Fire & Roses: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834 - Hardcover

Nancy Lusignan Schultz

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684856859 ISBN 13: 9780684856858

Publisher: Free Press, 2000

Synopsis

A tragic and largely forgotten tale of religious persecution is retold in this chilling account of the burning of a Charlestown convent in 1834 by an angry mob inflamed by an organized campaign of anti-Catholic rhetoric. 20,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Nancy Lusignan Schultz, Ph.D., is the editor of two anthologies, Fear Itself: Enemies Real and Imagined in American Culture and Veil of Fear: Nineteenth-Century Convent Tales. She is Professor and Coordinator of Graduate Studies in English at Salem State College in Salem, Massachusetts.

Reviews

In 1834, a group of fiercely anti-Catholic rioters burned Mt. Benedict, an Ursuline convent just outside of Boston that was home not only to a community of nuns, but also to the prestigious girls' school they ran. Using this singularly explosive example, Schultz, professor of English at Salem State College, conveys the larger current of anti-Catholic sentiment that was prevalent throughout early 19th-century America. While such religious intolerance had existed in New England since the Puritans first landed, the most recent anti-papist explosion could be traced to the departure from the convent of a novice named Rebecca Reed just two years before. A convert to Catholicism, Reed entered the convent school as a charity student and initially aspired to become a nun. However, she began to chafe under the requirements of convent life and imagined that there was a conspiracy plotting to imprison her in a convent in Canada. After fleeing Mt. Benedict, she published an anti-Catholic expose, Six Months in a Convent, filled with tales of abuse that she and other nuns allegedly suffered. Indeed, Reed wasn't the only nun to run away. Her escape was followed by that of a Sister St. John, who the hardworking but overwhelmingly poor townsfolk believed was brought back against her will by the bishop. The Ursuline nuns' dual purpose to serve the poor and to educate wealthy young women was increasingly resented by the struggling laborers who traveled to CharlestownAoften from farms in distant New HampshireAin search of work. Reed's escape, coupled with a series of anti-Catholic sermons by the Reverend Lyman Beecher (Harriet Beecher Stowe's father), served as the spark that ignited the townsfolk's burning anger. Schultz is to be commended for her riveting historical study, which is plotted like a novel, with tight pacing and fully realized characters. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The Ursuline Convent at Mt. Benedict in Charlestown, MA, was brutally vandalized and burned in 1834, and this dramatic depiction integrates the details of that harrowing event with the historical context. Situated on a hill, surrounded by acres of gardens and orchards, the convent educated not only young nuns but the daughters of elite Boston Protestants as well. It quickly became the focus of hostility on the part of struggling local brickmakers, for whom the convent symbolized religious mysticism and elitism, feeding the already nativistic, anti-Catholic sentiment of the period. One summer evening, a drunken mob attacked the convent, vandalized the cloister and mausoleum, and then burned the building down, coming back later to destroy the gardens. Rumors had circulated about sex and violence within the walls of the convent, so themes involving class, gender, and religion are woven into a gripping tale. But this work by Schultz (English, Salem State Coll., MA) is essentially a scholarly treatment, well researched, with footnotes, and with the welcome bonus of readability and drama. Recommended for academic and large public libraries.DBonnie Collier, Yale Law Lib.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

On August 11, 1834, an angry, drunken mob converged on Mount Benedict, a convent housing a flourishing women's school in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and burned it to the ground. This gripping narrative retraces the convergent emotional, cultural, and social forces that impelled a group of otherwise ordinary citizens to participate in^B an unthinkable act of violence and religious persecution. Founded in 1826 by a group of Ursuline nuns, the convent had long been the subject of vicious gossip--primarily fueled by a disgruntled ex-student alleging both psychological and sexual abuse. In addition, a series of particularly virulent and intolerant sermons by the respected Reverend Lyman Beecher Stowe added fuel to the already strong anti-Catholic sentiment prevalent in the area. A combustible combination of ignorance, suspicion, and antipapism made the convent the natural target of an unruly gathering of disgruntled laborers already resentful of the presence of a group of capable, well-educated women in their midst. Utilizing court documents, letters, diaries, and newspaper articles, Schultz does a remarkable job of piecing together the startling circumstances surrounding this devastating tragedy. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One: The Seed Is Planted

All the brick-kilns had been set burning, and as night concealed the ugly brickyards and clay-fields in which they were erected, nothing was visible but the magic circle of fire that seemed to be drawn around the Convent.

-- LOUISA WHITNEY, The Burning of the Convent, 1877

In the twilight of a sweltering August evening in 1834, groups of men are gathering on the Winter Hill Road in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, near the main gate of a Roman Catholic convent. It is Monday, and they have come here after rounds of drinks at the local tavern, following another backbreaking day's work. They are brickmakers, sailors, firemen, apprentices, and hooligans, Charlestown's poorest and least educated, and tonight they have a job to do. Cloistered inside are about a dozen Ursuline nuns who, in the last eight years, have built an elegant brick boarding school for wealthy girls high on a hill encircled by the brickyards of Charlestown, where most of those in the crowd at the gate eke out a meager living. Tall, sturdy fences fully enclose Mount Benedict, the nuns' lush twenty-four-acre farm, with its fragrant orchards of apple and pear, its heavily laden vineyards, its bounteous herb and vegetable gardens, its pebbled maze of walks through roses, a veritable self-contained Eden.

