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7 Fun Facts About the Boston Irish

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George Washington famously acknowledged the Boston Irish on March 17, 1776, when he ordered new code words to pass through Continental Army lines. The password, “Boston,” was to be answered with “St. Patrick.” Then, of course, the army trained cannons from Dorchester Heights onto the occupying British, and they left in a hurry.

Boston has had an Irish population since the first four shiploads from Ulster arrived in 1718. But not until the potato crop began to fail in 1845 did the huge influx of Irish immigrants sail into Boston Harbor.

The potato famine wasn’t the only thing that brought the Irish to Massachusetts rather than, say, Virginia or Maine. Hunger and poverty pushed the Irish out of Ireland, but the promise of work pulled them to Boston.

The world’s largest Irish flag at Rowe’s Wharf in Boston.

In the Atlas of Boston History, Robert J. Allison explains that Irish immigrants came for jobs. Jobs in the Merrimack River Valley, the most industrial region in the Western Hemisphere. Jobs in Lowell, the biggest industrial city in the United States. And jobs in Boston, a manufacturing powerhouse that led the nation in distilling and refining.

The Atlas of Boston History isn’t just about the Boston Irish. Edited by historian Nancy Seasholes, it traces the history of Boston from the Ice Age to the present. It includes 57 full-color maps, along with illustrations, graph and text.

Here are seven more facts about the Boston Irish borrowed liberally from the Atlas of Boston History.

1. Coming from County Cork

Some Irish immigrants walked a hundred miles to reach Queenstown (now Cobh), their port of departure. Most came from the southwestern counties of Galway, Kerry, Clare and especially Cork. Many arrived so sick and destitute that people said they came in famine ships.

Where they came from. Courtesy The Atlas of Boston History.

2. Hives of human beings

In 1849, a ship from overseas brought cholera to Boston. Crowded, unsanitary housing caused an epidemic of the disease, from which the Irish suffered the most. Of the 611 people who died of cholera, 500 came from Ireland.

The city physician investigated the living conditions, and included his findings in the Report of the Committee of Internal Health on the Asiatic Cholera. He was especially horrified by the Fort Hill neighborhood (now the Financial District), which had the densest Irish population. He called it a “perfect hive of human beings, without comforts and mostly without common necessaries; In many cases, huddled together like brutes… sometimes wife and husband, brothers and sisters, in the same bed.”

Some dwellings had 100 people living in them with one sink and one toilet. Half Moon Place was the worst, walled in by tall buildings, Fort Hill and 14 overflowing privies. Boston had 586 cellars used as dwellings; they had neither light nor ventilation and as many as 15 people living in them. The average age of Irish life in Boston didn’t exceed 14 years, he wrote.

Neighborhoods to avoid. Courtesy The Atlas of Boston History.

3. Filling in nicely

Back Bay and the South End owe their existence to the Irish, for more than one reason. So many Irish flooded into the city that Boston’s political leaders grew concerned that their taxpaying Yankee political supporters would move to the suburbs. So they built two attractive residential neighborhoods to keep Yankees in the city: Back Bay and the South End.

Irish laborers filled in the mud flats in Back Bay so Yankee homes could be built. Irishmen also filled in South Cove (now Chinatown) and expanded the shoreline and docks in Charlestown and East Boston. They also built a new warehouse and docks along Fort Point Channel.

Back Bay

4. A way to find missing friends

Friends and relatives of Irish immigrants who arrived in Boston placed thousands of “Missing Friends” advertisements in the Boston Pilot, a national Catholic newspaper.

Newcomers to Boston did it to find family who had come over earlier. Sometimes relatives and friends in Ireland placed ads to find immigrants in America they’d lost touch with. Or sometimes they advertised to find another immigrant who moved elsewhere to find work.

The map of Ireland that showed which counties Irish immigrants came from is based on that information.

5. Third Place

Irish immigrants made Boston the third-biggest city in the country in 1850, behind New York and Baltimore. The city had slipped to fifth place in 1840, but the Irish helped it climb into third.

Boston went from having a minority of foreign born residents to having a majority between 1845 and 1855. By then, 42.5 percent of the population of Boston was Irish.

map-boston-irish

Courtesy The Atlas of Boston History

6. Bring on the brawn

Boston Irish offered a vast pool of cheap labor to Yankee businessmen, and they fueled a manufacturing boom. Irish workers churned out steam engines, industrial furnaces, pianos, organs, refined sugar, candy, iron rails and ale and spirits.

Boston Irish laborers

Ready-made clothing makers, centered in and near the heavily Irish North End, challenged New York City, the top garment producer in the United States. And Boston shipyards made the clipper ships and steamers that carried to market New England’s products—especially textiles and shoes. Irish dockworkers and teamsters hauled the fruits of Irish labor into warehouses and onto ships that the Irish helped build.

