. Marcy, a Know Nothing, collected and burned many of the convent’s books.

Music teacher Elizabeth Harrison stayed with the order and joined the Ursuline Convent in Quebec.

Many debates then erupted on a national and state level about whether the Church should receive compensation for the damages caused in the Know Nothing riot. The most recent took place in 1962 in the Massachusetts General Court, and the proposal failed.

The mood that generated the growth of the Know Nothing Party of the mid-1800s showed up early in Massachusetts. This cartoon, "Uncle Sam's Boarding House" from Puck Magazine, highlights the party's anti-immigrant platform.

The mood that generated the growth of the Know Nothing Party of the mid-1800s showed up early in Massachusetts. This cartoon, “Uncle Sam’s Lodging House” from Puck Magazine, highlights the party’s anti-immigrant platform.

Interesting Reading…

Hidden History of the Boston Irish by Peter F. Stevens.

An Account of the Conflagration of the Ursuline Convent written by ‘a friend of religious toleration.’

The Charleston Convent; Its Destruction by a Mob on the Night of August 11, 1834, a compendium of official documents surrounding the incident.

The Burning of the Convent, an account of the incident written by one of the students of the school.

If you enjoyed this story about the Know Nothing party, you may also want to read how another Know Nothing mob tarred and feathered a Jesuit priest in Ellsworth, Maine, here.

This story about the burning of a convent by a Know Nothing mob was updated in 2022.

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