The men at the gate are angry. They're angry about a lot of things. Many have come down to the city from New Hampshire, leaving wives and children behind to manage as best they can the failing farms where the men once made decent livings growing alfalfa and clover for animal feed. As generations passed, the farms had been subdivided, and New Hampshire's sons had inherited fewer and fewer acres. Even with their thrifty Presbyterian Scots backgrounds, the men were finally unable to sustain a living from the exhausted soil of their parcels. Now they lived in dirty, crowded all-male dormitories owned by the brickyard boss, and worked with their backs for a dollar or two a day, supplying bricks for the rapidly growing city of Boston. Daily, as they wiped the sweat from their eyes, they glanced up from the brickyards to see verdant Mount Benedict, where the daughters of some of Boston's most prominent Protestant families were receiving an expensive European-style education from a community of Ursuline nuns. On this night, August 10, 1834, there were about ten Catholic and forty Protestant girls inside, many from elite Unitarian families in Boston, who paid a yearly tuition to the nuns equivalent to a brickmaker's wages for six months' labor.

Though many of the men had indirectly won their livelihood from the extensive construction work at the boarding school, lately the convent's relationship with the neighboring brickyards had deteriorated. Rumors had been circulating around Charlestown that something was amiss. A novice named Rebecca Reed had escaped over the convent wall two years before and told disturbing tales of the abuse she and other nuns suffered within. A convert to Catholicism, Miss Reed had been admitted to the school as a charity pupil, and had aspirations to become a nun. But she became dissatisfied with her life in the community, and fancied that a plot was afoot to imprison her in a Canadian convent. She had found a ready audience for her stories in anti-Catholic Yankee Boston, foreshadowing the wild success in 1835 of her published exposé of convent life. And just two weeks before, another nun named Sister St. John had run away from the convent to the home of one of the brickyard bosses, begging him to take her safely away. That nun had been brought back, against her will, or so the locals believed, by the Roman Catholic bishop, Benedict Joseph Fenwick, after whom Mount Benedict had been named. Now the Mercantile Journal was publishing rumors that St. John, whose given name was Elizabeth Harrison, was dead or held captive within the convent walls. When the selectmen of Charlestown had been sent in to investigate on the day before the riot, they had been treated with contempt by the convent's feisty mother superior, Sister St. George, née Mary Anne Moffatt.

Though Harrison, the escaped nun, assured the selectmen that she now wished to remain in the community, Moffatt's haughty demeanor disgusted them. One ringleader of the rioters, a strapping six-foot-six brick maker named John R. Buzzell, later said that Moffatt was "the sauciest woman I ever heard talk." Yesterday, the Superior had berated the selectmen for interfering with the running of her business. Today, as darkness deepened and the crowd grew, she threatened destruction of their homes and businesses. Standing at the front window, Moffatt ordered the crowd to disperse. If they didn't, she said, "The bishop has at his command an army of twenty thousand Catholic Irishmen who will burn your houses."

Bottles of rum and whiskey were passed around by the men at the gate, some of whom had painted their faces like Indians for the occasion. Around half past nine, a shout went up from the crowd, "Down with the Pope! Down with the convent!" alarming the nuns and students. The mother superior quickly assembled her sisters and ordered them to take the nightgown-clad girls, who ranged in age from six to fourteen, to the rear of the building. She then came to an upper window to face the crowd below, and demanded to know what they wanted.

"We want to see the nun who ran away!"

When Moffatt disdainfully shook her head in denial, two gunshots were fired in the air as a warning. At eleven o'clock the crowd began to tear down the convent fence, and lit a bonfire of fencing and tar barrels on the neighboring property of brickyard owner Alvah Kelley. Its light was visible for miles around. Local church bells began to peal out the signal for fire, and engine companies from Charlestown and Boston raced to the scene. But many of the firemen had friends in the crowd, and escaped nun Rebecca Reed's brother-in-law, Prescott Pond, was a member of Boston Engine No. 13. Instead of fighting the fire, the men from No. 13 provided cover for the rioters as they raced up the hill toward the convent. Stones and bricks shattered the rows of windows in the three-story building and its adjoining wings. A farmhand grabbed a stake to batter in the front door, and the rioters burst into the building. Moffatt ordered the nuns to take the flock of children down the back stairway to the convent garden. She then quickly returned to her office, and put something in her pocket, a miniature of her mother, she would later claim. Two other nuns ran to the chapel and wrenched the mahogany tabernacle from the center of the altar. Inside was an antique silver ciborium, a sacred chalice holding the consecrated bread that in Roman Catholic belief is the body of Christ. The nuns hid the tabernacle in a rosebush blooming in the garden.

By midnight, the rioters had penetrated to the heart of the cloister. Some of them broke up furniture and heaped it in the center of the large assembly room. Others gleefully hurled musical instruments out the windows, violins, harps, and even pianos. Amid cheers and jeers, the Bible, the ornaments of the altar, and the cross were tossed on the pyre and with their torches, the rioters ignited a fire. The firemen outside stood idly by, or returned to their engine houses as a crowd of about four thousand looked on. Hearing the shouts of the rioters inside the convent, the nuns and students, who had been cowering near the mausoleum in the garden where the convent buried its dead, fled through an opening they had made in the fence. In their nightgowns, the women and girls ran through the field in the light of the second-quarter moon, and took shelter half a mile away at the home of Mr. Adams, a neighbor. By one-thirty in the morning they could see that the entire building was engulfe

Edition details

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684856859
• ISBN 13: 9780684856858
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336