7. McGinniskin was the first

In 1851, Boston hired the first Irish cop in U.S. history, a quiet and respectable 42-year-old laborer named Barney McGinniskin. Boston’s Yankees objected strenuously, and held meetings (including at Faneuil Hall) to protest his appointment. One alderman complained Boston set a dangerous precedent because the ‘Irish commit most of the crime.’

McGinniskin served for three years until the political winds changed. The anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant Know-Nothings elected a Boston mayor and McGinniskin got fired from his job in 1854.


Images: Largest Irish flags By John Hoey from Framingham, MA, United States – World’s Largest Irish Flag (1), CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47411665 and https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47411658; all maps from The Atlas of Boston History by Nancy Seasholes. Back Bay by By Rick Berk – https://www.flickr.com/photos/rickberk/2848634125/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10986897. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Catholic Test – When New Hampshire Outlawed Catholics

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New Hampshire’s Constitution, adopted in 1784, had some of the toughest restrictions on religious freedom in the new United States. It stated unequivocally that to hold elected state office a man had to be “of the protestant religion.”

Similarly, it authorized the government to raise money for the support of “protestant teachers.”

An anti-Catholic cartoon from 1855 (Library of Congress)

Though not part of the state’s first, interim constitution of 1776, this language was inserted into the 1784 revisions. Over time these provisions — known as the Catholic Test — developed into a thorny issue.

To be fair, New Hampshire was hardly alone in banning Catholics from public office. New Jersey’s 1776 Constitution declared that only men “professing a belief in the faith of any Protestant sect” could hold office.

Other states were more tolerant of different beliefs. Massachusetts, for instance, required office holders to declare their allegiance to a Christian faith. But many states had some religious tests in their constitutions.

Reform Efforts

Three subsequent New Hampshire state constitutional conventions considered the issue . Each proposed removing the language referring to protestants from the constitution. But each time — 1792, 1851 and 1852 — voters failed to pass changes, which required two-thirds support to win.

In the constitutional convention of 1850, Rep. Enoch Cass of Holderness led a spirited defense of the Catholic Test in a speech to the convention:

“Was it safe to elect a man governor who was sworn to the Pope of Rome and believed that all protestants were heretics and should be persecuted unto death? Was it ever known that Catholics gained the power over any people, and got the government into their own hands, that they did not persecute, even unto death, all that were opposed to them? . . . Were not nunneries and Catholic schools springing up all around us? And were they not teaching the children that we are all heretics?”

Levi Woodbury

Levi Woodbury, U.S. Supreme Court justice and presidential candidate, led the push to revise the Constitution. As it stood, he said, it “offered the husk of religious freedom, but withheld the kernel.” The 1850 constitutional convention approved amending the constitution to remove the Catholic Test, but voters did not.

Franklin Pierce Controversy

The Catholic Test developed into an important issue in the 1852 election of Franklin Pierce to the presidency. Pierce was a weak candidate from the start. It had taken 49 ballots at the Democratic national convention to choose Pierce. He was a dark horse candidate who only appeared after the convention deadlocked, with a majority deathly opposed to James Buchanan, the most powerful of the nominees.

Franklin Pierce

Franklin Pierce

Almost immediately, critics accused Pierce of anti-Catholic bias. He had been chair of the 1850 constitutional convention. His supporters produced and published a “speech” Pierce had given in support of removing the Catholic Test from the constitution. His opponents, meanwhile, scoured the record and found no such speech. The speech had been fabricated, they concluded, to con Catholic voters. However, they could also find no record of Pierce supporting the Catholic Test. He had stood silent on the issue, they charged.

As was typical of Pierce, he did his best to straddle the issue of religious freedom, seeking to avoid  conflict. His stance on religious freedom did not prevent him from winning the presidency, but did create a blot on his character. After one term in office, voters replaced him with fellow Democrat Buchanan.

Catholic Test Repealed

New Hampshire received plenty of  ridicule for its religious test in the years following the Pierce presidency. Political leaders across the country would entreat the state to abandon the anti-Catholic relic.

Finally, a new constitutional convention came together and recommended removing the Catholic Test. In 1877, enough voters agreed to strip it out of the law.

Thanks to: The New Hampshire State Constitution, By Susan E. Marshall.

If you enjoyed this article, you might like Anti-Irish Know Nothing Mob Burns a Charlestown Convent in 1834. This story was updated in 2023.

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The Secret Killer of the Waterbury Radium Girls

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Frances Splettscher was the first of the Waterbury radium girls to die. In 1921 at the age of 17, she had gone to work for the Waterbury Clock Co., painting watch dials with the new miracle substance, radium.

To get a nice, sharp point on her paintbrush, Frances, like the other radium girls, put the brush to her lips to get a nice, sharp point, dipped it into the paint and painted the dial. Then she did it again, over and over, for eight cents a dial.

radium-girls-phossy-jaw

The radium girls’ ailments mimicked a condition called phossy jaw

The radium girls didn’t think radium carried any danger. The company told them it would give them glowing health. Wasn’t radium used to cure people?

The radium girls believed their supervisors. They painted their dress buttons with it and their fingernails, and they painted rings on their fingers.

In 1925, Frances Splettscher died of radium poisoning after an agonizing illness. She developed severe anemia, and her teeth hurt. When a dentist pulled a tooth, part of her jaw came with it. Her mouth rotted until she had a hole in her check.

She was one of hundreds of young immigrant women hired to paint luminous paint onto the popular new watch dials in Connecticut – in Waterbury, Bristol, Thomaston and New Haven – and in Orange, N.J., and in Ottawa, Ill. She was also one of dozens who died from radium poisoning.

Radium Girls

In 1920, Katherine Schaub had come to train the radium girls at the Connecticut watch studios, including the Waterbury Clock Co. She had worked as a dial painter in Orange, N.J., at the United States Radium Corporation (USRC).

Katherine later contracted radium poisoning and, with four other dial painters, sued USRC. The company settled out of court, but Katharine died at the age of 30 after suffering excruciating pain.

Waterbury Clock Co.

In 1923, U.S. Public Health Service said radium workers should take precautions. The radium girls in Waterbury knew nothing of it. A company doctor named Frederick Flinn examined them and reassured them they were fine.

What they didn’t know was that Flinn was a fraud who found a career covering up for companies that killed their workers with radium poisoning. He hadn’t gone to medical school; he had just acquired a PhD. That didn’t stop him from taking blood, reading x-rays and ordering medical treatment.

Frederick Flinn helped USRC fight the charges brought by Katherine Schaub and the other radium girls. He also worked with Waterbury Clock to sweep the radium poisoning under the rug.

Frederick Flinn

radium-girls-factory

Radium girls at work.

Flinn had approached Waterbury Clock Co. offering to examine the dial painters for free. By 1925, the year Frances Splettscher died, the company hired him.

That same year Elizabeth Dunn tripped slightly on a dance floor and suffered a spontaneous fracture of her leg. The radium had eaten into her bones, riddling them with holes. She developed the same jaw necrosis that felled Frances Splettscher. Elizabeth Dunn died in 1927.

At least by then Waterbury Clock Co. had warned the radium girls not to put their paintbrushes into their mouths.

Under the Rug

By the summer of 1926, Frederick Flinn found two cases of radium poisoning at Waterbury Clock. He continued to tell the radium girls they were perfectly healthy. He told Katherine Moore eight times she didn’t have a trace of radium in her body. She died from radium poisoning.

radium-dial

A radium dial.

In December 1926, Flinn published an article in a medical journal concluding, ‘An industrial hazard does not exist in the painting of luminous dials.’

Not until 1928 did Frederick Flinn find five girls who might have radium poisoning.

Flinn pretended concern. He convinced the radium girls to accept company settlements that freed it from further liability. With no lawyers representing them, the young, unsophisticated radium girls had no hope of justice.

Between 1926 and 1936, Waterbury Clock quietly paid out $90,000 for settlement, support and medical costs for 16 radium girls. One family received a paltry $43.75 as compensation for the death of their radium girl.

USRC

Meanwhile, radium girls were getting sick and dying in New Jersey. Five of them, including Katherinie Schaub, brought suit against USRC. Their lawyer tried to prove their horrific diseases resulted from occupational hazards associated with radium dial painting.

Alice Hamilton

A Harvard professor named Alice Hamilton tried to help. She had identified the occupational dangers of the Danbury hat factories, and she heard about the Waterbury girls. She told the New Jersey lawyer to look into the Waterbury Clock Co. cases.

In 1927 the lawyer wrote to the workmen’s comp commission in Connecticut. They hadn’t heard anything about it. “No claims have been filed with me. I have heard a number of rumors such as you have, but know nothing about them,“ wrote the commissioner.

USRC argued in court that no other cases of radium poisoning existed.

Aftermath

The New Jersey radium girls did win a settlement, but USRC managed to wriggle out of further liability. Waterbury Clock also wangled a change in Connecticut’s workmen’s compensation law, shortening the statute of limitations to three years from five.

In 2014, May Keane, the last of the radium girls, died in Middlebury, Conn., at 107. She had only worked as a dial painter at Waterbury Clock for a few months, which probably extended her life. However she lost all her teeth and suffered from colon cancer and breast cancer.

If you enjoyed this story, you may also want to read about child labor here. With thanks to The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore. This story was updated in 2023. 

Images: Waterbury Clock by By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=68158102. Radium dial by By Arma95 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9502836.

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William Wetmore Story Tries To Save the Washington Monument

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When the unfinished Washington Monument was still but an eyesore on the National Mall, William Wetmore Story tried to prevent it from becoming an example of American bad taste.

The Washington Monument about 1860

The Washington Monument about 1860

Story was the Massachusetts-born son of a famous American judge. He had given up a promising law career to become a sculptor in Rome.

He visited the United States in 1877, when controversy raged over what to do with the Washington Monument. Story had the best solution, but it was ignored.

How the Washington Monument came to sit on the Mall like a tree stump for 20 years is a story about changing tastes and rage against immigrants.

Washington Monument

Robert Mills' original design for the Washington Monument

Robert Mills’ original design for the Washington Monument

Work had begun on the Washington Monument in 1848 after supporters raised $28,000 for its construction. Architect Robert Mills designed it as an obelisk surrounded by a circular colonnade. It had a statue of George Washington on top of it – in a chariot.

But then hatred of immigrants — back then, German and Irish — stopped the project in 1854 when the obelisk reached 152 feet.

In the early morning hours of March 6, 1854,  anti-Catholic Know Nothings. destroyed a memorial stone contributed by Pope Pius IX, called the pope’s stone.  By then, money had run out for the Monument. Congress then refused to pay to finish it amidst the Know-Nothing controversy.

Work stopped for nearly two decades. In 1868,  Mark Twain commented it looked like “an ungainly old chimney that…is of no earthly use to anybody else, and certainly is not in the least ornamental.”

He argued it had the dignity of a sugar-mill chimney.

It is an eyesore to the people. It ought to be either pulled down or built up and finished.

Congress agreed to pay to finish it in 1876, and new designs were considered. Some people thought the monument should be left as an obelisk. Mills objected, saying it would then look like a stalk of asparagus.

William Wetmore Story

washington monument William_Wetmore_Story_-_Brady-Handy

William Wetmore Story

Born in Salem, Mass., on Feb. 12, 1819, William Westmore Story was the son of U.S. Supreme Court justice Joseph Story and his second wife, Sarah Waldo Wetmore. Justice Story wrote the opinion freeing kidnapped African-Americans in the Amistad case.

William Wetmore Story earned a law degree from Harvard in 1840, but eight years later abandoned the law for sculpting. He then moved to Rome in 1850, where people called him a modern Michelangelo.

Story's design for the Washington Monument.

Story’s design for the Washington Monument.

While in Rome, he carved a bust of his father, now at Harvard. He also carved a life-size statue of Cleopatra, which Nathaniel Hawthorne described with admiration in The Marble Faun. In 1877 he returned to the United States and gave a series of lectures about art.

Cleopatra, now in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

After his Washington lecture, the Senate Committee on Public Buildings asked him to testify on the Washington Monument.

He told the committee that “persons qualified to pronounce judgment” disliked the Mills design. He suggested modifying the memorial as “an ornament to the city.”

Two Colors

“We believe the nation has now escaped the peril of having that structure made a huge specimen of American bad taste,” wrote one reporter.

Story proposed instead encasing the obelisk in marble. He also suggested putting a portico at the base with a statue of Washington on one side and a statue of Liberty on the other.

The Washington National Monument Society concluded his design seemed “vastly superior in artistic taste and beauty” to the obelisk.

America got stuck with the obelisk. Wrote Mary Elizabeth Phillips in Reminiscences of William Wetmore Story, Congressmen had

…pledged themselves beyond recall to the monumental work already in progress — an Egyptian obelisk — between which and George Washington it is difficult to discover any connection whatever.

Work on the Washington Monument resumed in 1878 with rock from a different quarry.  So the monument has a slightly differently color above the 152-foot mark. It’s been called a testimony to anti-immigrant rage.

 

Another Story statue does sit on the National Mall: his statue of Joseph Henry, the scientist who served as the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.  His statue of Col. William Prescott stands in Charlestown, Mass.

To see other proposed designs for the Washington Monument, click here.

This story updated in 2022.

Images: Washington Monument amid cherry blossoms By Nate Lee – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51779911. Across the reflecting pool at night By Ramakrishna Gundra – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51135373. Cleopatra By Postdlf, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2675313.

 

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

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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.

bapst

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

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

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

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

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

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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.)

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.)

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 feared reprisal against the nuns involved in the case.

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 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 by the destruction of the convent and her failure to restart it.  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 2023.

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